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Skitterdoc 2077

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Школа кожевенного мастерства: сумки, ремни своими руками
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  • Аннотация:
    Кроссовер Worm и вселенной Киберпанка. Действие происходит в Найтсити. MC - Альтернативная Тейлор (стриггерила с альтернативной силой, сила Костепилочки), но она прожила свою жизнь согласно канону, затем ее перебросили во вселенную Киберпанка, и она должна выжить. Медицинский (био)тинкер Тейлор в мире киберпанка. Не могу читать через переводчик на оригинальном сайте - https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14155507/1/Skitterdoc-2077. Так что, выкладываю здесь, чтобы спокойно читать. Текст не мой, права не мои, выкладываю без разрешения автора. Ссылка на произведение выше.
  Skitterdoc 2077
  by SpiraSpira
  A crossover between Worm and the Cyberpunk universe. MC is Taylor from an AU (Riley/Bonesaww triggered with QA bug control powers and killed Jack Slash) but she lived her life as is canon, then gets swapped into the Cyberpunk universe and must survive. Medical Tinker Taylor in a Cyberpunk world.
  
  Original source: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14155507/1/Skitterdoc-2077
  
  Chapters: 64
  
  Words: 463473
  
  Rated: Fiction T - Language: English - Genre: Sci-Fi/Adventure - Reviews: 1,118 - Favs: 2,132 - Follows: 2,351
  
  Exported with the assistance of FicHub.net
  
  If she was a butterfly am I just a moth?
  A Moth's Wings and a Tyger's Claws
  A pussy cat with Claws
  Chippin' In
  Weapon of Ass Destruction
  The Kids Aren't Alright, Actually
  Fit Right In
  The Complete Idiot's Guide
  Relics of a hard life
  If you're not first, you're last!
  Stormy Clouds
  I'm bona fide
  Rockstar of medicine
  Proper fucked
  Stop! Not like that!
  Rose coloured glasses
  Treading water
  Base visit
  You mean I'm not getting paid for this?
  Front-leaning rest position
  Muffins
  A gig to build a dream on
  in flagrante delicto
  The anger of a gentle man
  Crime against humanity and decency
  Walls closing in
  SIDESTORY: Retainer
  Keep on rollin'
  I'm that girl!
  The Solo's Manual
  I knew you were into that weird shit!
  I Want Peking Duck!
  We're the Neon Angels!
  The meeting of two great entrepreneurs
  Absolutely nothing will go wrong!
  Civic improvement
  Anything that can go wrong...
  will go wrong
  She bravely turned her tail and fled
  We're the government & are here to help
  Kyaaa!
  Discourse
  Ano what is the opposite of hiatus?
  Lizzie Borden took an axe
  Bodyblow
  A Great Success!
  Second chances
  Tinker, Taylor, Entrepreneur, Spy
  You are cordially invited
  SPACE! I'm in space!
  Nuka-Girl
  Superpower? That's a midpower
  Higher education
  Magna Cum Laude
  Sidestory: Junior Illuminati Agent
  An offer she can't refuse
  Nine to giving it
  She got the job!
  Get your ass to Mars
  Patience, little crystal
  Nobody Do Voodoo Like You Do
  Odd bedfellows
  Unification
  It's treason, then (pt1)
  next chapterchapter list
  If she was a butterfly am I just a moth?
  I thought I would die inside that locker, and I thought for a while that I did, but that couldn't have been what happened. I had been trapped in there for hours, screaming myself hoarse... school had already let out, and I was just hoping a janitor might find me. It was a futile hope after none of my fellow students, and I was pretty sure even teachers ever helped me, but I wasn't going to give the Trio the satisfaction oaf murdering me without even trying to save myself. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, my mom would have quoted.
  
  Did you know that Winslow turned off all the heat as soon as school was out? I mean, when it was working at all. I lost consciousness shivering, wondering whether it was the hypothermia or toxic shock that would kill me first.
  
  [DESTINATION.]
  
  [AGREEMENT.]
  
  [TRAJECTORY.]
  
  [CONCERN.]
  
  [DATA!]
  
  [CO-#^ &*
  
  I regained consciousness thumping onto the floor as if I had rolled off the top bunk of a bunk bed. I hit with considerable force, and though I groaned in pain, the wind having been knocked out of me, I had already diagnosed my shoulder, which I mostly landed on with nothing more than a contusion.
  
  I thought someone had opened up the locker, and I must have spilt out onto the floor like a sack of potatoes, but opening my eyes and glancing up, I appeared to be in a small, efficiency apartment. I could see the small kitchenette directly in front of me, and it looked like they hadn't even finished unpacking because the ground was littered with brown cardboard boxes with the name "MILITECH" stencilled on the side.
  
  Great, I was kidnapped by a gang that was... doing a... guns deal? Gun trade? What the hell? That doesn't make any sense. It made more sense that I died, except...
  
  If I died, I wouldn't still be covered with the blood and filth that was in the locker, surely. And the afterlife wouldn't be a shitty apartment full of cardboard boxes. And there wasn't any trail of such filth coming from the door, so there was no way I walked or was dragged in here.
  
  Wait...
  
  Wait one second!
  
  I teleported! I must be a cape! I triggered with a teleportation Mover power... but please, why did I end up in the middle of some stash house full of whatever is inside these Militech boxes? It had to be some kind of weapons in there even if they looked more like moving boxes; I mean... the name!
  
  I always wanted to be a hero, but I sure wasn't ready right now! Power, I like your moxie in trying to break up a gun deal first thing, but we have to get ready first! You're moving almost as fast as Ladybug did when she killed Jack Slash as soon as she triggered over half a decade ago.
  
  Since his death, it had been theorised that the famous serial killer had some type of Thinker precognition power that was especially useful against other capes, which allowed him to get away from so many heroes that attempted to bring him down so often, but when a six-year-old girl Triggered with bug-controlling powers while you were torturing her parents, who thankfully hadn't gotten around to calling the exterminator to remove the giant wasp hive in the backyard, well... there is only so much fancy footwork can do against thousands of wasps, all controlled with a singular purpose- to murder you.
  
  Power, we don't even have a mask! I stood up and squinched my eyes. Power! Go back to Winslow, for now!
  
  ...
  
  Power?... Go back... to my room at home!
  
  Uh, go... anywhere else but here? Wait, anywhere safe but here! I don't want to be in a volcano, next to Oni Lee or at the bottom of the ocean!
  
  I stood there with my hands balled into my fists, eyes closed, eyebrows furrowed and face scrunched up. It suddenly dawned on me how ridiculous I looked. I looked like Carrie after she was drenched in pig's blood trying to hold a fart in.
  
  The thought of the blood and my cut fingers, damaged fingernails and numerous scratches on my body had a number of possible bacterial infections and toxic shock syndrome coming to my head. In fact, I was already infected with a number of harmful bacteria, which might proceed to sepsis in as little as twelve hours if left untreated. I was sure of it. Prompt treatment was important at this stage, and I started moving without realising what I was doing. There was no phone visible to call emergency services, and leaving this apartment was fraught with peril, so I would have to treat myself, which was not a big deal at all...
  
  I came back to my senses in the shower, just letting the hot water run all over my body. It felt heavenly after being stuck in that locker for hours. Not only was it disgusting, but I was a tall girl, and my shoulders and neck were crinked from being in there so long... or at least they were. Rolling my neck, it felt a lot better after having the hot water run on them for so long.
  
  I sort of remembered what I had been doing as if my body had been on autopilot for a while. I stepped out of the shower, giving the bloody remnants of my clothes a wide berth. I didn't care if this was Lung's personal stash house; there was no way I would ever wear those clothes again. I'd rather run through the Docks in nothing but this towel!
  
  I glanced at a mug that read "World's Number One Dad" that was half-filled with an off-white powder. I had already taken about twenty milligrams of the powder. It was a shame that there were no gel capsules around, and the time necessary for me to fabricate an actual pill press would have caused my treatment to be delayed unacceptably.
  
  This drug was an extremely effective broad-spectrum antibiotic. Only one treatment was necessary to eradicate everything from syphilis to MRSA and everything in between. Honestly, there was really only one negative side effect to it...
  
  I immediately threw my towel off my body and rushed to the toilet. Thankfully in such a small bathroom, it was only two steps away.
  
  "Oh, shit..." I said aloud as I felt my stomach rumbling dangerously.
  
  And shit, I did.
  
  I realised I was a Tinker about halfway through the twenty minutes I spent on the toilet. I would have learned immediately, but for the first ten minutes, there was no real conscious thought at all. Just groaning and pain.
  
  The antibiotic had literally destroyed every micro-organism in my body, which actually would have been a really bad thing as humans had evolved to depend on their microfauna biome. Except it wasn't the only thing, I made when I was in a fugue.
  
  There were no amounts of courtesy flushing that would forgive the sin I committed against this commode, so I just flushed it for what must have been the twelfth time once, grabbed the mug full of super antibiotics and walked out of the bathroom.
  
  I had made four drugs at the kitchenette, which I found incredibly impressive. It wasn't even a proper kitchen; it was the kind that you might find in a hotel that you rented by the week or crappy apartments... like the crappy apartment, I was currently in.
  
  I had memories of already taking two of the drugs, the other one I needed to take immediately, and the last was made as a contingency.
  
  The second drug I had taken in my fugue made me frown deeply, and I started to get pissed off. It was an anti-depressant, and it was as good as the antibiotic was. It was guaranteed to normalise neurotransmitter levels within six to twelve hours of administration and only needed to be taken once a week.
  
  Did my power think I was depressed?!... well... I mean... It still didn't have the right to take the decision out of my hands itself!
  
  Wait, why was I talking about my power like it was another person? The Agent theory of Parahuman powers was widely denigrated, and only crazy crackpots on PHO actually subscribed to it. I just wasn't used to going into a fugue as I had done.
  
  At the back of my mind rested a deep field of absolute knowledge, like I had a hundred different encyclopedias hooked into my brain. The knowledge was mostly about medicine, biology, anatomy, organic chemistry and genetics. I had also been trying hard not to think about the vast trove of psychiatric data I had access to.
  
  According to the same part of my brain that diagnosed the exact strains of staph bacteria I had been exposed to, I was at a mental health crisis point; just one bad day would have been all that it took to push me over the edge into some permanent solutions. It felt that gaining powers was only postponing the inevitable and that I would likely do something foolish and get myself killed in a classic example of self-destructive behaviour if I didn't take things in hand. It felt that my mental state was a bigger danger than the bacteria. It could be treated pharmacologically, but that wasn't really a cure.
  
  I did... not like being confronted with this. But, my possible mental breakdown and a psychological break could wait. I was really at some risk if I didn't take this third drug very soon.
  
  I had made it out of a can of yoghurt and some miscellaneous kitchen chemicals, the latter of which was the same thing I made the other three drugs out of, which didn't make me feel that much better about them, except that I knew that they would work and be fine.
  
  Sighing, I grabbed a spoon out of the drawer and ate the entire can of yoghurt. Mmm, it was strawberry flavour. This would replace all the beneficial microbiomes in my digestive system after the earlier antibiotic wrecked it.
  
  After finishing the yoghurt, I glanced at the last drug I had made, which I hadn't thought much about. I made it as a contingency, as a tool to escape. I was already exhausted, but if I was in the middle of a dangerous area like the docks or deep in Empire or ABB territory, I might not have enough time to stay in this stash house. There was no telling when someone might arrive. It might be months or minutes!
  
  So I made a very potent dopamine reuptake inhibitor; it was a very strong and long-lasting neural stimulant. One dose, and I could stay awake for at least forty-eight hours with no real side effects.
  
  My hand rushed to cover my own mouth in shock. Aghast, I said, "Oh, no..."
  
  Had I just Broken Bad and created super-meth? Already? Oh god. No, no, no! I will not be Skidmark's second girlfriend! What will they call me? Hollar, to go with Squealer?! I felt ill.
  
  I shook my head rapidly to clear it and stared at the over six hundred grams of powder in an empty old margarine tub as if I had just made some mashed potatoes or something. Oh god! A single dose was only twenty-five milligrams by oral administration! The PRT would get me for distribution! If the gangs didn't catch me first!
  
  It was all over!
  
  I started panting, acutely aware that I was hyperventilating and having an anxiety attack but ignoring the corner of my brain that was brimming full of medical advice. I sat down, slumped on a couch on the other side of the room, which was surrounded by boxes full of guns and stared out into space for a time.
  
  I wasn't sure if it was because the super-antidepressants were starting to work, but I only let myself have a panic attack for about five or ten minutes at the most. After that, I started calming down a little bit, even if I was still kind of hyperventilating. I realised I wasn't thinking straight. Nobody knew what I had done. I could flush the incriminating evidence, and it would be fine.
  
  I started to get up to go do just that, but something caught my eye on the coffee table in front of me. It was one of only two tables in the apartment, the other being a small table next to the kitchenette that was stacked full of cardboard boxes. This table, however, only had what looked like a smartphone on it. It was either a small tablet or a large phone, and I considered the latter to be more likely. Smartphones were still quite expensive, and this one looked even swankier than the DragonTech phones that were all the rage if you were rich.
  
  That made her become very, very scared. Nobody would leave their expensive phone here if they were not going to come back and get it, and soon. I had to call the BBPD or the PRT right away, or I was going to be dead meat! I didn't think that the PRT would care about saving me at all, but they would be at least interested in all of these boxes, and I might get saved as a result, but I had to move fast. I had already spent at least two hours in a fugue making those drugs!
  
  I was pretty sure you could still make an emergency call even if you didn't have the PIN number to unlock a phone, so I grabbed the phone off the table, the screen coming to life as soon as she picked it up.
  
  What I saw caused me to drop the phone in shock, it slipping through my limp-with-shock fingers and tumbling onto the floor with a clatter.
  
  Dad was death on cell phones, even flip phones, so I had never had one, but I was pretty sure what I saw was called the lock screen. You could select a picture that would be displayed while the phone was locked.
  
  So, why, then, was a picture of me and my mom the lock screen photo of this phone that presumably belonged to gun runners?!
  
  Everyone said that powers were bullcrap and you shouldn't try to understand them with normal logic, but there was a point when things got too crazy to explain away with that simple platitude.
  
  I reached down and grabbed the phone from the floor, the screen lighting up again. I didn't recognise this photo of my mom or me, and I was confident it was never taken. They were on the roof of a building, and the background was a cityscape that would look more in place in Tokyo than in Brockton Bay. I was absolutely sure I had never been there!
  
  I tried to move the photo around with my thumb, but as soon as I touched the screen, a green padlock icon appeared along with the text, " BIOMETRIC MATCH. " Then the phone unlocked, and I was looking at a totally unfamiliar screen full of odd icons and glyphs.
  
  Wait... what?! Did this phone just unlock to my fingerprint?! I did a lot of research on fingerprints back when I still thought the teachers and school officials would still do anything about the Trio. How stupid I was back then. How could this phone unlock to my fingerprint? Maybe any fingerprint unlocked it? That didn't seem to sit right with the words biometric match, though. This was starting to get weirder and weirder, and I was half-expecting some kind of SAW situation from that disgusting Earth Aleph horror movie.
  
  I looked at the unfamiliar glyphs on the screen, but there was one that looked like an old-time telephone, so I pressed it. For the moment, I was ignoring the fact that the Home Screen picture was my dad and me with my dad wearing some kind of military uniform. I find the dialer and enter 9-1-1 and CALL, putting the phone up to my head.
  
  The phone answers immediately, and the voice is slick but slightly computer generated, "Night City Emergency Services, Miss Taylor Hebert, I see your location as the twenty-ninth floor of Megabuilding H8 in Westbrook. Please be advised present response times to your position exceed O NE ONE ZERO minutes. Do you wish to continue?"
  
  What?
  
  I stammer out, "No, thank you," and get another computer-generated response, "Very well, you have been charged ten eurodollars for this service. Have a good day."
  
  I glance at the phone's screen in shock, in time to see a red alert at the top of the screen indicating that ten eurodollars, whatever those are, have been deducted from my account. I have been thinking about this for a while, but I need to say it out loud, "Toto, I don't think I am in Kansas anymore."
  
  I stare at the picture on the home screen, perplexed. Dad looks pretty good in a military uniform, but I can't even determine which military he is in. I set the phone down and do some breathing exercises that the information in the back of my head is telling me will be helpful for stress, as I have been hyperventilating for over fifteen minutes, and my hands were starting to cramp into useless claws.
  
  My... what is this, even? A medical-based Thinker power? But I diagnosed myself immediately with a carpopedal spasm caused by hyperventilation due to localised hypocalcemia. Treatment was getting my breathing under conscious control, so I started breathing in a slow pattern that was clinically proven to provide anxiolytic benefits.
  
  After a few minutes of just sitting there and relaxing, I grab the phone again, and this time I try unlocking it with my left pinky finger, only to get a stern red icon. Sighing, I use my right thumb, and it unlocks. I was very good with computers, and ultimately this was just an unfamiliar computer interface. But it was one that was clearly designed for ease of use, as the icons made sense and were straightforward.
  
  I navigate through a number of pending notifications and find what seems to be the text messaging app, seeing a lot of texts to this phone that was more or less similar in nature, in that they were all offering condolences or saying that they would miss... me? They were clearly texting a Taylor Hebert.
  
  There was a different app for e-mails, and there were a couple of pending notifications in that app too, which I pulled up. The first e-mail answered a lot of questions but gave me a lot more besides.
  
  FROM: Alice Newman Militech HR
  
  TO: Taylor Hebert Dependents, Militech Intranet
  
  DATE: Saturday, August 5, 2062
  
  SUBJECT: Dependent Settlement
  
  Dear Miss Hebert,
  
  First, let me offer our condolences for the recent loss of your father, MAJOR DANIEL HEBERT, who was killed in the line of duty at [REDACTED] on [REDACTED]. All of Militech owes you a great debt.
  
  However, while Major Hebert was eligible for the Enhanced Combat Survivor's Benefit, it has been determined that the [REDACTED] at [REDACTED] is to be considered a POLICE ACTION, and while Major Hebert was killed in the line of duty, deaths resultant from POLICE ACTIONS are not considered combat deaths, so you are eligible for only the basic survivorship package.
  
  While we understand this isn't the decision you may have hoped for, we hope you understand that only through careful stewardship of the finances entrusted to us can we remain a strong Militech family.
  
  Additionally, as you are the only next of kin and are a minor child, there are some important decisions you must make before SEPTEMBER 1, 2062 ; otherwise, we are legally obligated to forward your file to the Night City government for foster placement. I am not qualified to advise you on this matter. However, attached to this e-mail is a small 472-page guide about your options. It is recommended that you retain an attorney...
  
  ...
  
  ...
  
  There were about three more pages of finely worded legalese, but I started hyperventilating again when I read foster placement. I wasn't even from this universe; of that, I was absolutely certain now. Could they really put me in foster care? Oh, and my universe-dad was dead, I guess. Honestly, that wasn't that different from what I was used to. My actual dad was basically just walking dead already, merely acting out the memories of what life once was like a revenant.
  
  That made me think about him. Practically the only emotion he actually felt was worry, and he was going to be out of his mind with it, worried that I never came home from school, and I was worried that I might never see him again. Travel between universes was difficult enough between Aleph and Bet, and it was illegal, in fact, except in highly supervised cases.
  
  But this... this was something very different. There weren't alternate versions of you in Earth Aleph. That wasn't how this worked! I had read about the theorised point of divergence between the two universes, and the accumulated differences over time were enough butterflies to ensure that there was no, for example, Taylor Hebert on Earth Aleph. And there certainly was no Taylor Hebert in 2062.
  
  This wasn't Earth Gimel; this was something very different.
  
  This meant that I probably would never see my dad again and that he would have to deal with a missing daughter on top of losing his wife just a couple of years ago. Oh god, he was barely hanging on as it was!
  
  Unless... hopefully, I just swapped places with this Alternate Taylor? If so, I want to apologise if you find yourself inside a disgusting locker. Although, since it sent me to about five feet above the ground, it probably wasn't going to be one hundred per cent accurate when swapping Alt-Taylor? Hopefully, she'd fall in front of the locker.
  
  Maybe that... would be for the best? Judging from all the text messages, this girl had she had friends, people who seemed to care enough about her to at least offer words of platitude, even if they were only being polite. Her contact list was full of names, and she had been texting to and from people her own age. Some even said that they would miss her since apparently she couldn't stay enrolled at the Militech school after her father passed away. By any metric, I could see she was vastly superior in all respects to me.
  
  I didn't want to inflict my life on my worst enemy, except maybe Sophia, and especially not on an alternate version of myself from a different universe, but surely this Alt-Taylor was smart enough that she could figure out how to get out of my predicament that I had been suffering through since I entered high school. She was, from all appearances, smart both intellectually and socially, unlike me.
  
  The part of my brain full of psychiatry information was warning me that I was approaching seriously unhealthy levels of self-loathing, ' I wish that would just shut up! I'm not asking for advice!'
  
  I stewed there on the couch, which I could see was a fold-out bed as well and built into the side of the wall and tried to use the phone to find out anything I could about where I was.
  
  On the plus side, all these cardboard boxes didn't have guns or grenades in them. Well, most of them didn't. I found several pistols in boxes with the rest of Alt-Dad's effects. I carefully set them aside, not knowing the first thing about either safely handling them or even making sure that they were safe, so I figured the safest thing to do was just not to touch them at all.
  
  The boxes were full of all the stuff Alt-Taylor and Alt-Dad had in their apartment. Apparently, the company evicted you pretty rapidly in the event you left their service, even if it was in case of death. However, they packed everything well, and according to that lady's e-mail, part of the "basic survivorship package" included three months of paid rent at accommodations of their choice that were rated at least GREEN for safety, whatever that meant.
  
  I had figured out how to turn on the television that was integrated into one of the walls, but after it started playing " America's Most Violent Home Videos" and seeing some gang member accidentally blow himself up with a grenade to a laugh track , I turned it off immediately. I thought life was cheap in Brockton Bay, but this goes far beyond what I'm used to. Although, that sort of thing might have been played on Über and Leet's private channel, and it wasn't actually that far off from what I would expect one of the Merchant's to do.
  
  However, at least I managed to find the boxes that contained Alt-Taylor's clothes, so I put on some of her pyjamas so I wouldn't be stuck in a towel for the foreseeable future.
  
  After making sure that the door outside was well and truly locked, I decided the best thing I could do was just cry myself to sleep on the roll-out futon.
  
  My dreams seemed to last years; I dreamt of Alt-Taylor's life. It wasn't as though I relived her entire life, not even close. Nor did I have her full memories at my beck and call when I woke up, but when I woke up, I was a lot less confused about my location and situation.
  
  Alt-Taylor had been expecting the company to screw her over in more or less the manner that they ended up doing. Even if she didn't precisely know how they would fuck her, she knew it was coming. However, instead of my own impression that everyone was out to screw me over, Alt-Taylor's impression was that the corp screwed everyone. The nuance was totally different, there was no personal animus behind it, and Alt-Taylor didn't even seem that upset about it. Alt-Taylor and her dad had even made contingency planning for this exact scenario, as he was apparently under no illusions about how dangerous his job was.
  
  I was more sure that we had swapped places now because the impressions I got from my dreams were of two boats passing in the night, going to opposite places. Or two streams of energy passing through each other as we coiled around a massively giant crystalline entity, which was why I had gotten a few of her memories.
  
  I held my hands up in prayer, devotedly apologising for inflicting my life on the much more well-adjusted girl. Was this a punishment for me? Because I had not managed to help my Dad that I was being tossed into a universe where I had already lost him?
  
  No, that didn't make sense.
  
  I blinked. Normally, I would not have contradicted my self-denigrations like that. I glanced over at the tub of anti-depressant powder that was still on the kitchenette sink. Well, they were supposed to work very fast.
  
  The thing about normalising my neurotransmitters was it wasn't a cure for anything, really. However, if your brain chemistry was so out of wack, your sense of depression and self-loathing would tend to make you avoid or sabotage any kind of treatment, my medical sense told me.
  
  I still had all the same predilections; however, at least my brain wasn't firmly reinforcing my self-loathing anymore. The fact that I could make such a self-diagnosis without angrily denying it seemed to be proof of their effectiveness.
  
  Sighing, I walked over to the couch again. I had all the contingency files on Alt-Taylor's phone. Alt-Dad had set up a complicated flowchart that he assured would give me the maximum out of the Corp.
  
  Glancing at the pistol on the coffee table, I grabbed it, thumbed the magazine release and pulled the pistol's slide out of battery slightly to check to make sure there was no round in the chamber. There wasn't. I sat the empty gun and full magazine back down on the coffee table. While I didn't get anywhere near all of Alt-Taylor's memories, there were a surprising number of memories of Alt-Dad teaching his daughter about firearms and firearms safety.
  
  Well, I suppose that could be useful, even if my first impression of guns was still of deep antipathy. Dad kept a shotgun at home, but Mom was always against anyone having guns, which was a lot different than Alt-Taylor's mom, who also worked for Militech. I suppose it was hard to be Pro Gun Control laws when you lived in a world where the government hardly exists and you work for an arms company.
  
  Sighing, I brought up the private files on Alt-Taylor... no, it's my phone now. It wasn't good to keep such things compartmentalised mentally. Perhaps I could find a way back to my own universe in the future, but if I keep acting mentally like Alt-Taylor and I were two different girls, then I may slip up when interacting with people from this universe. That would lead to either mental institutionalisation or vivisection, depending on if they believed that I was actually from another universe or not. Alt-Taylor had no illusions at all about what those truly in power would do if they thought I might lead them to new, unknown Earths. Complete destructive testing of every molecule in my body if I was lucky.
  
  I brought up my private files and found the contingency document my Dad had made. It was actually a small program that gave me prompts. It confirmed my date of birth and the current date and then asked me about my current grades at school, with a number of drop-down options.
  
  I hummed and managed to find the transcript that was e-mailed to me when I withdrew from the corporate school last week. Wow, that was another thing I would have to apologise to Alt-Taylor for. She had straight A's. If she was waking up in my life, she had a lot of work to do as I was barely passing any of my classes due to not being generally able to turn any homework in.
  
  The flow chart was kind of complicated, and it took me another fifteen minutes to work through all the questions it was asking me. That made me feel kind of warm inside; if he did this much planning for his daughter, then Alt-Dad surely loved her.
  
  The suggestions made my eyebrows raise. They were all explained, too, in ways to get the most out of the Corp without completely antagonising them.
  
  As she was a minor, the Corp was essentially her guardian. So, it was going to be on the hook to pay for foster care, public school, and some amount of maintenance until she turned 18. They would basically be paying off Night Corp, which ran the city.
  
  It was spelt out for her that the only thing a Corp hated to do more than paying out to a person was paying out to another Corp, especially Night Corp, which tended to pretend it was some kind of government as it ran all the organs of Night City governance, like the police and courts.
  
  The flowchart and associated plans recommended that she send an e-mail to the HR drone, a template being provided, offering to apply for emancipation in exchange for some additional benefits. Not only would Militech be on the hook for less than they would have to pay to Night Corp, but they would be paying the daughter of a fallen hero instead. The file made it clear that it wasn't that the corporate workers wanted to screw her over, specifically. It was just that they did not have any discretion and had to attempt to screw over everybody. They almost considered it an IQ test, as a kind of social Darwinism which I found repugnant. However, if given a plausible option where they could award me additional benefits and save the Corp money at the same time, they would definitely go for it.
  
  Was this all just a fever dream as I lay dying inside that locker? ' No,' replied my medical sense. My brain was full of ways to test reality or myself for delusions, and I hadn't failed them when I did many of them this morning.
  
  Sighing, I copied over the e-mail template and filled out the relevant portions before sending it to that Alice Newman lady.
  
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  A Moth's Wings and a Tyger's Claws
  POV: Taylor Hebert from the Cyberpunk 2077 universe (not our MC.)
  
  Taylor didn't realise it, but the fact that she was sleeping when the swap took place meant she got a much more significant chunk of her alternate's memories than the other girl had. She was also unaware of the fact that a giant crystalline computer was inspecting the process of transfer very carefully, which ensured that it settled upon her brain, much as it began to do to her doppelganger before they were transposed.
  
  She fell onto the flat linoleum floor in front of her alternate's locker with a thud. A crappy way to wake up. She had been wallowing in her own despair in her little apartment, wondering what she was going to do and missing her dad, even though he had a tendency to be gone for weeks at a time on missions. Being gone for a little while was a lot different from being gone. It had only been three days since she came to the Corp-provided temporary housing in the Megablock in Japantown.
  
  Why the hell they put a fifteen-year-old girl, a Militech Corpo brat, in the middle of a Megabuilding run lock stock and barrel by the Tyger Claws Yakuza gang, which had ties to Arasaka, was anyone's guess. Although Arasaka was officially banned from North America following the Corporate War, everyone knew that they had covert operations on the continent. Although you didn't hear about it all the time, it wasn't uncommon to hear about a researcher kidnapped in the USA and later showing up in Japan "working" for Arasaka. Everybody did these types of renditions, and everyone claimed they were rescuing the workers, and sometimes that was probably the case. But who did Arasaka's dirty work in Night City? In the past, it was the Tyger Claws. Could they still be responsible for it, a secret conduit to this day? Her dad thought so. Either someone had a grudge against her dad, or more likely, it was probably at least two eddies cheaper than the Megablock downtown.
  
  She didn't think too much about how her alternate had been handling herself, her life or her depression, but then again, she had been starting to circle the drain herself, so she wouldn't throw stones just because her alternate had been doing it longer.
  
  The way she arrived in this world left a lot to be desired, too. Luckily, she didn't sleep in the buff, but she still found herself flat on the floor of a dark school familiar only to memories that weren't hers.
  
  Welp, what did Dad always say? Take stock, plan, adapt and then overcome. Take stock came first. She sat up. She had one Kerry Eurodyne branded duvet-style comforter, one pair of Militech-branded panties, worn, one bra, worn, two socks worn, one Miltech Paraline cyberdeck and operating system, one pair of Kiroshi Mk3 cybernetic eyes, one superpower that seemed to give her ideas about how to enhance her body to be resistant to the cold, and finally one Militech M-37AF compact variable-velocity SmartPistol.
  
  Her dad purchased this pistol for her last year. She had been holding it under her pillow more as a remembrance of him than as a form of self-defence. She doubted she would have been invaded in the Megablock she was in - it really was pretty safe, Tyger Claws or no Tyger Claws, but if anyone came through her locked door, it would be those selfsame Tyger Claws, and one pistol wouldn't have saved her from them. It was Militech's top-of-the-line in concealable personal defence pistols; although Taylor did have a set of Kiroshi optics, her dad finally allowed her some 'ware, but she didn't have the Smart-Link cyberware that would allow her to designate targets for the homing flechettes to take full advantage of its features. That said, it was still a very nice pistol that she had already switched to three-round burst mode. Her dad always told her that ammo was cheap, but being sure the other fucker was dead was priceless.
  
  She momentarily ejected the cassette to ensure all of the ammunition was there. Yep, sixty rounds of 2mm caseless gyrojet-seeking flechettes. Cheap as though ammo was, she somehow doubted she could go to a vending machine down the street and get more of the specialised 2mm flechettes, so her pistol was of purely limited utility. Plus, the ammunition was distinctive, and even her memories indicated that the BBPD would be able to link any deaths to the single weapon, which would be linked to her if she was ever discovered with it. Unless she surgically removed every single flechette from anyone she had to shoot, which her power was aching to do.
  
  The ammo itself, though? The sense of her "superpower" gave her was that she could build a lot of things, but replacement ammo for a high-tech gun was not one of them unless it was ammo made out of bone shards produced by a specialised organ in her body. Hmm.
  
  Perhaps she could save a few of the flechettes for when she had the resources to hire someone to reverse-engineer and duplicate them, but most likely, she would either discard the gun entirely or keep it as only a memento the first time she had to use it, but first things first.
  
  She stood up and glanced around. It was past twenty-three hundred according to the clock on the wall. Her dad must be worried sick. Honestly, she didn't think much about her alternate's dad's behavior, either. He hadn't handled mom's death as well as she remembered, but perhaps it was just that her actual dad just shoved everything into his work. Or, growing up in Night City, they had both internalised the possibility of not living to ripe old age? Although there were some weird superpowers in play, Brockton Bay seemed très tame compared to Night City. Well, no matter. She would fix him, one way or another. She wasn't about to lose two fathers.
  
  Taylor paused and considered her appearance and compared it with her alternate. She looked... mostly the same. She considered the differences. She didn't use glasses as her alternate had to do, as she had a pair of top-of-the-line Kiroshi cybernetic eyes, and of course, she made a few minor changes in her appearance as well.
  
  She suspected she would have looked identical, but body sculpt clinics were so cheap in Night City, and it only cost a few hundred eddies to increase her bust a little, narrow her waist and adjust her hips and slightly adjust the symmetry in her face. And it wasn't like they checked her ID or required her to be 18 to do it, either. It wasn't like she did anything major. Otherwise, her Dad would totally have noticed, but she did it the last time he was deployed about six months ago and just claimed she had a growth spurt when he got back.
  
  It should be fine; her memories indicate her alternate Dad barely noticed anything, anyway.
  
  She needed to either call him soon or decide to make her way back home on her own. She wasn't sure which was the better decision, tactically. She was leaning towards the latter, as she wanted a clean break with this place and didn't want any phone records tying her father to an outbound call from this location in the middle of the night. However, first, there was something she needed to do.
  
  She searched her memories and couldn't find any hint of surveillance cameras or drones at this school, so she started walking with purpose to the maintenance room, where she knew the janitor had kept some tools. It was locked, and she considered shooting the hinges off but realised the door was installed improperly and managed to just kick it open without too much trouble or even damage to the door itself. The door opened inwards, and the latch was barely keeping the door closed, locked or not.
  
  Nodding, she grabbed a stout prybar and then visited the locker room by the gym. She pried open about a dozen lockers before she found clean clothes that fit her, even if they were gym clothes. Then, thinking about it, she grabbed the rest of the clothes that were either dirty or didn't fit her, along with everything else the girls had in those lockers and threw them in a trash can down the hall. Except for thirty eddies... err dollars, she pocketed that. Waste not, want not, after all.
  
  She didn't want to give anyone a clue that she precisely wanted a clean set of clothes to fit a tall, lanky girl - that would point directly back to her. She knew many of the fucks at this school were well aware of what happened to her alternate today.
  
  Sighing, she found the janitor's room again and got a lot of cleaning supplies. This part she wasn't looking forward to doing. Nevertheless, she put on plastic gloves and a full-mask respirator and spent two hours cleaning her disgusting locker, bagging all the biohazard waste and everything that was in it.
  
  She didn't want any record of this incident, and there surely would be one if she didn't do this herself. Hell, with the way this school administration tried to cover for those three bitches it was possible they might accuse her of doing it... for some reason.
  
  She had to stop herself from using the cleaning supplies to concoct an odourless contact poison to put on each of the girl's lockers. That would be very obvious, and she'd likely be under PRT investigation within days. Even if she wasn't, eventually, her power would become known, and it would look very suspicious if her three bullies died of a tinkertech poison the day after they put her alternate in that locker.
  
  No, if she was going to take her alternate's dad, then at least she would take revenge on her behalf too, but it had to be smart. Not least because she experienced much of that same locker experience herself in her dream, let them think they have won, and let them think they had driven poor Taylor completely out of school.
  
  She was definitely never returning to this place. Six months when nobody remembered her, and the psychopath Sophia was making some other girl's life hell, well... that girl is the one who the cops will investigate when Sophia Hess, track star, is sniped from a klick and a half away when coming to school. That or the Empire 88. Growing up in a society where almost every part of your body could be malleable and changed, Taylor certainly didn't understand the concept of hate-based purely on skin tone. You could have that changed for two hundred eddies at any biosculpt clinic.
  
  In any case, any hypothetical future death of Sophia Hess wouldn't have anything to do with Taylor Hebert, GED graduate and secret bio-tinker, that's for sure. Even once they figure out that she is a Tinker, what bio-tinker snipes someone, anyway?
  
  Sighing, she carefully peeled off her gloves and threw them with the other biohazard waste, which she would triple bag and toss in the dumpster. Not exactly how you're supposed to deal with biological waste, but what could she do?
  
  Her locker reeked of bleach and other chemicals but was quite clean. She left the janitor's room exactly how she found it, if down a number of supplies. She doubted they would notice.
  
  Now, she just had to go steal some glassware from the chemistry lab and someone's backpack to carry them in. They'd probably think some Merchants broke in and stole it to cook meth, but she needed to make her dad some antidepressants, which she would give to him surreptitiously in some lasagna tomorrow. In fact, she'd probably need some too. As for the lasagna? She'd have to do something to make up for the fact that she had been keeping such bullying a secret from him. If there was one thing her actual dad had made sure she knew, it was you didn't keep secrets from family.
  
  Only if all the facts were known could a proper strategy be devised. She was already going to keep one secret from him, that she wasn't actually his daughter (oh and that she was going to drug him secretly), so she had to tell him everything else. He was going to be upset, but at least he would be alive.
  
  Then she had a number of exciting possibilities to explore with her own body or, instead, modifications to it. She would have to study a little to pass the GED as, no doubt, the curriculum in Shittown, USA circa dinosaur times was different than a Militech school in 2062, but that wouldn't be a problem. It especially wouldn't be a problem when she gave herself a photographic memory and deleted her biological or psychological need to sleep through some judicious auto-brain surgery.
  
  She didn't think cyberpsychosis was a thing here, and even if it was just the throwaway antidepressant that she was about to make for her and her dad was enough to chill out even a full-body Borg, the way it balanced your brain's neurotransmitters. They might still kill you, but it wouldn't be because they were 'zerking.
  
  She could have made a fortune selling it if she was back in Night City, so long as one of the Pharmcorps didn't zero her for inventing it or steal it from her and then zero her on general principles. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. The shit she could make was preem.
  
  She felt bad for the poor girl who took her place. Well, maybe her alternate got the same power she had? If so, she might be able to make a life for herself. She didn't know how any of this was supposed to work; only that even with giant Kaiju and other monsters slowly destroying the world one city at a time a couple of times a year, this place seemed a lot better than Night City.
  
  She wished her alternate the best. She quickly apologised for eating all of the food in the fridge, as she was afraid to go out back then due to the Tyger Claws. Do better than me in Night City, other self! As for herself? She would adapt and overcome.
  
  POV: Our MC.
  
  It was rare for Colin to be impressed with another tinker's miniaturisation efforts, but he had to admit that the six autonomously steerable flechette munitions that were sent to him for examination by the BBPD were impressive.
  
  They featured an altogether unusual microprocessor architecture that he could tell was manufactured with a completely novel photolithographic method. It gave him a lot of ideas about how he could improve the size of the over hundred and eight individual microprocessors that his armour required. Moreover, they didn't actually appear to be tinkertech themselves, as he could completely understand their operating principles.
  
  He immediately discounted it as being preexisting arms technology that he was just unfamiliar with. Although there were some similarities between the devices and existing precision-guided artillery munitions that the military used, the only similarity was that they were all guided munitions. There were just a limited number of ways for a guided munition fired out of a gun to work, and articulating guide fins was the simplest in all cases.
  
  That meant that a Tinker had to be responsible. A Tinker that could produce reproducible technology? Or, perhaps the tinker tech was in the machine that built the ammunition? That wasn't unheard of, but it was pretty rare.
  
  They could be a new Toybox product, but if so, why was their first use killing two no-name gang members in the Docks? Such things were clearly assassin's tools; why waste them on a couple of junkies?
  
  The city coroner had dug them out of two deceased members of the Archer's Bridge merchants several days ago and immediately recognised that the tungsten flechettes were not your regular 9mm rounds and forwarded them to the PRT for examination. Such things, if they were actually unusual, invariably ended up at his desk.
  
  He was on a conference call with Dragon, who had been watching him disassemble them. Already, he had shipped via overnight express three of the devices to Canada for her own examination, "What do you think?" he asked carefully.
  
  Her voice came back, seemingly happy and very interested, "Quite amazing! The actual mechanics of the gyrojet guidance is pretty simple; we could build things like that already. But I'm sure you're asking about the microprocessors, right? These are from a sub-1nm manufacturing process. If these processors got any smaller, electrons would jump from transistor to transistor through quantum tunnelling effects! This might be the smallest, most highly transistor-dense that traditional computing can get."
  
  He nodded. She always knew what he meant, and she picked up on the important points right away. It was why he so enjoyed collaborating with her, "Precisely. It is a bit intimidating seeing the absolute apogee of traditional computing technology staring you in the face, but I had the same opinion. Perhaps we will exceed these using quantum computers or some other hitherto-fore unknown computing technology... but as far as transistors are concerned? This is it. It's amazing, exactly as you said."
  
  "It might be a little difficult to infer the manufacturing technique, and that is really what we want, but I think I know precisely how these were built. What we need to do is..." Dragon continued.
  
  I felt bad for the girl who took my place and hoped that she would help my dad where I had failed him, and perhaps we could be reunited some day in the future. The world I found myself in might be a dystopian future, but at least there weren't giant monsters wrecking the world on a predictable schedule.
  
  I wasn't sure how I was so positive that it had been a swap between the two of us, but it was just something I felt deeply sure about.
  
  I was a bit nervous being in the building I was in. A combination of a few memories from my alternate about the Yakuza and research on my phone revealed that most of Japantown, and especially this Megabuilding was run by a gang called the Tyger Claws. They were a mostly Japanese gang, and my alternate memories were especially concerned about Japanese gangs.
  
  That caused me to come up short. Was... my alternate racist? It didn't seem like it, and there seemed to be some actual legitimate reason that she had been concerned about Japanese gangs. I would have to do a lot more research about Militech, as that seemed to be caught up in that feeling as well. Something in the back of my head told me I definitely shouldn't traipse around the neighbourhood alone wearing any of my Militech-branded swag that filled a lot of these cardboard boxes. Was that it? Did the Japanese gangs dislike the ultra-American corporation? I didn't know.
  
  The Tyger Claws were pretty easy to learn about online, and everything I learned made me a bit nervous too. They were kind of like what the Azn Bad Boys might be like if they were run by competent, not just ruthless, people. They were much bigger, too. Not only were they involved in the same organised crime activities that I would have recognised, such as drugs, protection rackets and prostitution, including a high-class "dollhouse", whatever that meant only a couple dozen floors beneath my feet.
  
  However, they had a lot of darker businesses, too, including organ and cybernetics harvesting of people who nobody would miss. Kind of like a girl with no next of kin living by herself in a small apartment, perhaps. It was why if I ever interacted with any of them, and I would end up doing so just walking to and from my apartment that I would give them the idea that she had a huge family nearby.
  
  Plus, I found online that everyone living in this Megabuilding was expected to pay for their protection, and there was even a guide on how to do so politely, so I would have to go see one of their local middle managers in this building as soon as possible. Today. I wondered why my alternate self had never accomplished it, but perhaps dealing with gangs wasn't what they were taught in corporate school. It wasn't what I was taught either, and it rankled me to have to do it, but the sites I had read were pretty clear on the possible consequences of not doing so.
  
  In fact, it was one of the first things that popped up when I searched for "Things I need to know to live in Japantown."
  
  As gangs went, the Tyger Claws were a medium threat in Night City, according to the guides online. A medium threat in Night City would get Brockton Bay turned into a quarantine zone, I thought, but it wasn't like the police or corps played around, either.
  
  Theoretically, they had something that they called honour and principles, and what I found online indicated that some of the top leaders of the gang might even believe that and act that way, so long as it was convenient. The problem was the bottom tier of the gang, the ones I would likely meet, did not have almost any bottom line.
  
  Moreover, if you defended yourself from the bottom tier, the entire gang would turn on you like a school of piranhas, even if they were doing something "dishonourable" to you against gang rules. It didn't make any sense at all to me, except when I realised that they were just scum and talking about honour was just empty platitudes. A lot of supervillains in her old world were that way too. They talked a good game but then were involved in the worst of activities.
  
  It was like watching pro wrestlers. All an act, performative.
  
  It definitely sounded like Night City could use a hero, but I didn't have powers that were strong like Eidolon or Alexandria. I couldn't tank a nuke, or even a gun. I had a lot of knowledge about medicine and might be able to tinker some useful drugs or maybe even novel cybernetics, but my knowledge of cybernetics left a lot to be desired compared to what was available in this world.
  
  I had the feeling that I would learn very quickly if I studied cybernetics here and had a strong, strong urge to do so, but all that together didn't make a hero that would last more than a couple of days before being killed or worse.
  
  Maybe I couldn't be a hero. Not like Alexandria. At least, not at first and perhaps not ever. But I could still help people. Be a good person.
  
  That caused me to glance down at my phone. The lady from Militech's HR department had gotten back to me really quickly, today on a Sunday, no less.
  
  The woman was very pleased with the proposal. With my alt's grades and the classes she had taken, I already qualified for early graduation from a public school. So, if I applied for emancipation and early graduation, they wouldn't be on the hook for anything.
  
  They were willing to pay me in a lump sum, essentially half of what they would have ended up paying to Night City for my foster care, food and upkeep. They would also be willing to pay and arrange admission for me in a number of either post-high school or vocational school options.
  
  But only up to two-year programs, the same as I would have gotten if I went to public school. So I could get the equivalent of an associate's degree, which might open the door to a crappy entry-level supervisory position very far down the corporate ladder, or I could choose a number of vocational training options, many of which weren't available for your average person on the street.
  
  Based on my supposed educational background and noted interests in school, of course, the corp would track that; she was even polite enough to hilite what her computer suggested I would be the most successful in, namely a two-year Netrunner/Systems Admin course.
  
  That did sound interesting, but it wouldn't mesh well with my ridiculous level of medical knowledge. I was almost certain I was one of the better doctors in the entire world if you only counted pure medicine. For some reason, my power didn't know about this world's cybernetics, perhaps because my power came from my old world.
  
  Another problem with the Sysadmin course was that I didn't have any cybernetics at all. I had the entirety of Alt-Taylor's medical records on my phone, and it listed she had a basic operating system and cyberdeck from Militech, the Paraline, as well as a set of high-end Kiroshi cybernetic eyes.
  
  She also visited a biosculpt clinic and got a few things adjusted. She was a B-cup, whereas I was still languishing in the barely-A realm. Did she hide this from her Dad, I wondered?
  
  It would be important for me to, over the next week, get at least the exact same amount of cybernetics and... other treatments just so that we have identical medical records! Just in case, you know! Not because I agreed with her decision to make any changes to my appearance, but because the choice was taken out of my hands!
  
  That meant I would have to visit a different clinic from where Taylor went in the past, but that wasn't a big deal because she went to an internal Militech cyber clinic that I no longer had access to in the first place.
  
  Just the name "Ripperdoc" didn't inspire a lot of confidence in me at all, but there were a number of well-thought-of cybernetics clinics in the Corpo sector of town, either Downtown or in Corpo Plaza, which wasn't too far from where I lived. I would end up paying probably double what I would pay at one of the local "clinics" on Jig-Jig street, but I would also survive the experience with all of my organs intact.
  
  I nodded, the Sysadmin course sounded very interesting, but I was just learning about computers here. Attending it would make a fool out of myself; I didn't have the years of experience using a cyberdeck that Alt-Taylor did. I had a couple of ideas for making some drugs that would increase my neural plasticity and learning speed, but it wouldn't be enough.
  
  However... I glanced near the bottom of the list of offered courses. A six-month accelerated paramedics course. It was designed for people leaving the Army or who already had a basic EMT rating. It would be an absolute cakewalk for me.
  
  I replied to the woman, selecting that course. She replied in real-time, asking if I was sure, as it was intended for people who already had some medical training and that they would pay for it, but I would only get one shot at it. It was clear that she didn't really care one way or another and was just being polite. I told her I was sure, and she replied in the affirmative.
  
  A few minutes later, a large packet of over three hundred pages of thick legalese that I was expected to sign arrived as an e-mail attachment. I did not sign it.
  
  There were a number of legal firms that did business primarily online. I had all of dad's money from his bank account, so I wasn't poor even before receiving any settlement from the Corp, even a basic one. I might be able to live nine to ten months, even on nothing but his bank account. So I spent a little bit extra to hire one of the better thought firms and spent about fifteen minutes discussing the matter with one of their lawyers on the phone.
  
  Judging from the number of pages, he judged it was a simple matter, and I'd be billed for about four hours of work, which I thought was very reasonable and paid them on the spot, forwarding the document to him. They would even handle Militech themselves, so I never had to interact with that HR lady again.
  
  I got myself dressed, as I had to go out of the safe apartment to get some food - someone was a bitch and ate all the food in the fridge, in fact, that yoghurt that I used to make drugs was the last thing in there. I had been foraging off chips and crackers for the past day, and that wouldn't do.
  
  I also had to visit the Tyger Claws community office on the tenth floor to make my payment to them for living in their building. It was weird; they had office hours and everything.
  
  I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked very neutral. Not quite like a corporate brat, but not like trash either. I was wearing clothes that were fashionable two or three seasons ago, judging from my online searches, so I hoped I looked comfortably middle-class. Someone that would be missed if I disappeared and who the police department would investigate if I disappeared.
  
  I almost left the gun on the coffee table, but everything I took away from Alt-Taylor's memories was that I absolutely should not leave home unarmed, so it took me a bit longer to scrounge up a concealed holster for it.
  
  Sighing, I patted myself down and unlocked the door and stepped out.
  
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  A pussy cat with Claws
  Walking through my floor of the Megabuilding was a bit odd. It was mainly set up with small residences, like my own. However, there were a number of small businesses as well. It was surreal, and I felt like I was living through that old Earth Aleph film Blade Runner . There was even a noodle stand like what I recalled in the film; the only exception was you couldn't sit there in the rain and eat your noodles, obviously.
  
  It was a similar experience purchasing the noodles to what she remembered in the movie, too, as the noodle man didn't speak a word of English. Or if he did, he didn't want to speak it to the lanky anglo girl. However, I did end up with a bowl of noodles and a Nicola, which was apparently America's Favorite Cola. Personally, I doubted that. Perhaps it would be your favourite if you drank Robitussin for enjoyment, as it tasted vaguely like carbonated cough syrup.
  
  I noticed I was dressed a little bit too good to smoothly fit in around there, so I finished my noodles, which were good and tossed the mostly-full can of Nicola Classic into the trash can. The can featured a minimalist line drawing of an Asian lady with a bare bottom. Honestly, the Cola probably would taste about the same if it came from her bottom. Ugh.
  
  Another business was something like a convenience store. Although it was run by an older-looking man that looked like he might own it and live next door, did that mean it was a bodega? I wasn't entirely sure, but I made it my second stop. I'm not sure I'd see an actual grocery store for a long time, but I spent about a hundred and fifty eurodollars on buying a bunch of food that looked good and brought it back to my apartment. That would last me a couple of days.
  
  After unloading the food in my kitchenette, next to my margarine tub of Super-Meth, I got ready to go back outside so I could go to the elevator. Speaking of the Super-Meth, I discovered it wasn't actually supernatural. I had the complete chemical compound structure and three synthesis methods for it in my head. But the interesting thing was, there was no way in hell that I could have made that drug in my kitchen.
  
  All three of the synthesis methods that I knew require, at minimum, a vacuum distillation setup and a number of chemical precursors that are simply not found in kitchen cleaners of any kind as far as I knew.
  
  Now, that wasn't actually that unusual when you considered Tinkertech. I heard of a Tinker that turned a spring from his mattress and two toasters into a perpetual motion device. However, what was unusual was that what she made wasn't tinkertech at all, as far as she could tell. Aside from the yoghurt, they were all actual, real chemicals.
  
  I tried to think back on how I made it in the kitchen, and it was just a fog. That's kind of normal Tinker stuff, right? Then why can I not make it again? Thinking about trying to make it again pulls up the actual chemical compound and synthesis steps in my head, as if I was a chemist and not a Tinker. Shouldn't I just... you know... wham, take weird stuff, and bam, then it does something?
  
  Thinking about the anti-depressants and anti-biotics yielded a similar result. However, I had to stop myself from starting to cook an anti-retroviral medicine in my kitchen when I came home when and thought about one as a test.
  
  So, what does that mean? My power would give me one "freebie" where it would use heebie-jeebies to produce something out of all manners of implausible inputs, using implausible methods and tools. But after that, I had to do it the old-fashioned way?
  
  I thought about it while I unloaded all the food I had bought. Glancing at some of the individual servings of yoghurt, I shook my head. I had the feeling I could create more of that yoghurt medicine, and when I thought about it, the yoghurt stuff didn't seem to be a real, non-Tinkertech, chemical or formulation. That made sense; yoghurt certainly had a lot of beneficial bacteria in it, but not enough and not the varieties to completely replace a person's microfauna thirty minutes after taking some extremely powerful antibiotic.
  
  It felt like my power was being stingy as hell. If I got inspired to create something, and I could do it through traditional chemistry, it would let me have that freebie, but if I wanted more, I had to create it like I was a scientist? That wasn't how Tinkering was supposed to work. It wasn't the first time that I felt that my power was a weird combination of Tinkering and Thinking. And I couldn't tell if I got ripped off by my power or if I won the lottery with it. One of the biggest problems with Tinkertech was that it wasn't reproducible by anybody except perhaps the best Tinkers in the world like Dragon, and it required the Tinker to maintain it.
  
  The fact that some of what I made seemed to be reproducible and congruent with actual science seemed amazing, now that I thought of that. Amazingly awesome or amazingly dangerous, perhaps both. When I got inspired with something, if it was possible to accomplish what I wanted scientifically, then it seemed to default to giving me an actual scientific solution. Sure, it seemed to Tinker-bullshit it the first time, but if I wanted a repeat like if I wanted to make more of that neural stimulant, I had to actually get a chemistry lab. I had all of the academic knowledge of its synthesis, but none of the muscle memory, either.
  
  The neural stimulant was a known drug in this world; I had looked it up by its composition online. It was a patented designer drug made by a European Pharmaceutical company. Patents didn't really mean a lot in this world, so what really gave them the edge was that their production method was a trade secret. It was expensive and was a commonly used drug by corporate executives, military pilots, astronauts and anyone who needed to stay up a long time with minimal side effects and low abuse potential.
  
  It still wasn't great for your brain to use it chronically over a period of years, though, but it was the safest neural stimulant currently on the market and priced accordingly. I didn't know the ins and outs of macroeconomics of the drug trade, but I thought I could probably sell the six hundred grams of what I had for over twenty-five thousand eurodollars. Retail, it would cost over twenty times that.
  
  However, it might not be a great idea to do so. Beyond any moral questions, the Pharmacorp sold this drug in distinctive, hard-to-counterfeit tablets. The shape, colour and texture of the tablets were trademarked, too and part of their marketing strategy. Similar to Pfizer marketing viagra as "the little blue pill." I doubted I could create such a similar tablet, especially since they were designed to be hard to counterfeit in the first place, so you knew people weren't tricking you with biker meth if you saw one of their pills.
  
  If the Corp ever found out someone sold a whole bunch of their premiere moneymaker in powdered base form, they would either think someone diverted it from their manufacturing centre, they'd probably consider this most likely, or that someone had discovered their synthesis method. Both would trigger an investigation that I didn't want to be anywhere near.
  
  I decided I wouldn't flush it after all, but I was definitely not interested in getting into the drug manufacturing business. Especially manufacturing a product that was supposed to be a firmly held trade secret by a Pharmacorp. Compared to other similarly sold drugs, it was practically good for you so, so I might have been able to rationalise selling it if I really needed the money someday, but the risks were too great to do so.
  
  The other two drugs I could find no mention of. I got a little nervous after searching for the exact chemical composition of the first drug and instead decided to not do that for the last two. Chemicals were similar to other chemicals, though.
  
  So, I browsed a chemistry encyclopedia online for nearby similar analogues, finding nothing. This told me either my power didn't only restrict me to chemicals that were already known in this world or that these two chemicals were even deeper secrets than the first one. The antibiotic was very useful but had a pretty big downside, but it was one that could definitely be mitigated if administered in a hospital setting.
  
  The anti-depressant was the most magical of the bunch in that it worked very rapidly, seemed to have no side effects that her power warned her about and only had to be taken once a week. One of the biggest problems with anti-depressants was compliance in the patient taking them every day. It turned out that when you were suffering from severe enough depression, you didn't want to do anything, even if it was as simple as swallowing a pill that you knew would help you.
  
  You were depressed, so you needed to take a pill, but your depression made you not want to take it. A kind of a Catch-22. The Tinker part of her was suggesting, mildly, a implanted personal pharmacopoeia inside a patient's body, that would administer appropriate drugs on an appropriate schedule. Something like that had to already exist in this world, as I thought they were working in that direction in my old world for insulin.
  
  It kind of made me feel bad to keep such a wonder drug to myself, but I definitely didn't want to lose what little freedom I had in this world. Perhaps it would come to that, and I might end up in someone's gilded cage. Definitely, worse things could happen, but who would choose that first? I might be able to release the synthesis procedures anonymously online, but then again, there wasn't a lot of anonymity to be had. I definitely wasn't a good enough "hacker," or a hacker at all, to ensure anything wouldn't be traced back to me.
  
  While walking from my apartment towards the elevator at the centre of the block I suddenly had the feeling that I was being watched and perhaps followed. It was a feeling that I had honed over the years, and I trusted my instincts in this manner. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to dodge Sophia and the Trio as often as I did. Rather than accelerate and try to lose them, I stayed with a group of about ten others who were also headed towards one of the elevators. This strategy of hiding with the herd would have been folly back in Winslow, as I had already been excommunicated from the herd, and nobody would have protected me.
  
  Here, though, it seemed to work. In the corner of my eye, I saw the man, no wait... it was a boy, younger than me even, that was trailing me. Thankfully, the boy didn't look too dangerous, but thirteen-year-olds could do some ultraviolence in this world, so I wouldn't make any assumptions.
  
  I only had two things of value on me, my phone, which I could absolutely not lose and my pistol, which I didn't want to lose either, mostly because I read people who take your gun often shoot you with it first thing. A lot of others on the elevator were going to the tenth floor also, as there was a built-in NCART station to get on the maglev on that floor, and it was one of the larger commercial floors, with very few residential housing available. It was like a large mall, so I supposed it made sense to have the Tyger Claws office on the same floor.
  
  I could either confront the kid following me, implying that I had a gun by having my hand near it or just try to avoid whatever he was trying to do until I got to the Tyger Claws. I was never one for confrontation, and honestly, I was surprised that I even gave myself that option. This couldn't be entirely the result of the anti-depressants. Were the here-and-there memories of Alt-Taylor playing a role? She would have confronted the kid right away.
  
  Questions like that had the potential to spiral into existential questions that didn't do me any good to even consider, so I ignored them and just tried to keep the kid in sight as I stepped off the elevator.
  
  The Tyger Claws site said their office was just in front of the train terminal, and I found that very quickly. I managed to stay with a herd of a few people the entire way, but instead of following them through the NCART pylons, I darted away and walked straight with a purpose to the Tyger Claw office. I saw the kid notice me change directions, and he moved to follow me again until he saw where I was headed, and I think I saw a look of panic on his face before he made a quick ninety-degree turn to the left and walked off, perpendicular to the direction I was going, fast.
  
  The Tyger Claws "community office" was pretty small, at least the public front area. It kind of reminded me of a post office or a bank, but there was just one "clerk" behind the counter. He was in his thirties, and although he was covered with tattoos, he seemed to have a mild temperament. He smiled at me in a friendly manner and asked, in perfect English, "Hello, there, little lady. I am called Jin, by some. How can the Tyger Claws help you today?"
  
  What good customer service for a murderous booster gang. He just out and out admitted it, like I walked through the door at Fugly Bobs. It threw me for a loop for a moment but then I came to my senses. I decided not to try to use Japanese honorifics in English. Mainly because I once heard that Lung set a person on fire who did that, and figured that maybe it was offensive?
  
  "Ah, Mr Jin?" I asked, and he nodded with a friendly smile, "It is a pleasure to meet you, my name is Taylor Hebert, and I recently moved into the Megablock. This is my first time away from home, so I was not sure of the correct procedures but all of my Uncles told me that it would be in my best interests to pay for some services your organisation provides to the tenants here."
  
  That caused him to smile widely and even in a more friendly matter. I could briefly see his eyes change colours slightly, and I didn't realise what was happening until he said, "Ah, of course. Miss Hebert, of apartment 29-221. I'd like to offer my condolences about the recent passing of your father. Your Uncles? You must mean all of his comrades-in-arms in the NUSA or Militech's military? They have given you good advice; I wish more people had people they trust to tell them this."
  
  Oh. He must have some optics cyberware and pulled my file. Well, so much for keeping my connection to Militech a secret from them. He didn't seem to care, though. I bowed my head a little bit, "Thank you for that, Mr Jin. It has been hard for me the last few days. Otherwise, I would have been in sooner."
  
  He waved a hand affably, "It's not a problem. Our housing block is often one of the ones selected by corporations; Militech especially often sends their children here for the first time when they are leaving the nest... oh, that shocked you?" He did an actual belly laugh and waved his hand again, "You no doubt learned about Militech and Arasaka growing up and think perhaps us mere Tyger Claws, a Japanese benevolence organisation, are Arasaka's catspaw?"
  
  He shrugged but didn't deny it. But he chuckled again, "Even if that was the case, things would have to get much worse indeed for either side to target the fledglings of the other side indiscriminately. You're of the age where you will likely start working soon; not only is this housing block safe for the most part, but it is a way for you to see a different side of the world. That's why I think Militech often send their youngsters to live here, anyway. I've had this conversation a few times." He then grinned, "Of course, maybe it is because the rent is, on average, one hundred and three eurodollars cheaper than the block Downtown."
  
  I nodded firmly at that, which caused him to laugh again, "Yeah, maybe you're right."
  
  He explained which levels of service I could purchase, like I was buying car insurance; there were two. I could buy protection inside the Megablock, or I could also buy protection anywhere in Japantown. He was open that most Corpos only go for the first option, as the NCART could take them straight downtown without stepping foot in Japantown.
  
  They wouldn't guarantee my protection in Japantown, there weren't enough eurodollars in the entire Megablock to absolutely guarantee anyone's protection if they walked around unescorted in Jig-Jig street looking like a corpo, but it wouldn't be the Tyger Claws themselves that started things first. However, in the Megablock they would offer some guarantees about my safety inside my apartment, in fact they had a number to call if anyone tried to break in.
  
  "Did you know that the NCPD is probably moving to a fee-for-service to make 911 calls? I think it is going to be five eddies a minute. Us, on the other hand? We will pay you if you report such crimes on the premises," he said emphatically. I didn't think I wanted to know what they would do to people they "arrested."
  
  I wanted to tell him that the NCPD already did charge ten eurodollars if he ever decided to hang up when calling Emergency Services; it was listed as a fine, presumably for wasting their time, on my transaction history. But I didn't want to tell him I had tried to call 911.
  
  The costs were reasonable, too. Ten per cent of your rent if you only stayed in the Megablock, and fifteen per cent for all of Japantown. The location where the paramedics' school was was technically Downtown, but it was quite close to Japantown, only a block away. I asked him, "Mr Jin, please give me your advice. I will be attending a school for six months at..." I gave the address, ". That is Downtown, I guess. But it is very close. Do you think I should pay for your extra tier of service?"
  
  I had already decided to buy the extra level. I was just being respectful, in asking his opinion. Nobody working at Fugly Bobs would tell her: 'No, maybe you shouldn't Fugly-size it.'
  
  He got a thoughtful look on his face and rolled his fingers along his desk. "Normally, Miss Hebert, I would say it is probably not necessary. However, in the past six months, the closest NCART station to that address has closed for several weeks twice. That leaves you either going for the one past it, which would be over a two-kilometre walk back, or you could stop in the last Japantown station for only a few blocks walk." He shrugged and said, "Even if you do not get the full package, it is not like that means you can't go to Japantown. It just means we won't have your back. It'd probably be fine. However, I do promise that if you do have the full service and you go missing, we will at least look for you a lot more than the cops will. The only people who will look for you more is Trauma Team, and they charge a lot more. It is up to you. It'd probably be fine either way, though."
  
  Wow, he didn't try to upsell me... Actually, I think he did. He was just a lot subtler about it. "Ah, thank you for your advice Mr Jin. I take my personal safety very seriously, so I think I would like to pay for the full level of service you provide just to be safe."
  
  He nodded, smiling. "You are very wise for someone your age. That school, are you going to be studying medicine? That is a medical campus."
  
  I blinked. I didn't realise they did anything but paramedic classes. I raise my hand and make a waffling gesture, "I'll be studying to be a paramedic. I'd love to be a doctor some day, but this is all I could get paid for, as of now."
  
  Mr Jin nodded and said, "You are modest. It's the best paramedic course in the city. You must be truly gifted to have gotten admitted without even a basic EMT certificate."
  
  I think he is just being polite because it seemed like I was being polite. I think modesty is a big part of a lot of Asian cultures, but I didn't know. I decide to go with, "There are many much more gifted than I, but I thank you." I honestly didn't believe that though. I was going to be the best.
  
  After a few more back and forths, he finalises the price I am expected to pay. I look a little nervous and ask, "Do you need me to pay in cash?"
  
  Mr Jin looked a little surprised but then suddenly affected a stern expression and said solemnly, "Yes, in small, non-sequential bills..."
  
  Fuck! Where was I going to find that?
  
  "... and then you will have to come and have sake with the oyabun..."
  
  Wait, what? I'm not joining your gang!
  
  "... and I warn you that any disrespect and you'll be expected to commit seppuku..."
  
  I suddenly narrow my eyes at him. He's screwing with me. That causes him to crack up and roar with laughter, slapping the counter several times. "Oh, oh... you should have seen yourself. Oh, I am going to tell all my friends, thank you for that. Little lady, I think you have been watching too many old movies. Do we need cash? Of course not!"
  
  I laugh a little, haltingly. Okay, maybe it was a little bit funny. I bring out my phone and send an electronic payment, and he grinned even wider, "Want to set up Autopay?"
  
  He's still making fun of me. My face must be beet red. But I nodded; I did want to set up autopay. It sounded very convenient.
  
  "Okay, we already have your biometrics, so all of our members will know that you're paid up. Take one of these stickers and place it on your door, too, if you don't mind," he brought a number of tiger themed stickers out from behind the counter. Most were similar to the tattoos, an Asian inspired tiger, sometimes clawing with flame around its paws.
  
  However, one of them...
  
  I looked at it. He nodded with a smile. I sighed and grabbed it, which caused him to laugh again, "I knew it! I knew it! Don't worry, that one has been very popular with girls your age. My daughter put one on our door, and we don't even need these!"
  
  I sighed and put the sticker of a cute cat girl with tiger stripes in my pocket. She had her hand/paw raised like one of those money cats, and a speech bubble proclaimed, "Nya!"
  
  I would not underestimate this gang. This guy was incredibly personable and charming, but that was exactly why he was working the job he was doing. Still, it sounded like things weren't as dire as I was anticipating them to be.
  
  Before I left, I asked him, "In the next day or so I am going to be getting a little work done, will that be a problem with the biometrics you've taken? Should I come back to the office?" I actually already had set up an appointment for one of Downtown's best biosculpt clinics tomorrow. I knew exactly what to ask them to do, as I had a complete report of the work Alt-Taylor received.
  
  He got a peculiar look, almost disapproving, on his face and asked, "Divergence factor?"
  
  I searched my memories for what that meant and finally realised it was a percentage based on how different you would look from your baseline after treatment. "Less than five per cent."
  
  That caused him to smile in his friendly manner again, "Oh, no. That's no problem. I'm so glad to hear that, too many people your age change your entire bodies, try to look like stars." He shook his head, "It's not really respectful to your parents! I certainly wouldn't let my daughter do anything like that."
  
  Ah, he had been disapproving at first. I smiled, "I would never betray the memory of my father or mother. I am their daughter even if neither of them is around anymore, so I could never make radical changes like that. I like that I can see them in myself when I look in the mirror." That last part was a lie, but it sounded good. I didn't intend to, but I could imagine any number of situations where I would do so... being on the run, for example.
  
  He nodded slowly, "You are a filial girl, Miss Hebert. It's rare to see these days. Come by the office, or call me if you need anything." He forwarded my phone his contact information, and I nodded, seeing that as a clear dismissal.
  
  I departed and walked directly back to the elevator. Well, I liked that guy a lot more than Mr Gladly. However, I didn't trust him at all. I mean, I sort of believed what he had said, but I only figured that mattered when it was convenient.
  
  That said, the fact that a member of a murderous street gang made me feel better than my teachers had in two years made me laugh. Was I always that good at talking? I didn't think so. I was just so scared that I said whatever came out of my mouth. I think I did well.
  
  I thought about it as I headed back to my apartment. Finally, I realised a big reason was that he saw me as a completely different Taylor Hebert. So, my self-esteem still wasn't the best, I guess. But here, I could pretend to be this other girl every day, and nobody would ever know. Was that healthy?
  
  My medical sense seemed to think it depended on a lot of other factors, but no, not generally. Oh well.
  
  After I got back to my apartment, I spent the day further looking at things online and forging a version of my medical records that didn't have any of the biosculpt or cyberware that Alt-Taylor had, so I could give to the clinic tomorrow.
  
  Shortly before I was heading to bed, I got an alert on my phone from Militech and one from the law firm simultaneously. Everything had gone through correctly. Or so I had thought.
  
  The law firm told me that they had spotted a few problems with the contract, especially the fact that my compensation should be a bit different, i.e. more, since I was attending only a six month course compared to a normal two-year course that they had been offering.
  
  That one change paid for their fees six times over, so I felt good about using their services. One perk that they got for me was one I didn't realise I should have asked for. Namely, they got Militech to let me keep my Militech dependent's net address until I turned 20. Although, I'd have to surrender it if I got a job at a major corporate competitor, like Kang Tao or Arasaka, or a number of others. The law firm emphasised how nice of a benefit this was, and I considered why they thought that was the case for a while.
  
  Finally, I nodded. I could see what they meant. Any time I applied for a job, I could send the application through this address. It was almost like a recommendation from Militech. Perhaps I couldn't get a job overseas with Arasaka or any Corp that Militech was on the outs with, but it told the hiring managers if I wanted a corporate job that I wasn't some mook of the street. Even if that was exactly what I was.
  
  I had already realised that my status, tenuous as it was, had value. Alt-Taylor was a third-generation Corpo, and that was almost a caste in this dystopian world. I was sure I got treated better by that Tyger Claw guy because of it.
  
  And I'm sure there were tons of things about it that were big negatives, too. I'm sure there were lots of places in Night City that I couldn't walk around without getting jumped, for example. And I already knew that working for most corporations was similar to working as an Imperial Official in old Chinese dynasties. You were as often killed by your colleagues as your enemies.
  
  Still, it wasn't something I should throw away. It might not have been a big deal if I was Alt-Taylor, as she still had the culture of growing up in that caste, so it would show through with whoever she was dealing with, but I didn't have that advantage at all.
  
  The e-mail from Militech did seem correct at first blush. However, there was a mistake. It had the class I was attending as the Sysadmin class, complete with links to download all course materials included.
  
  I blinked and rapidly clicked the link before they realised the error. The Sysadmin class wasn't a class that they let just anybody into. I didn't think that there would be some of the mythical "black ICE" that I had been reading about online in any of the course materials, but it should still be good stuff that I could study in my own time.
  
  I managed to grab the first year's materials, all books and included software, including three large scripted software packages designed to be run on a cyberdeck, labelled Ping, Reboot Optics and C. Malfunction. I didn't know what any of those did beyond what they said on the tin, but I managed to download and save them to a data shard on my phone.
  
  Militech realised their mistake before I could get the second year's materials, but I still felt I got a nice unasked-for bonus. To make it look less suspicious, I downloaded all of the Paramedic class courseware too, as if that was what I was after all along. Some of them were BDs, so I would have to get a wreath somewhere. I had a memory that my dad didn't permit Alt-Taylor to have one. Probably because, by far, the most common braindances were porn-related.
  
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  Chippin' In
  I never figured myself as one of the girls in my school to take off her clothes for a man more than two times her age; I just thought that was more something Emma might do, considering she was both a model and a psychopath. Although, to be honest, I was wearing a robe and completely covered, presently, when the clinic's tech arrived for my consultation. I didn't think he was considered a doctor, per se, but he seemed a lot more knowledgeable about biology than anyone called a clinic technician in Brockton Bay would have been.
  
  That just made it worse, actually. I had to strip to get a full body scan, so he technically wasn't looking at my body in the buff. Just the full three-dimensional ultra high definition scan of it, being displayed on a holographic display that was built into the table between us. Watching him pinch the image to zoom in to identify whether or not it was a freckle or birthmark on my butt was mortifying.
  
  Having anyone, especially a man, look at my stick-thin body, and chubby tummy was anxiety-inducing. However, he had a clinical, dispassionate disposition that at least put me a little bit at ease. Still, it was disquieting to watch him examine my images as though I were a puzzle he was solving.
  
  Finally, he looked over at me and said, smiling, "Ah, Miss Hebert. Welcome. The receptionist said you already had an idea of what you wanted to do with your body's canvas."
  
  Oh, he was one of those types. Pretentious. I didn't like the idea of someone calling my body a canvas. However, I nodded and fished a data shard out of my robe's pocket, sliding it over on the countertop of the table that was between us. He arched an eyebrow, clearly unused to taking data through such a pedestrian means, but I couldn't do anything about that until my visit to the cybernetics clinic tomorrow.
  
  However, he took it and slotted it into a port on his neck. That looked pretty cool and gross at the same time. I had to make a couple of adjustments to Alt-Taylor's medical records, although it wasn't difficult. For example, even before she got her cybernetic eyes, she had her vision fixed.
  
  The man tsked his tongue, sounding exasperated. "I thought you were wearing those glasses as a fashion statement. It looked pretty retro; totally nova. But do you really have myopia? Was this some kind of bet you lost, or did you grow up in a weird religious cult?" he asked, some of his professionalism disappearing in his curiosity.
  
  I was worried about that. But there wasn't really anything I could do about it. I could have gone to the cybernetics clinic first, I supposed, but that left some similar problems. And since I was planning on spending a lot more money there, I wanted to reduce their suspicion, or rather curiosity, by at least arriving there looking like my Militech medical files said I should, in case anyone ever did some digging later.
  
  I chuckled nervously and lied, "More of the former, rather than the latter. I have an appointment day after tomorrow at the Skyline clinic to get my chrome chipped back in." I tried using some slang that I had read and heard online, but the unsure way I had said it made it obvious I was a poseur.
  
  Rather than make him suspicious, my failure there helped the impression I was trying to convey because I saw him roll his eyes and mutter quietly, "Corpo kids will do anything for thrills, I guess." He then composed himself, and his friendly, if detached, bedside manner returned, "So, I suppose that is why you did not include fixing the eyes in the spec sheet? Other than that, it's pretty comprehensive. Let's take a look."
  
  He waved his hand, and the holographic image of me naked shrunk, and a second version appeared right next to it. On the new hologram, my bust increased a little bit, as did my hips, and my waist shrunk slightly. I couldn't really tell the difference in my face unless I glanced back and forth between the two, but at the same time, the new version definitely gave the impression of being slightly more pretty.
  
  "Nice, subtle work, this. We couldn't do better ourselves. In fact, this might give me a couple ideas about suggestions to girls your age who want something done without their parents finding out," he said knowingly. That had been exactly what Alt-Taylor had been going for, actually. Did no businesses really care what age you were in this dystopia? I hadn't tried buying beer because it sounded gross, but I didn't think I would be refused.
  
  He tilted his head, "Want to keep this subtle look or go for something more pronounced?"
  
  I shook my head, "No, just this, please."
  
  He nodded, "Only two recommendations, then. First, while we're in there, we may as well tighten your abdominal muscles. You're not chubby by any means..." I actually thought I was, "... but I think this treatment plan was made when you were in a little better shape."
  
  Alt-Taylor had exercised some, that was true. I meant to start running, but... "I was going to just start running; there is a gym in my housing block."
  
  That caused him to nod, "Then maybe a slight adjustment to your core muscles and glutes, too. Cardiovascular exercise is recommended, but all we'd do is get your body to the point so your future exercise can maintain it. Save you six weeks of running on a treadmill for virtually no extra cost."
  
  Hm, that did sound fine, actually. "Okay, nothing ridiculous, though."
  
  "Sure," he replied and used a bunch of arcane-looking gestures to edit the second image, causing my chubby tummy to firm up slightly. I couldn't notice any changes to my legs, though, "How's that?" I just nodded at him. "Second... the hair..." he said the last diplomatically.
  
  It was true; naturally, curly hair wasn't very much in style in Night City, but I firmly shook my head, "No. I am keeping my hair." Would I even still be Taylor Hebert if I straightened my hair? Besides, my trove of psychiatric data in my head said people generally like interesting quirks like that in people, and that would probably especially be the case in this future, where you could change everything about your body for less than five hundred dollars.
  
  He sighed, sounding very much like a put-upon artist, "Very well. You can't win them all, as they say."
  
  I managed to arrive safely back at my apartment. Travelling on the NCART train was a bit scary; I had never been on a similar public transit system in my life. The closest thing was maybe the city bus. I would have been nervous just getting on a subway in New York in my old world, to say nothing about this version.
  
  It was a magnetic levitation train, so it moved incredibly fast. I almost fell off my feet when I didn't brace myself correctly as the train left the station the first time I took it going to the clinic earlier, causing a number of people to stare at me with highly amused expressions.
  
  I had to make a conscious effort to stop looking like a "gonk"; otherwise, someone might "flatline" me. See, I could fit in!
  
  Shaking my head, I pushed my beet-red face into my pillows. That sounded so terrible, even in my head!
  
  I spent the rest of the day recovering and intended to spend the next day relaxing and studying. However, I got sudden inspiration and spent most of that day Tinkering instead.
  
  The process of biosculpting was fascinating, involving me floating in a vat of liquids with tiny nanomachines suspended in them. Normally they anaesthetised you for the procedure, but I was so fascinated that I asked to not be put out. I wasn't sure why I said that, and it sounded like something I would never have said or wanted, actually.
  
  That was kind of a mistake because I discovered I had a bit of claustrophobia, I think, from the locker. However, I managed to hold it together while breathing through a tube. My medical sense seemed very interested in everything, but I didn't really know why, as it wasn't like I could actually sense what was happening to my body in more than a general way. But something in the back of my mind really wanted me to be awake for this procedure.
  
  The procedure wasn't painful at first, and in fact, only after I was out of the vat did a dull ache come on, which I figured was an inflammation response. Sure enough, they gave me some anti-inflammatories, made sure my payment went through and sent me on my way. The changes made to my body were minor enough that they were all mostly done that day.
  
  Before returning to my apartment yesterday, I meandered around a Downtown shopping centre and purchased a braindance wreath and a few other items. I had actually found an older version wreath with some of my alternate dad's things, but I did not want to use his wreath or see a list of what BDs he has scrolled or experienced any more than I wanted to look under my dad's bed for his Playboys back in Brockton Bay.
  
  I probably would have just buckled down and reset it to factory defaults, as wreaths were a little expensive, but I couldn't actually use it anymore because I had disassembled it a couple of days ago when I wasn't paying attention. I was pretty sure I could still use it for Tinkering. Still, I had ideas about it that didn't have anything to do with brain dances but everything to do with brains by themselves, in fact, I was still itching to rebuild it when I left for the biosculpt clinic, so since I still needed one to watch a lot of the BDs for my class a new one was needed. I wanted to go through the entirety of the course material before the first day of class on September 4th, close to a month away.
  
  I had a ton of medical knowledge in my head, but I have already discovered that there were a lot of things I didn't know about how medicine was practised in this world, but I was learning rapidly even now. All clinicians in this world, from doctors to basic EMTs, were equal parts medical professionals and equal parts technicians. Not only were cybernetics ubiquitous, and if you responded to a trauma, you had to be able to help not only regular people but highly augmented ones as well. Also, the level of technology in the medical field far exceeded what I was used to.
  
  For example, in my last life, an EMT might connect a patient's body to a cardiac monitor, pulse oximeter and blood pressure cuff to monitor their vital signs. Maybe a CO2 sensor, as well, if they were really sick. Of course, all that equipment still existed, although much more miniaturised, but it was equally likely a basic EMT in Night City would connect their own cybernetic operating system to a patient to read off that patient's vital signs and diagnosis from the patient's internal bio-monitor if they had one.
  
  It was one reason that the word tech was emphasised in what they were called, which was usually Med-Techs. If I wanted to use slang, which I had realised probably wasn't a good idea with my current unfamiliarity with any of the local "lingo", they were called Techies, even, although more of a subtype of that broad classification.
  
  It kind of reminded me about how some professions in my past world changed radically with the advent of technology a few decades ago. Like, I remembered reading that architects sat at desks with pencils. Today, an architect in Brockton Bay would need to be very proficient with computer systems that made their job possible.
  
  I glanced down at my kitchen table to see the two things I had built. One was already broken, but it had done what I wanted it to do, but the other looked rather slick, not clunky at all.
  
  There were way too many boxes in my little apartment, and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I honestly needed a larger apartment to store everything that had been in our home or move a bunch of things to storage or get rid of them, but the nearest self-storage centre with any vacancies wasn't even in Japantown. I didn't think riding on the metro into Watson with dozens of cardboard Militech boxes was a good idea. If I had a car or had access to one, it would be easy, but I didn't even know how to drive.
  
  Shaking my head, I picked up the first small item I had built. I didn't realise that this type of thing would be in my Tinker "speciality", but then again, medical imagers were very important in medicine. It had been a small can, with wires appearing out of every inch of it. It was a type of electromagnetic scanner similar to an MRI. You'd place a biological sample; in this case, I had placed a drop of my blood, and it would be held in suspension, levitated while the scanner bombarded it with crazy amounts of electromagnetic radiation and magnetic fields to get an image of everything inside.
  
  Using it had tripped the circuit breaker for my apartment and burned the invention out; I couldn't build something like this to last with just the stuff sitting around my apartment. However, it did get an image transferred over to my laptop, which I had found in one of the boxes. It was a 3-D image of my blood cells as well as anything that was travelling in my blood, including a number of small nanomachines that were still in my body from the biosculpt treatment the other day.
  
  The resolution on the scan was pretty good. At least as good as what you'd get with an electron microscope, and without the need to coat the entire sample with a small layer of gold before you scanned them, as was necessary with electron microscopy.
  
  I have been very interested in nanomachines ever since I discovered they were widely used in medical practice here in this world. I had searched on the net, but the publicly available information was very sparse. I could tell you who invented the first commercially available medical nanomachines back in the early 2000s, and I could even see some images of this first-generation model but nothing about how they were produced, controlled or programmed.
  
  It seemed that some information, despite the fact that it was very old, was by default not freely accessible. Although both the first-generation nanomachine, which I could see a grainy picture of online and the ones in my blood, looked something like a tiny crab, the dimensions were utterly different. The ones in my blood were two orders of magnitude smaller, and examining different individuals revealed that there were over twelve different versions or types, each looking slightly different or having a different tool. Clearly, the state of the art had followed the path of specialisation, then, rather than the first generation, which, according to the encyclopedia, were intended to be generalised tools.
  
  It was very fascinating to me, but I didn't know how much use this first experiment of mine would be. The scanning process fried the nanites, so I wouldn't have been able to recover their programming or command and control; I just got 3-D images of them. Still, it let me infer a lot about how they were used in medicine, things I wouldn't learn just from a Paramedics course. Paramedics might use nanomeds, although they were still kind of pricey, but they were only taught how the medicine was supposed to be administered, any contraindications, and similar end-user information. I would have to just keep studying, finding information where I could.
  
  The second device I made looked like a retro braindance wreath. I had made it from most of the parts of my dad's old wreath. Although there were wires sticking out of this device, they were carefully insulated and affixed into place. I got the impression I might need to perform regular maintenance on this device in order to keep it operable, like what I had expected from all of my Tinker inventions.
  
  I was calling it a sleep inducer, but it did more than that. You wore it, and then when triggered, it would rapidly induce you into the most restful sleep state possible. By default, this lasted three hours and would provide all the rest that your body and mind needed a day. You could use a dial to select shorter rest periods in thirty-minute increments, with the minimum being thirty minutes. That would give you a "nap" that was equivalent to a few hours of sleep. That was amazing in and of itself. However, the main benefit was that this sleep would be especially beneficial for your learning process.
  
  Using this device to get sleep would have a beneficial effect on your brain's neuroplasticity, and you would tend to retain the information you learned in the previous day much better.
  
  I had a lot to learn. Not only were there actually a lot of details that I needed to become familiar with, mainly technology and how it was used, to pass my Paramedics course, but I wanted to learn a lot more than just that!
  
  Any way that I could minimise the amount of sleep I took every night in a healthy way was something I needed to do. I think my power agreed with me, which was why one of the first things I created was a stimulant drug. That wasn't a long-term solution for me, though. This, though, might be.
  
  I had to admit that I was still kind of nervous and scared to be here in this world, and any time I was sleeping, I was also potentially vulnerable. Well, more vulnerable. Theoretically, the device shouldn't induce a very deep sleep that was impossible to be woken from; at least, I didn't think that was how it should work, so it should be safe to use all of the time.
  
  Before testing it, I gathered up all of my dad's tools that I had scavenged for in the cardboard boxes, made sure the soldering iron was cool and put them all back away where I wouldn't lose them.
  
  Then I gathered the sleep inducer, and sat in what was my alt-dad's recliner, put it on my head and triggered it for a three-hour sleep. I had stayed awake a bit too long building the sensor can, and I would be hurting tomorrow if this thing didn't work.
  
  It worked beautifully! Instead of the usual fog of memories of my previous day, I could recollect most things I did pretty well. The device both helped to transfer data from short to long-term memory but also should optimise the storage of neural information in a person's long-term memory. It wasn't a big boost, but you'd be less likely to lose things or misplace them.
  
  Humming happily, I took a shower and picked my most expensive-looking clothes for my trip to the Skyline cybernetics clinic today. Every corpo kid whose parents were at least middle managers had, no matter their age, at least one outfit that wouldn't be out of place in a corporate board room. According to some of my memories, it started, at first, as kind of costumes - people might remark, 'Oh, how cute!' However, as one got older, it became more serious, as children were often invited to company parties, and the way you were perceived, combined with your grades at school, could open or close many doors for your future.
  
  It was a bit of a shame that Alt-Taylor's taste in clothing was in some ways different from my own. We both liked dark colours, but Alt-Taylor showed a lot more skin than I was ever comfortable with. Her version of "Sunday school" clothes was a dark grey skirt-suit, with the skirt reaching barely past my mid-thigh.
  
  Pantyhose wasn't really in style at the moment, from what I could tell online, but I didn't care. There were lines I wasn't presently willing to cross, and showing everyone my bare thighs was one of them. So, I wore a dark pair with the skirt; besides, I thought they complemented the shiny black dress shoes.
  
  Glancing at myself in the mirror, I nodded. These would be the clothes Alt-Taylor would have worn if she ever went on a job interview or similar social situation. I was planning on spending a lot of money today, so I wanted to give an initial social impression that would be congruent with that.
  
  The hardest part about this morning would be avoiding getting pickpocketed on the metro.
  
  There was nowhere to really conceal a pistol on this outfit, so I had to carry it in my small black purse, along with my phone, so I absolutely made sure it never left my sight the entire trip on the train. Of course, a lot of people looked at me with disdain, but I noticed all of the better-dressed corporate workers who took the train to work gave me small nods of respect.
  
  I think that in their eyes, I was dressed a cut above their everyday fair, so I was either going to a job interview or a similar event, in which case they were wishing me luck, or I was of a higher station than them, so they were paying respects.
  
  I got off deep into the downtown station where security and police presence were high. They were starting to call this area Corpo plaza, even if it did include the burned-out crater that used to be the Arasaka building. Decades ago, it was totally destroyed using a small nuclear bomb, of all things.
  
  For a long time, people blamed Arasaka themselves for the destruction, but in the 2040s, a now-famous journalist named Trace Santiago published an explosive expose revealing Militech's involvement in the disaster. I had read all about that, a bit shocked. Needless to say, that didn't do a lot of good for Militech's PR in Night City, and although Arasaka was still technically banned from operating in the country, a lot of their subsidiaries did business in town, and it seemed like Night City was slowly shifting towards Arasaka's orbit.
  
  Well, it didn't really matter to me too much. Militech was one of the last options that I would agree to work for. They had too much data about Alt-Taylor. Too much data about her preferences and her study habits and interests, none of which was medicine. The potential for too many questions that I didn't have any good way to answer.
  
  It probably would have been fine, I mean, children often discover an intense interest and aptitude in their teenage years, but it was just something I didn't see a need to risk. I'd rather not work for an Arms Manufacturer in the first place, although that might have been kind of naive as most Megacorps were extremely diversified and many of them manufactured arms. None of them, as far as I could tell, were what I would call "good guys." This world seemed to have an extreme dearth of "good guys."
  
  A group of two Night City police officers paused in their beating up of a homeless-looking man with batons to give me a slight nod, which caused my heart to hurt a little. But what was I going to do? Even my alt-dad didn't have the power to stop things like that. It made me feel like shit to just walk on by while that happened in front of my face, though. I wanted to be a good person, but first, I needed to get the skills, abilities and power to make a difference. Would that ever happen? Or was that just a pretty little lie I was telling myself?
  
  I suppose that man could have been a criminal, but it didn't look like anything but the cops giving him the bum rush out of the good part of town.
  
  Sighing, I decided to put it aside for the moment but promised myself that even if I couldn't stop things like that, I would at least try to avoid perpetuating them. The cyberclinic had a street-level office, so I found it easily enough, the large crystal doors sliding inwards for me as I approached them.
  
  I was greeted immediately by a woman in a nice outfit, and once it was determined I had an appointment and wasn't a walk-up customer, I was ushered into a small conference room to meet with a "customer sales specialist."
  
  Another woman arrived, and she was, if anything, a walking billboard for their products here as she had cybernetic arms and obvious neural cyberware at the base of her neck. I started to rise politely, but she waved me off.
  
  The woman said in a friendly manner, "Miss Hebert, stay seated, stay seated. The notes on your appointment were a bit vague, so perhaps I should just ask you how we can help you today?"
  
  I plastered a fake smile on my face and said, "Of course. I need a full operating system; I'd like to get a cyberdeck as well, also a pair of optics. Lastly, I was considering something that could perhaps help my memory or retention of information; I will be starting at Night City Health Science centre next month."
  
  I didn't lie, but I intentionally gave the impression that I was attending a more prestigious course than I was. The HSC was mainly a traditional medical school, although they had two-year courses for nurses as well.
  
  That caused the woman to smile at first, but then look at me in confusion, "Wait... you don't have... anything?"
  
  I thought a lot about how to handle this question and decided to go with a somewhat brusque answer. I was trying to perhaps imply that I had been a victim of an attack by Scavengers that have a tendency to kidnap people and rip out their cybernetics. Normally people don't survive that, but it has been known to happen. The survivors would generally spend a fair while being put back together by the Trauma Team medical centre, using medical nanotechnology. So I said, with a bit of an affected shiver, "Yes. It's complicated. I'd really rather not discuss it."
  
  I'm not sure if I succeeded in my attempt, but she became much more polite, "Of course, of course. Let's look through your options. Then, once payment clears, we'll have a quick physical examination and can schedule surgery before lunch!"
  
  Originally I had planned on buying exactly what Alt-Taylor had, which was a 2062 version of the Militech Paraline cyberdeck, but the sales lady said politely, three different ways, that it was a piece of shit, just not in those words.
  
  That made sense; it wasn't that expensive. But my problem was I was beyond a novice. I didn't need nor want an extremely complicated cyberdeck. It would take me a long time just to learn how to use it properly.
  
  For not too much more money, I was looking at two options. One was from an American company called Biotech Sigma. They had been in operation for about six years, and every year they would produce an updated version of about ten different models of cyberdecks.
  
  The 2062 model of their "mark one" entry-level cyberdeck was about twice the cost of the Paraline, but it was much, much better. It would cost about six thousand eurodollars, about the same as what I was paying for my cybernetic eyes.
  
  The other option cost about the same, and it was from a brand-new corporation in Korea. They had rave reviews as being especially easy to use, but it was the first year and first model that they had released. I was a little worried, so I decided to go with the Biotech Sigma product. They were close to equivalent in specifications, in any case.
  
  As for my optics, Kiroshi was a market leader. They also refined their product every year, with this year's model featuring, in addition to several zoom levels, a fully integrated datalink and facial recognition software. Included by default was a free subscription to the NCPD database, so I could see more or less the rap sheet of anyone I saw. That was both very interesting and absolutely dystopian.
  
  The last thing I wanted was relatively cheap, only a few thousand eurodollars. It was a memory co-processor that would integrate seamlessly into my frontal cortex, and the marketing material for it claimed that it would grant "close to a photographic memory."
  
  I thought that there probably was a lot of work being done by "close to" in that sentence, especially considering I saw a very small asterisk, but the sales rep reassured me that the memory boost was very large and noticeable and that they had no complaints about anyone who bought it.
  
  Lastly, she tried to upsell me an internal medical biomonitor, and I was very tempted, but with each of the cybernetics I was purchasing, with clinician fees, I was going to be out close to twenty thousand eurodollars today. That was a third of what my alt-dad had in his bank account. It was true that I would be receiving a settlement of about the same amount from Militech, but it hadn't arrived yet, and I didn't feel comfortable spending half of all the money I had in the world right now. Even if that was exactly the sort of thing that I would like very much to have. It would have to wait. I needed to be more sure of my position in the world. Perhaps I could splurge in six months if I could get gainfully employed with my new Paramedic's credentials.
  
  She didn't seem upset; I was sure she was already going to receive a healthy commission on the sales I was making today. One interesting thing was they didn't even ask me for my medical records. It turned out that if you were a new patient or hadn't been there in a while, they would do a complete full physical on you as a matter of course, not trusting the word of other doctors.
  
  I wasn't stupid enough to ask to forgo the anaesthesia this time, even if I was incredibly interested in the process.
  
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  Weapon of Ass Destruction
  The physical, consult by the actual doctor, surgery, post-surgical calibration, and in-patient recovery took most of the day, but I was out of their clinic towards the end of the afternoon. That was an absolutely amazing turnaround for elective brain surgery; even my medical sense was very impressed.
  
  I made small talk with the doctor during the processes when I wasn't anesthetised, and he told me a fair bit about his perspective on cybernetics. He was a chatty old man, and I had the impression that he liked to talk, and maybe most of his clients never bothered. I also learned that nanomachines were also widely used in the cybernetics field as well, and it made a lot of sense. Nanomachines were used to completely integrate the bio-active elements in the machine with individual nerve fibres and filaments; most implants were connected to the brain or central nervous system, after all. And those that weren't were often connected to the cardiovascular system, so it was a similar thing there.
  
  Even after using nanomachines during the implantation process of my eyes, they still had to be carefully calibrated. To work correctly, they had to integrate almost perfectly with my optic nerves. My medical knowledge told me that individuals often had wildly divergent optic nerves, where stimulating the same fibre in one person would produce an altogether different image in the brain if stimulated in a different person.
  
  After the installation of the optics, I was woken up and could see very well! But while the default assumptions and simple machine learning-based error correction Kiroshi made was good, perhaps ninety per cent correct out of the box, after about fifteen minutes while I was waiting for the tech to arrive to begin the calibration, I could detect the slightest amount of artefacts and a very small intermittent headache.
  
  Even with the artefacts, my vision was better than it had ever been before, but I could see how I might have even ignored the occasional twinge of a headache if I had purchased these cybernetics from a less reputable dealer who did not go through as thorough a post-installation calibration process.
  
  I may have put it down to postoperative pain, ignored it, and then later got used to it. But the surgeon was very clear; in his opinion, any properly installed piece of prosthetic-style cybernetics, for example, my replacement eyes or a replacement arm, should feel significantly better than the original. If you merely settled for "feels the same as", then your doctor had failed, to say nothing of many people who he claimed thought glitches, twinges, and pain was normal and just something they had to live with.
  
  I felt that this was a pretty good philosophy to have if you were to sell cybernetics and strove to remember it, which I could already tell I was doing better with as well, even before they calibrated my memory co-processor.
  
  The doctor was a kindly-looking old man of indeterminate age who claimed he retired from a long career at MoorE technologies to open his own practice a decade ago. MoorE was a Swedish company that specialised in radical alterations; for example, customised full-body replacements were what they were famous for. He claimed that he had never once had a patient that had followed his medical advice have any incidence of cyberpsychosis.
  
  I wasn't sure if he was telling the complete truth, but there was some ring of truth in it. I had seen videos of cyberpsychos online; thankfully, most of them were censored on the sites I visited. On the other hand, I had seen many people, some in person and others online, that were as augmented or even more so, who seemed perfectly sane, lucid and rational.
  
  I had begun researching the topic off and on since I learned of the condition shortly after I arrived, especially since I knew I would be getting implants myself. I thought insanity was everyone's secret fear, especially the type of insanity where you didn't realise it was happening until it was too late. However, the publically available literature was... well, I hesitated to call it literature, even. Of course, there was a variety of opinions, but most official-looking documents reminded me of a cross between Reefer Madness, abstinence-only sex education and the Salem Witch trials. "Has your neighbour been acting odd after getting chrome? See something? Say something!"
  
  The possibility of cyberpsychosis afflicted people going on rampages had always been somewhat present from my study of the history of the last half-century, but it was approaching the level of a moral panic, today. And yet, they hardly knew much more about it now than they did back in the 2020s! Or if they did they kept it secret.
  
  A lot of what was said was completely contradictory, too. There wasn't a lot I could learn, but my vast trove of knowledge of violent anti-social spectrum disorders made me suspicious about all of it. Although it was true that people afflicted with psychosis were more likely to be violent than the average person, much more, the truth was the vast, vast majority of people experiencing psychotic breaks never became violent at all. Why, then, were cyberpsychos almost always, eventually, violent?
  
  Or were they? Perhaps there were a vast majority of non-violent "cyberpsychos" that just lived with it? That sounded very dystopian. I didn't know and wasn't in any position to begin some kind of large sample-sized psychological study of the most violently deadly demographic on the planet, either. It was something I would have to just keep watching, but it certainly appeared that my fears about myself succumbing to the disease were not, at least now, likely.
  
  One of the major "symptoms" I had read about was that a burgeoning cyberpsycho began seeing themselves as superhuman and as an average person as an ant, kind of like what was common in the narcissistic personality disorders I was familiar with. If so, I wondered if my low self-esteem would give me a lot more leeway!
  
  I was scanning everyone and everything interesting with my optics as I walked back to the metro station. I was very specifically not using my cyberdeck until I got home; besides the fact that the augmented reality interface took some getting used to and made me not pay attention to my surroundings, which was dangerous, I was a little bit worried about the software running on it.
  
  Honestly, I was a little worried about the software running on my Kiroshis and my operating system, as well. I didn't think I could presently do much about hardware hacks or software-based backdoors placed in the equipment by the OEM, but many people were worried about what malware a clinic might put into their cybernetics. It kind of reminded me of the bloatware that Verizon or AT&T would include in their phones; in some ways, it made the phone easier to operate, but mostly it was just bloatware with unknown permissions doing unknown things.
  
  My OS seemed clean, but both my eyes and my deck had a number of pre-installed software packages. When I got home, I would use my laptop and interface plugs to go through each software package one by one. Once I found which packages I was going to keep, I would note them and then download the most recent firmware from Biotech Sigma and reflash my deck. Then for each software package, I could download the official, most recent, cryptographically signed version from each manufacturer.
  
  There would still be some trust involved, but there was not a lot I could do about that at the moment without becoming a peerless expert at programming, getting copies of all that software source code and then inspecting it line by line. I wasn't some famous hacker; I just was pretty good with computers! Maybe someday I'd have that skill, but it surely wasn't today.
  
  Although I had a tingling in the back of my head of ideas that indicated that my power might help some with software development, it only seemed to be the case if it was the base firmware for a medical implant or medical device. It wouldn't at all help me reprogram the phone app on my Kiroshis, so I knew I wasn't being spied on, for example.
  
  Still, that was something to keep in mind as a possibility in the future. It was obvious, but I noticed my Tinkering worked a lot better on things I was already very knowledgeable about. That was why I could make a techno-tiara that put you to sleep. It was because I was already very familiar with the brain's processes of sleep, rest and healing.
  
  Stepping onto the train, I carefully guarded my purse and sat on one of the open seats. Although NCART was always somewhat busy, I had missed the real rush hour an hour and a half ago. The sun was already starting to set, setting a stark dichotomy, looking like a beautiful ink on canvas amidst the trashiness of the cityscape in front of it.
  
  Going back to my thoughts, I was sure I needed to expand my horizons and learn more about both programming and electronics than I ever learned in Mrs Knott's class. So, although I was very proud, actually I was ridiculously proud, of my sleep inducer, I felt if I knew more about the way, electronically, braindance wreaths interfaced with a person's brain, I could have made a device that did a lot more than just help you sleep and remember.
  
  After two stops, the train filled up again, and I offered my seat to an older gentleman who looked like he was barely making it through to the end of the day. He looked shocked and then suspicious but, after a moment, gave me a genuine smile and told me, "Thanks, lady."
  
  I was a lady now, huh? I liked the way that sounded. First lady, then QUEEN, then GODDESS. Oh, no, they were right about the Cyberpsychosis all along! I giggled at my internal monologue, then coughed when people stared at me and quietly tried to hide behind a mass of people, wanting the floor to swallow me up.
  
  I calmed down after the next stop and resumed my thoughts about my power. It felt like there was a limited amount of secret sauce, and everything that I could build traditionally with science would allow that secret sauce to be spread to areas of my invention that were totally irreproducible with science instead of making up for what I didn't know, which was almost everything in some fields right now. I didn't know if this was normally how Tinkers worked, but I thought that maybe it was as it would explain reasons why Armsmaster went to graduate school for engineering and could produce marvels and Squealer could produce only trashy monster trucks.
  
  I just felt that my jar of secret sauce was a lot smaller than theirs, but that might be just envy from someone newly starting out. But Squealer? I had seen one of her cars driving a hundred and fifty miles an hour down the highway with square wheels on the news once. She not only got the jar of sauce but the whole sauce factory!
  
  Still, I had still learned a little bit more about electrode-based brain interfaces when I made my sleep inducer, building it wasn't a complete fog. It kind of felt like I was working my way up the tech tree in Civilisation, one of the few games our computer at home could still run. Building this one device gave me ideas for other devices using similar but slightly more advanced principles.
  
  In the same way, I had been considering ways to mitigate the effects of the antibiotic I had made before. It was absolute death on bacteria. Such that I couldn't think of any ideas about how to make it selectively leave your microfauna alone.
  
  But when I looked back at the over dozen different shapes of medical nanomachines in my blood gave me the initial sketches of a new type of potential nanomachine, whose tool would be a tiny controllable and coilable filament, twice the length of the nanite itself. A hunter-killer nanomachine that could kill bacteria or even any other type of eukaryotic cell very easily. It was a completely different area of medical science as to the antibiotic, which chemically weakened the plasma cell membrane of bacteria. However, it was still in the same general area of "things that kill single cellular organisms."
  
  However, although I got a good idea of the shape of the machine and even some hints on how its little filament whip would work in identifying and then destroying eukaryotes, I currently didn't have any ideas of how to build the nanites themselves. There was clearly some wiggle room with my power, but building nanites with my alt dad's hand tools wasn't going to cut it.
  
  At the next stop, a boy about my age slapped my ass, laughed uproariously and ran off the train before I could smack him. Had I just been... chikaned? You heard stories about subway gropers in big cities, but this was only my second day riding the damn train! The little shit had a good arm on him, too. I rubbed my butt, mortified. The other passengers ranged from sympathetic to amused, with the latter being the plurality. I got that little booger's face, though, and remembered his stop.
  
  Wait...
  
  Oh, god. With my recently enhanced memory, I thought back to when the asshole got on the train; he was carrying a greasy Buck-A-Slice pizza, which I didn't think was even literally considered food. They either had an asterisk calling their product food in their marketing materials, or they should have. My skirt was dry-cleaning only! I would get even if I saw him again.
  
  I spent the next few days reading guides online and watching videos. I was still very much getting resources from what would be considered the normal part of the net, but I was inching towards sites and channels that were considered... well I didn't know. In my last life I would have called them preppers.
  
  People who stored a lot of food and gun at their house for when the zombies came. Like, some people were professional paranoids, but this segment of people took it as a hobby instead. They were usually corporate workers or professionals that both distrusted and relied on cybernetics heavily.
  
  It wasn't "hacker resources" that I was consuming, but it shared some commonalities, in that they were big on open-source software... or at least software where the source code could be examined or had been examined by other people besides the Corporation releasing it. Their other interests were security and privacy, in as much as the latter could be found on the net or in the world at all.
  
  If I had been as savvy as Alt-Taylor, it probably wouldn't have taken me more than a couple of hours to inspect every software package installed on my operating system, eyes and cyberdeck, reflash and reinstall everything. In fact, this was probably the bare minimum of what savvy people did. The memory co-processor didn't have customisable software at all, and I already checked that it was running the most up-to-date firmware, so I would just have to trust it for now.
  
  However, I wasn't Alt-Taylor. I took several days to accomplish the same thing, although I was learning a lot at the same time. I was notably a little leery about wiping and then reinstalling the software on what I used to see unless I was absolutely sure it would work. I didn't even know what I would do if I just suddenly blinded myself, and I couldn't fix it. I suppose I'd have to call emergency services and get an ambulance ride to the Skyline clinic or invent some sort of echolocation to see in the dark. To say nothing about the cyberdeck, which was even more integrated into my brain.
  
  I found a number of extraneous software packages on both my Kiroshis and my deck that didn't correlate to what either manufacturer considered their factory defaults. Seven or eight in total on each device. Most of them seemed to be bloatware, but I didn't really know for sure.
  
  They were cryptographically signed by a couple of software companies that sounded legitimate, but who knows what they were hired to actually produce and for whom. They had replaced the phone, messenger, moving map, and a couple of other apps. I was pretty sure one of the bloatware apps was designed to run continuously and broadcast my identity to nearby devices for advertising purposes rather than any nefarious purposes. Although a lot of advertising in this world really was nefarious.
  
  Two of the installed apps looked very suspicious. Their permissions granted were extraordinarily broad; they had strange non-descriptive alphanumeric names and were signed by unknown entities. However, one of the apps was cross-signed by a public key that I had linked to the city of Night City by searching online. That was interesting. Some kind of police LoJak or backdoor? It was signed by a different certificate than the software that NCPD provided that ran people's faces in their records. That software looked pretty normal, and I would keep it. The permissions were mild, too; it couldn't get everything I saw at any time, just specific stills when I triggered the app.
  
  I already knew that the government took a special interest in people who bought a lot of cybernetics, so perhaps one of those suspicious apps was how they monitored them.
  
  Both of the suspicious software packages broke all of the rules of security the default devices had installed. If I had tried to install either of the packages by myself, neither system would have permitted it without me going deep into the settings. The cryptographic certificates these two programs were signed with had been specifically added to each device's trusted list, which bypassed the normal security checks. Normally only Kiroshi or Biotech Sigma's own software had that level of trust.
  
  I found that all very interesting, and it made me certain that I wanted to reflash each of the implants as soon as possible.
  
  I did my cyberdeck first, as if I made a mistake, at least I wouldn't be blind. Although, one of the things I learned from Dr Travis was that almost regardless of what your cybernetic system was, it was generally a bad idea for it to be rendered inert or bricked. Theoretically, it was impossible to actually brick modern cyberware like I was worrying about, but I never underestimated the way I could screw something up by the numbers if I tried really hard on it.
  
  But... it actually proceeded without a hitch. I then downloaded the replacement software packages directly from the OEM's net site and verified that I wasn't being phished with an imposter site several times. It had only been a handful of years since the actual world wide web became worldwide again. Even just fifteen years ago, each part of the net was fragmented into regional, local private networks after the greatest hacker in history destroyed the old net.
  
  I was, perhaps, being paranoid because each of the implants did its own security check on the update, too, before allowing it to be reflashed. Still, I was a belt and suspenders type of girl when it came to software running in devices connected directly to my brain.
  
  After both devices were cleared, my interfaces became quite a bit more clunky. I didn't have the link to the NCPD on people anymore or much of anything else except for optical zoom.
  
  After an hour and a half of carefully installing all of the apps I had approved onto both devices, it felt like using a freshly formatted Windows XP system before any cruft managed to get grafted on. Nice, in other words.
  
  A feeling of pride suffused me, and I realised I was being ridiculous. I felt like a Boomer, being proud of operating some new-fangled device when a kid my age could have done the same thing in fifteen minutes. Still, it was progress.
  
  Over the next week, I started going to the gym on the tenth floor of my building, building up until I was staying almost an hour a day by the end of my first week. It didn't cost very much, and there were not many people interested in using it, except a Megablock boxing club, but they immediately discounted me on sight, especially after I ignored the free weights every day and just ran on a treadmill and elliptical machine.
  
  Alt-Taylor's gym clothes were a pair of shorts that were way too short and a short-sleeved T-shirt, which I nixed immediately after seeing and replaced with baggy dark grey long-sleeve sweats and sweatpants.
  
  I got pretty good at using my deck to navigate the regular net while running, and I didn't need to carry my phone anywhere at all anymore, so I left it at home.
  
  This morning while running, I received a call. At first, I didn't recognise the name, but I finally remembered them as one of Alt-Taylor's friends, although not incredibly close. I wasn't sure if I should answer it. My personality and Alt-Taylor's were widely divergent, although I could try to just play it off as I had changed my personality after the life-altering trauma of losing my father.
  
  Sighing, I picked up on the fifth ring. Instantly in the corner of my vision, a small window of a teenage girl around my age appeared, wearing a brightly coloured, sort of kitsch style of clothes that I thought looked good on a lot of people but would look terrible on me. Her skin was the colour of a latte with a triple shot of milk, a light to medium caramel, and she had almost had even more unruly hair than I had. It was one of the things that attracted us to each other when we became friends at school.
  
  She didn't wait for me to say hello, "Tay! How have you been? Wait, that's scorched; I didn't mean that; of course, you've not been good... I just meant, hello."
  
  "Yeah, things have been hard, but I have had a pretty good break. Rather than totally screwing me, the Corp is helping me out. How's everyone back in school?" I asked after chuckling a little bit in spite of myself. I didn't have a lot of memories of this girl, but most of the memories I did have featured her talking at this same super speed.
  
  She spent about ten minutes explaining in detail specifically who was dating who and who had broken up with who in the time I had been gone. Surely there hadn't been that much activity? I mean, how often did they change who they were dating? Even my past memories indicated my alternate self wasn't interested in this kind of gossip, either.
  
  She asked, after kind of wincing, "So... how is.. ugh... public school?"
  
  "I don't know! That's the break I was talking about. I graduated early; I'm enrolling in a college course starting next month. Militech is paying for it, as part of my survivorship package," I told her. It wasn't like any of this was private information, although I specifically didn't state where and implied the course was more than it actually was.
  
  The girl gasped, "Woah! That's nova, Tay! I knew you wouldn't let this keep you down. Say, did you want to hang out with a few friends on Friday?"
  
  I considered that. I really didn't. Not only did I intend to make a clean break with my Militech school friends, but my memories indicated that her type of parties was not something either version of me was interested in. They weren't precisely chaste. Although Alt-Taylor wasn't, as far as I could tell, sexually active yet, she did date boys, but she wasn't interested in going to parties where the main thing going on was fooling around. Jessica had been purely an in-school friend.
  
  "Sorry, Jess. You know, that's not really my thing, plus I only have a couple of weeks until I need to start on a class I didn't think I was qualified to take until recently," that last part was the definitely, one hundred per cent truth.
  
  Still, Jessica was an ultra gossip. Perhaps it would have been better if everyone in my alternate life just thought I had faded away, but at the same time, part of my memories of her didn't want that to happen. Having them find out that I was possibly thriving through gossip was a good compromise. Half wouldn't believe it, and there were no real details to verify for those who did.
  
  The girl shrugged and said, "Yeah, I figured, but I wanted to be friendly, yaknow? Besides, Vicki said you had become a yono whore in Japantown, and I couldn't let that bitch get away with sayin' that." I didn't know what yono was, but a quick parallel net search indicated it was a Korean word popularised into the slang, and it meant trashy. I was interested in how this Vicki person deduced I lived in Japantown, though. Could it have been a guess? There were probably a limited number of places Militech would place someone like me.
  
  Considering what she had said, I figured it was more likely that Jessica wanted to verify whether it was true or not and if it was, she would have spread the news far and wide herself. That was just kind of the girl she was, from what I could remember. I did not really like swearing, but my memories indicated it was what she was expecting, "Vicki's a stupid fucking cunt."
  
  We talked more back and forth about how much of a bitch Vicki was, which was funny because I couldn't remember her from Adam before she eventually hung up. That was surreal. I think I will maybe avoid those kinds of conversations in the future.
  
  I pant as I jump out of my rig, running through the holographic police line and past a couple of Night City's finest shitheads. They were keeping the looky-loos away, such that we couldn't even bring the rig all the way up. My partner was following me with the gurney, but reports from the patient's biom were that their blood pressure was dropping to the crapper. They'd code soon if I didn't hurry. Or maybe even if I did hurry. Trauma Team had already been here and gone, but this guy obviously wasn't a subscriber.
  
  It was already somewhat of a miracle that there was even this survivor from a cyberpsycho MCI. I tried to avoid glancing at the imposing figures of MaxTac, still standing around the chromed-up booster's body.
  
  I cut all of the guy's clothes off with my shears, identifying three gunshot wounds while setting up my kit to get to work. I had a quickset tourniquet around the man's left leg instantly, the simple medical device self-tightening. My partner rushes up, panting, "Oh shit, he's fucked."
  
  My grizzled voice sounded like I was a perpetual smoker, which I was, "Maybe. Two GSW lower left quadrant, one in the left thigh. Come help. His airway's still good, still breathing. Start an I.V., and pressure infuse NS with TXA. Blood pressure is shit, so we'll keep dumping fluids into him and prep the two units of blood we got with us." I ordered the younger med-tech sternly as I started to apply automated pressure bandages to the two wounds in his abdomen.
  
  I'd give this guy a fifty per cent chance.
  
  ...
  
  After the braindance finished playing, I pulled the wreath I had customised off of my head and considered what I had experienced. These BDs were edited, and some of them were almost complete fabrications for educational purposes. They weren't virtus that were scrolled by the EMT and not edited at all. That would have been a lot more intense, but they still had a bit of the emotion track, and you could get a muted sense of what the scroller was thinking, probably intentionally so you could follow their medical decision.
  
  This was a long one that started out in the field and took the patient all the way to the trauma centre in Watson. It seemed somewhat real, at least more so than the obvious fakes. The purpose of the exercise was to identify both what the EMTs did correctly and what they did incorrectly using the current patient care guidelines.
  
  In answering the questions, I had to be very careful to also only use answers that a Paramedic of average skill could accomplish while also following the sample PCGs. For example, I could not write down, "He should have noticed specifically which artery was lacerated by sight and shoved a pair of hemostats into the wound to clamp the bleeding."
  
  If I tried to turn that answer in, they'd kick me out of the program, even if that was what I actually would have done in his shoes.
  
  I intended to ace this class, but it was going to be difficult to keep my skills on the plausible prodigy level and not the "what the fuck" level. Paramedics had a limited "scope of practice" which was to say that legally they were only allowed to do a certain number of things.
  
  I couldn't start talking about surgery too often because there was only a limited number of surgical procedures that paramedics were authorised to do in the field. They were all of the types that were necessary for immediate first aid, for example, chest tubes, tracheotomies, field amputations and occasionally wild things like a C-section if the mother was already deceased.
  
  In practice in the field, if I got a job as a paramedic, I felt that it would be the results that spoke for themself, but to graduate, I definitely had to toe the line.
  
  I glanced down at my customised wreath. I made a promise that I wouldn't disassemble the brand-new braindance wreath that I bought, but I lied to myself. Although I didn't completely disassemble it, but I ended up using parts from my dad's old phone.
  
  You see, I started to feel a bit anxious using it when I began learning more and more about how they worked and about how much access the system had to your brain. I was very sure that it was possible to create subliminal tracks on a BD or to even create a malicious braindance to adjust the thought track to cause terror, extreme depression and temporary neurosis. The reaction would depend on the person viewing it, but it might be so extreme as to cause an actual physical brain injury.
  
  It was this part of living in this world that I hated and detested the most. Not being able to trust anything. So I had used the processor in one of his old phones; he had an entire drawer full of old models to create what I was calling a firewall.
  
  It was wired in the middle, between the braindance wreath's output and the actual electrodes. The ways a BD could be messed with, at least the ones I had thought up, were detectible when examining the output. There were easily identifiable spikes targeting certain areas of the brain and consistent and identifiable electrical waveforms. In effect, the firewall played BDs on a slight fifty-millisecond delay, and if it detected a malicious BD, it would stop it before it ever got to my brain. In theory.
  
  Still, it made me feel a lot better about using them, and I had to watch them all.
  
  The school sent me an e-mail asking me to come to campus to register a student ID, and those newly enrolled students were permitted to use the campus facilities, like the student union and library, up to a month before enrollment and up to a month after they matriculated, so long as they were still in good standing.
  
  That was something I wish I had known. I imagine that the library of an actual medical school would have a lot of information that I just couldn't get on the public net.
  
  So, for the last two weeks, before I started class, I left my apartment in the morning and came back in the evening; right before, I felt a bit too scared to be on the streets by myself, even in the safety of Downtown.
  
  Today, on the train ride back, that same ass-slapping boy came onto the metro, and I narrowed my eyes. He saw me, too and grinned. I had his number this time, though, at least if he tried the same thing.
  
  I reached into my purse and brought out a small transparent piece of plastic. Moving surreptitiously, I very carefully peeled back one layer to expose an adhesive layer underneath and reached behind myself and casually stuck it to my rear. Then, even more carefully, I peeled back the last film layer on top and made extremely sure I didn't actually touch my skin with that second layer of film. I casually put it in a small empty section of my purse that I would have to carefully clean when I got home.
  
  Was immediately escalating to chemical weapons an appropriate response to having your ass slapped on a train? I wondered. Well, it wasn't like it was actually a weapon, per se. Legally speaking, it wasn't. He wouldn't die or even become sick. I had made very sure of the safety of the chemical, which was rapidly absorbed by skin contact. I even tested it on myself, although I at least had the benefit of doing so in the shower.
  
  Well, if he just got off on his stop and didn't make a second attempt, nothing would happen, and I will have to go and carefully take this off my pants.
  
  The train rolled into the station, and I saw him go for it, and I didn't move an inch to stop him. He laughs uproariously, slaps my ass and yells, "See ya, suit bitch!" and then runs off the train. I specifically do not rub my butt this time.
  
  I wonder if I will get to see it. It had a very rapid onset even if an extremity like the hand was exposed, but at the same time, these stops didn't last long at all, and he was already running, trying to escape two train cops. They might have seen him slap me on the butt on the surveillance systems. Realistically, you could only get away with an activity like that on the train once or twice. A lot of corporate workers used the train, so the security was actually really good.
  
  Oh! There it goes, the look of shock and horror on his face as he is in mid-flight. I think I would have a similar expression if I was unknowingly exposed to a chemical that induced rapid, temporary urinary incontinence. Keep going! Don't let a pissed pair of pants stop you, asshole boy!
  
  The train left the station while I smirked to myself. He should be thankful. I had to specifically use Tinkering to make the drug only induce urinary and not also faecal incontinence. But that, surely, would have been a weapon of ass destruction, and I have some lines.
  
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  The Kids Aren't Alright, Actually
  I had settled on the treadmill after trying the other cardio machines, even though the elliptical machine was both better for your joints and theoretically more efficient in providing a workout. There was something simple and pure about just running that was very primal and struck a chord with me.
  
  The treadmill made the ones I had seen in gyms back in Brockton Bay look like child's toys. Although it didn't have the advanced holographic systems that I knew were available, it did have what was, to me, a very fancy-looking wrap-around display that simulated any number of programs you could run through.
  
  "Give me the downtown Paris program, please," I told the treadmill after getting on. The display switched to a photorealistic rendering of a first-person view of the Rue de Rivoli; this program circled the Louvre and then went southwest across the river Seine and continued down the Rue de Solferino some ways before stopping.
  
  That wasn't the main reason I tended to select this program, though. Also rendered was an attractive man of European descent, wearing tight shorts and a shirt with no sleeves. He had a runner's build, and he was what the computer used to set the pace. You could make it a race using the variable speed mode, or he would run alongside or in front of you.
  
  I made sure to set his speed so that he stayed in front of me at my normal long-range pace, as it was a pleasant distraction to look at him run away from me for the whole workout. I would either enjoy the view or read or watch media on the net, using my cyberdeck. I had begun reading some of the well-known books on the net, but most of the ones that really talked about hacking and weren't complete bullshit were a bit outdated, such as Rache Bartmoss's guide to the net. Another legendary hacker named Spider Murphy's biography on the dead legend was quite good, too. For a while, she wrote updated and edited versions of Bartmoss' famous guide every year, noting if anything changed significantly, so I was merely twenty-five years behind most newbies instead of forty-plus.
  
  It was interesting reading the original version Bartmoss wrote and then the updates every year. In those days, and thanks to Bartmoss, the net was fragmented. A lot of the information Spider Murphy added was interesting ways to get physical access to various regional subnets, VPNs and company intranets, and how to prevent yourself from being murdered by crazy AIs, which mostly broke down into "stay away from the old net if you know what's good for you." The last version was written a year after NetWatch created the Blackwall, and the various regional nets had barely begun the process of reconnection, so even the last version of the guide wasn't that useful, even if it was very interesting . Ms Spider Murphy's updates tended to have information that was local to Night City that still might be a little bit useful today, such as how Night City's regional net was structured.
  
  Today was my first day of class, but I made sure not to disrupt my routine too much. Since I didn't sleep very much since inventing my sleep inducer, I intended to maintain my workout schedule as much as possible, even while going to school and then when working.
  
  The attractive-looking computer man looked back at me with a pleasantly expectant look on his face. I got ready and then nodded at him. That's all it took for him to start running and the treadmill to come to life as I followed behind, letting my mind drift while thinking about my future.
  
  It might be a bit more difficult to keep working out every day like this while working. Working hours were longer here, which made sense since there wasn't any kind of wage or hour regulations. A normal workday in Night City varied somewhat but averaged about ten hours a day, not including your lunch. Twelve-hour days weren't uncommon, at all, either.
  
  The workdays for paramedics were a bit different. Most ambulance services had a one-day on, one-day off schedule. Theoretically, on your twenty-four-hour shift, you were expected to get rest as you could while waiting between calls. R.E.O. Meatwagon had a twelve-hour shift schedule, but not only did that company have a very poor reputation, but they were floundering, with the expectation that they may go out of business any time.
  
  Allegedly R.E.O. Meatwagon had a habit of physically interdicting their competition with force, generally other ground ambulances, in order to secure paying patients. It wasn't surprising, but in Night City, the 911 EMS service was privatised, although there were certain standardisation requirements.
  
  Whether or not that was true or not, what was definitely true, as far as I could tell, was a group of private ambulance services banded together and hired a team of mercenaries to riddle the CEO of R.E.O. full of bullets when he was coming home from work. And then, for good measure, they ran the R.E.O Meatwagon ambulance that responded to try to save his life off the road.
  
  Although it was listed as an unsolved crime, even the tamest sites she read on the net had nothing but schadenfreude for the plight of that man and his company.
  
  The final payment from Militech cleared into my account a couple of days ago, and my balance sheet was sitting at a very healthy one hundred-and-twenty-two thousand eurodollars and some change. That sounded like a lot, and for many in the city, it was. My dad, as a Major in the Militech armed forces, made a little more than one hundred thousand a year, which was well on the upper middle class realm in this city.
  
  However, one semester of actual medical school in the NCU Health Science Centre costs sixty-seven thousand dollars, not including room and board. Perhaps I was getting ahead of myself, but I definitely wanted to get actual's doctors' credentials.
  
  In many ways, the mostly complete destruction of the system of colleges and Universities was very bad for the average citizen. At one point, Academia was almost totally beholden to funding from the government, and the government here in the world of Night City was barely functional. They weren't funding research, not at colleges anyway, nor did they provide guaranteed student loans to anyone.
  
  In one way, it was kind of beneficial for her, though. The new, more corporate structure of higher education got rid of a lot of extraneous frivolities. You didn't need a four-year degree to attend medical school, for example. So long as you could find one to admit you, all you needed was a high-school diploma, or in her case, an equivalent. The payment was in advance and non-refundable if you flunked out, though.
  
  The thought of going to med school under my own power, not having to sign a long-term loyalty contract to any specific corporation, appealed a lot to me, but I wasn't sure how it might be possible. Even if I lucked out and got a job at Trauma Team straight out of school, I definitely wouldn't make enough to save over three hundred thousand eurodollars in any reasonable time frame. I would have to moonlight, somehow, or accept having a corporation pay my way.
  
  The program was only about a twenty-five-minute run and it came to an end with a short cool-down period, after which I hopped off the treadmill, being careful to wipe it off carefully. I didn't really sweat very much, especially when I was using a treadmill, but it was polite.
  
  Although this gym wasn't very high-end, in some respects, anyone coming to it was slightly better off than average. The actual poor of the city didn't have enough money or time to care about their health, certainly not enough to spend time in a gym. Gyms were for people who didn't get exercise through the labour of their bodies, and even with the advent of automated production technologies, much labour, especially the less compensated, in the world was still very physical.
  
  The classes I took in Militech called it "The Formula", and it was pretty cold-hearted. If you could replace a worker with a machine, you only did so if the total cost of the machine, including financing and maintenance, divided by the machine's expected service life, was less than the total compensation of the worker.
  
  You'd think that this would drive tons of workers out of jobs, and in some cases, it did, but the truth was that a lot of times, a human worker was cheaper than a high-tech articulating robotic manipulator controlled by machine learning, so really there were a lot of low-end jobs that entailed strenuous physical labour.
  
  The woman who was grinning at me, waiting to use the machine, was someone who looked like she had never really seen any of that herself. She was of partial European and partial Chinese descent, very pretty in the way models were, and I didn't know her name, much less anything about her. She tended to work out at around the same time I did, early in the morning, and we had become something like gym buddies. She also preferred the treadmill and elliptical machines.
  
  "I see you chose the Paris program again. I have to admit, that guy does have a perfect ass," she said with a slight Chinese accent. It was so slight, just enough to give a hint of exoticness to her tone that I suspected that she could probably speak with no accent at all if she wanted to.
  
  I lied furiously, "That isn't why I picked that program! It's because of the Louvre!"
  
  "Yeah, his ass should be in there. It's a work of art, alright," she said as she hopped up onto the machine. She glanced at me, "You know, everyone can see you're strapped when you run in here in those sweats. Why do you carry a piece to the gym?" Her gym outfit exposed a lot more skin than mine, but I seemed to be a bit of the odd one out there.
  
  I considered that question. Something from a series of Earth Aleph books that my mom liked before she died came to mind, and I quoted, "Because the night is dark and full of terrors. I'm surprised that you don't, yourself. I'd expect you to get hassled a lot more than me." Because she was so pretty and I was just a string bean, I left unsaid.
  
  That caused her to laugh as she began the exact same Paris program, waggling her eyes at me as she chose it, "That's funny, kid. I might consider it if I was leaving the building, but... there's not a single person who would give me a hard time in this building. I figured you knew, but I work upstairs at Clouds."
  
  I raised my eyebrows at that and gave her another inspection, then blushed a bit as I realised what she meant. She was a doll, which was a type of prostitute. They used special cybernetics, allowing their entire body to be taken over by computer-controlled expert systems that would act out a client's fantasy perfectly, with the doll themselves not remembering a thing about what happened.
  
  At first, when I heard about Clouds, I was aghast. I expected the grossest and most weird fetishes imaginable to be the only reason such a system existed. And considering I had tons of psychiatric data at my beck and call, including detailed information on almost every paraphilia known, I was expecting the worst. Maybe that was the case in some places that used doll hardware, but the Clouds net site emphasised and seemed to market itself to a high-end clientele, especially those with crippling social anxiety, and it was priced accordingly.
  
  In any case, it definitely explained why the woman felt safe in this building. The Clouds was owned, lock stock and barrel, by the Tyger Claws. I didn't think anyone who messed with their "talent" had a very long life expectancy.
  
  The woman, seeing me blush, laughed even harder, "I thought that was obvious, that you couldn't tell either means you were extra sheltered or my attempt to seem classy worked."
  
  Well, maybe a little bit of both. She did seem classy, but she did have that sort of aura you'd expect from an expensive courtesan or geisha, now that I thought about it.
  
  I didn't stick around much longer, we would usually make small-talk if we were both in the two treadmills, but I wasn't going to stick around just to watch her run just to be sociable. I didn't use the showers in the gym, either, which I felt a little bad about considering I had to go up nineteen floors in an elevator, although I wiped myself with towels so I wasn't incredibly sweaty or stinky before going back upstairs and using my own shower, where I couldn't easily be snuck up on.
  
  I hadn't seen the ass-slapper since my revenge a couple of weeks ago, but my schedule was a bit different, too. Even before today, I spent most of my day on campus.
  
  I had had to get off on the NCART stop in Japantown for the past week, just like what Mr Jin had warned me about. Thankfully, it wasn't a long walk to campus, but I had been coming over an hour early.
  
  However, this time I almost got shot for my trouble. I knew something was a little wrong immediately after I stepped on the street because a large group of Tyger Claws were looming, looking simultaneously dangerous and anxious.
  
  A man that looked to be their leader, wearing a jacket with a stylised Asian dragon printed on it, said as I carefully navigated past them, "... the kids are almost here; when they get here fucking shoot them if you have a gun, chop their fucking heads off if you don't. "
  
  He spoke in Japanese, but my implants included an auto-translate function, rendering subtitles in English either in front of me or in front of the speaker, depending on how many people were talking.
  
  Were they going to kill kids ?
  
  I started to wonder what I could do, which I already knew was absolutely nothing. I couldn't fight a half dozen, obviously heavily cybernetically augmented, gang members, that was for sure. Especially not ones that controlled the building I lived in, the selfish part of my brain added.
  
  I started walking faster, hoping to perhaps warn these kids to take another street. All of the Tyger Claws seemed to be staring down the street, expecting their prey to arrive from that direction, which was coincidentally also the same direction I wanted to go, towards Downtown.
  
  However, instead of a bunch of kids, a large white-panelled van roared from a side street, fishtailing after taking a ninety-degree turn at high speed. The side door was open, revealing a bunch of definite adults levelling automatic weapons in the direction of the Tyger Claws... which was also incidentally also my direction.
  
  Great. I'm going to be turned into swiss cheese by the crossfire, I thought and leapt aside, hitting the deck, rolling and hiding behind a Data Term. I felt good about my cover, Data Term net terminals were ubiquitous, and all of them were bulletproof, as some gangs in parts of the city, especially Pacifica, used them as target practice, just for fun. Alt-Taylor's memories suggested you'd need an anti-material rifle to have a hope of doing more than scratching them.
  
  The two belligerents opened fire almost simultaneously, and the Tyger Claws seemed to have a better aim, but the van had the benefit of being a moving target shooting at a stationary one. I heard a couple of stray rounds ping off the Data Term shielding me. The sound was a cacophony, and I watched as the van came to a stop, crashing into a parked car as the driver was shot. A bunch of combatants leapt out of the disabled vehicle to be met by the Tyger Claw forces.
  
  The Tyger Claws were outnumbered by two to one, it must have been a clown car in that van, but the fight was going more or less evenly and getting a lot closer to my position of concealment, with one Tyger Claw fighter taking a knife wound and slumping right next to me. That was, up until a bright red motorcycle took the same turn at the van, also at high speed. Instead of fishtailing, however, the rider did some ridiculous spinning manoeuvre and came to a stop, leaping off the bike before the machine even came to a complete stop, doing a front flip before landing in the middle of the melee with a katana.
  
  Brave, but I think he would have been better served by hanging back and picking off the highly cybered enemy gang members at long range. Or at least I thought that until I just saw him vanish, and then right after, the heads of the six remaining men departed their bodies, blood flying everywhere.
  
  I gagged and threw up, aiming away from the downed Tyger Claw as a sign of respect. I was already a bit queasy seeing people get shot more or less right in front of me, but watching six people get decapitated by some fucking speedster was the straw that broke the camel's back.
  
  The downed Tyger Claw next to me saw me throw up, specifically saw me move out of my way so I wouldn't hit him with any of it and gave me a rueful nod of appreciation. He glanced down at his chest, winced and was about to yank the small little knife that was sticking out of it, but I suddenly found myself saying firmly, moving my hand to intercept his, " Stop!"
  
  He looked more confused than upset, but that crazily dangerous man with the sword that must have some kind of high-end reflex boostware was suddenly looming over the both of us and asked both menacingly and curiously, "What are you doing, girl?"
  
  Should I not have said anything? I didn't know, but I was already in this mess, so I decided to say confidently, "Saving his life, I guess. That knife knicked his aorta, but it's currently blocking the bleeding like a cork; if he pulls it out or moves around a lot like he is doing now, he will die very quickly."
  
  That caused the downed Tyger Claw to freeze. The man looked down at his compatriot as if gauging the accuracy of my words from his vast experience of stabbing people in the chest. In fact, that seemed to be exactly what he was doing, and he probably did have enough experience. Finally, the man nodded and shrugged, "Does look a little close. Are you a med-tech or doctor, girl? Yuki, you better lay back down on your back and be very still till we get some help for you ." The latter, he said in Japanese to the man, who nodded rapidly and did as he was told.
  
  I grimaced, "This is supposed to be my first day in class at the HSC Paramedic course."
  
  That caused him to grin, "Well, apologies about the unpleasantness in your commute. We have a few med-techs coming, but they're five minutes away. Mind taking a look at my men?"
  
  He worded it as a request, but it didn't sound optional at all. Actually, it made me feel somewhat better about him. Perhaps it was the influence of Alt-Taylor's memories, but a man doing whatever he had to save the lives of the men under his command felt like a virtue.
  
  I nodded and stood up, and he walked with me about ten metres to where a few of the Tyger Claws were laid out on the ground. He casually kicked one of the dead enemies who were in our way, causing the dead man to roll over. When that happened, I saw on the back of the dead man's leather jacket text that read "NIGHTKIDS," along with a stylised representation of a cartoon Dracula.
  
  That made me want to do a comically cinematic face-slap. These were the "kids" that one man was talking about, I guess. God, I was so fucking stupid sometimes. The Tyger Claws may be a murderous street gang, but why had I thought they'd mow down a bunch of girl scouts out selling cookies? I should have done an about-face and gone straight back into the NCART terminal.
  
  Two of the Tyger Claws were shot in the head, and the man said rather sadly, "I guess these two are a lost cause."
  
  Well, that was definitely true for one of them. He was dead as dead could be.
  
  The other, though, although it looked bad, was a lot more minor and a different story. The world was so violent that they had a very accurate way of predicting the survivability of a penetrating wound to the brain, and I stopped to do a quick assessment, which surprised my escort.
  
  "He stands a good chance of surviving if you can get him to a trauma centre in less than an hour," I said, sighing. "But I don't know what kind of deficiencies he might have after recovering." I actually did, he would have trouble with his long-term memory and speech, but both of those could be mitigated with speciality implants designed to help those with traumatic brain injuries. I definitely didn't want to seem like I could detect that just by a quick, mostly visual inspection, though.
  
  My proclamation caused the leader to raise his eyebrows in surprise and possibly suspicion, "Are you sure? People don't often survive getting shot in the head like that."
  
  Actually, the truth was that they survived that all the time. Even people trying to kill themselves often survive shooting themselves in the head, but I didn't out and out correct the man with a katana and super speed and no compunctions about killing people in job lots, but I did qualify, "Over ninety per cent sure, yes."
  
  He nodded, smiling a little, "That's good. His wife is pregnant." I thought that was a rough break; he might be recovering for some time. He said in Japanese to one of his men, " Sanjuro and Yuki are priority one, take them together, straight to Watson, don't stop for anything when Monotori arrives."
  
  The rest of the Tyger Claws were only minorly injured, although I could detect one had taken shrapnel from an exploding high-velocity flechette ricocheting off something in his neck.
  
  "It isn't a cut; it is an entry would of a small piece of metal. It might be fine, or you might get a neck massage and suddenly die someday. Or you might keel over dead in an hour if you keep rubbing at it. I'd recommend you get an x-ray at a hospital," I told him churlishly after he said he was fine.
  
  "Really? That could happen?" asked the decapitator.
  
  I sighed, "Most wounds I have read about similar to this actually never progress to that stage, but I can't tell exactly where the piece of shrapnel is." I could, of course, and it was true he wasn't actually in any real danger. But saying get a pair of tweezers to get it out seemed wrong.
  
  The last man he had me look at was one of the "kids." The only survivor. His left leg was shredded beyond any saving, absent immediate nanomedical intervention. I frown, "I'd rather not help you, even indirectly, torture this man." I finally say quietly. There was probably only one reason they wanted him to survive, and it didn't bode very well for him.
  
  I wasn't that sympathetic to him, as he and his friends almost killed me, but I had some morals, at least. Besides, they had already done the correct thing in applying a tourniquet, anyway.
  
  That caused the man to grin at me and say, "I'm not really used to having people tell me, no, you know. How refreshing! You know what, Taylor, I like you. My name is Yukimura. Yukimura Kato. People I like can call me Kato."
  
  Because, of course, he knew my name. Well, I suppose that was why I was paying fifteen per cent of my rent in protection money so that I was easily identifiable to them.
  
  Was this some kind of weird samurai thing? I like you; then he was going to stab me? You have the heart of a samurai, so die!
  
  "Well, Kato, it is nice to meet you, I guess..." I said, lying through my teeth.
  
  Kato laughed at me, "You know, you're not a great liar, Taylor. Go on; I won't keep you anymore."
  
  I just nodded and proceeded with prudent haste towards downtown. That entire battle, including the first aid on the Tyger Claws, had only taken ten minutes, and although my hands were covered in blood, I managed to keep most of it off my outfit.
  
  I duck into the first public bathroom on campus and use a liberal amount of hot water and soap to clean off my hands. Things could have gone better, but surviving my first small-scale gang battle when I was directly in between the two groups fighting was something to be proud of.
  
  Should I have kept my big mouth shut and let that guy Yuki yank a knife out of his chest like a "gonk"? Probably not. It felt like the wrong thing to do. Besides, I didn't really demonstrate much skill beyond what any med-tech could do, after all. Even diagnosing the man with the GSW to the head wasn't that unusual. Gunshots to the head were so common that even basic med-techs generally knew, or at least had on their implants, the penetrating brain injury survival score test. The injuries in this battle were remarkably fatal ; beyond the one guy with the knife in his chest, I didn't actually have to do anything.
  
  After I finished washing my hands, I went into one of the stalls and threw up again.
  
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  Fit Right In
  I got to campus on time and not looking like I had stepped through an abattoir. I already had my schedule, and the first class was an orientation in the same building as the library, which was a little bit weird judging from my other classes. The campus was shaped like a circle with an outer area that had some buildings like the library, student union, recreational building and administrative building, along with a few others. By contrast, the inner circle area had the buildings classes were taught in.
  
  Both areas had a security perimeter, but the information in my student packet told me I wouldn't be permitted into the inner area except on days when I was actually scheduled for classes. I had to admit I was curious about what was inside.
  
  Well, I supposed I would find out today. I was already very familiar with the library building, and I had even peeked in the few classroom-style buildings that I was headed to for orientation, thinking they were large conference rooms.
  
  The library was an interesting building. While there were some physical books, mostly there were areas set up for private reviewing of books and media electronically, as well as more communal study nooks if you had friends. You could use your implants to check out anything, or if you either didn't have one or did not want to, they offered tablets to rent.
  
  I spent most of my days sitting in one of the cushy chairs they had in a study nook, browsing the list of titles of books I could borrow for free. I didn't have complete access to their library, which I wasn't surprised about, but I did have access to more things than I probably would ever read in my life, even if I dedicated my entire life to only reading books.
  
  I had decided to dress up a little bit today, but not as much as I had to get my cybernetics put in. At the same time, what I was wearing was very conservative, dark black and grey colours. In Brockton Bay, I suppose they would call it "power dressing," although updated somewhat in style. It's a domineering aesthetic, and although I had two outfits in this style, this was the only outfit that I owned that was an actual dress. It was a black dress, but not a little black dress. The skirt reached almost my ankles, and the neckline was high-cut if anything. My Alt-Dad had bought it for me and said it made me look like some of the most terrifying people in the world, an auditor.
  
  I wasn't sure what to expect at this school, so I wanted to set a good impression, at least on the first day.
  
  Finding the classroom with a good ten minutes to spare, I walked in to see that at least half of the class was already there before me, including the instructor, who was standing by the door inside, greeting everyone who walked in. He smiled at me and said, "There should be a little tent with your name on it; take a seat there."
  
  Assigned seating, huh? I nodded at him and looked around. Rather than individual desks, there were even rows that faced the podium where the instructor would stand, going nearly the length of the room. Sure enough, in front of each chair was a small piece of paper folded into a triangle with people's names printed in bold font on the front and back. I finally found my tag in the middle of the lower right quadrant of seats, which I felt was pretty good. Not too close, not the very last row, either.
  
  I sat down next to a man in his mid to late twenties who was wearing a suit in a similar colour to my dress, except that he skipped the tie to give him a casual flair. He smiled at me in a friendly manner after I got settled and introduced himself, "I guess we're desk buddies. Hi, I'm Antonio Thurston."
  
  I gave him a closer inspection as I smiled and reciprocated, "I guess so. I'm Taylor Hebert; nice to meet you." Now that I was looking at him closer, he featured a lot of cybernetics, much of it was combat-related. His left arm had been completely replaced, and I was pretty sure it could deploy into a mantis blade, and the coat he was wearing was tight enough to reveal the outline of boosterware on his back, probably a Sandevistan, as most of the others didn't really protrude too much out of the spine. My Alt-Dad had very similar cybernetics, except he had both arms replaced.
  
  Well, they did say this was a common course for people that had been in the Army, I supposed. He nodded, "Likewise. Militech, too, huh?"
  
  I blinked at him, "Eh?"
  
  He chuckled, "I've been told they generally place people who have the same sponsor close together in clusters in this orientation class," he hooked a thumb and indicated the lower right of the room. Sure enough, most of the others were similar to him, clearly all hard men.
  
  I gave him an astonished look, "I don't exactly fit in with your intrepid group. I think you could bench-press me one-handed."
  
  "True! But you look exactly like the suits that hired me," he gestured to my dress, "I mean, I haven't seen anyone in that dress... but the colour, the cut... does Militech have a swag shop where you can just buy clothes in that style? Because I only got hired last month. Had to have help finding this suit, actually."
  
  Ohhh. Yes. Actually, while the style of my outfit wasn't officially a "Militech style", it was definitely one in all but name. Well, shit. I didn't intend to give that impression, but that was most of the nice clothes I had. Plus, it generally went with my own preferences for dark colours and not showing a lot of skin.
  
  "Ah, yes. I suppose you are right. I don't work for the Corp like you do, though. I'm a dependent; they're paying my way through school," I said with a smile.
  
  His eyebrows rose up, "They do that for children of employees? Like, if me and my wife, hypothetically, had a kid on the way?"
  
  I bit my tongue, not wanting to lie to the man. "Yes, but not in all circumstances. My father was a Major in the Militech military division, which I assume you got hired into too. I admit that officers and their kids do get treated a little bit better, but your child will be schooled by the Corp, so long as you're not a short-timer. For me, they are paying for me to attend because my dad recently was killed in action, and it is part of my survivorship package."
  
  That caused him to wince and say quieter, "I'm sorry to hear about your loss. What do you mean by short-timer?"
  
  "Thank you. And by short-timer, I mean you right now. You're on your first contract. I believe that dependent education benefits only kick in after two or three years of service, but I'm not entirely sure," I said quietly. I made a mental note if we spoke much more to try to remind him to read his employment and compensation agreement carefully. If it was one thing that was exactly the same between my old world and this one, it was those in authority generally screwed over those that weren't.
  
  More conversation is halted by the instructor closing the door and walking over to the podium. "Welcome to the Night City University Health Science Centre, fall semester 2062. I am Dr Steven Grayling, a professor in anatomy, and I'll be conducting your new student orientation today. This is a combined class, with both new and transferee students, as well as our new cohort in our Paramedic certification course starting today."
  
  Oh, that is why it is an actual Doctor. A lot of these people were actual med school students. Interesting.
  
  Only a few people have physical note-taking equipment, like a pen and paper, with them. Antonio and a number of the Militech grunts being most of them, and I saw a couple of the better dressed, no doubt med students, start taking notes as well. I suspected they were doing it for retro-pretentious reasons.
  
  As for myself, I had a note-taking app recording and converting to text everything that was said, and I was scrolling a BD that I could review later, and I intended to do the same for all of my classes. Not every cyberdeck included tech for making your own braindances, but it wasn't that uncommon, either.
  
  The instructor spent thirty minutes talking about the campus, and then he paused, "One thing that we have, historically, needed to make clear is that there are no firearms permitted inside the inner radius, where classes are taught."
  
  I raised my eyebrows because I didn't actually remember that in the information I received. Although, it was almost all about the outer area, which presumably had no such restrictions on account of how I had a pistol strapped to my leg right now and the security at the front didn't give me a hard time about it.
  
  "There is a check service at the security checkpoint, however since we are all about to take a tour, it has been best we have found for our students that are armed to temporarily surrender their arms now, a staffer will provide you with a receipt that you can use to reclaim the weapon at the end of our class at lunch," he said, smiling.
  
  I noticed every one of the Militech new hires grumbling a little and reaching into their coats or pants to produce a pistol. Antonio plops his on the table and then looks at me with expectant eyes. I sigh and stand up. On the side of my dress is what looks like a pocket, but it is actually just a slit, as a pocket would ruin the lines of the dress, apparently. I reach inside it and pull out the exact same pistol he had and plop mine onto the table as well, then sit back down. In fact, it was the exact same pistol all of the Militech people had.
  
  I apparently was deeply amusing to the Militech contingent, who chuckled. I guess I did fit in with them a little bit. I glanced at our pistols. They all were M-10C Lexingtons. It was the compact version of the iconic and famous Militech pistol, whose design was thirty years old and still popular. It was basically the same pistol with a slightly shorter barrel, and instead of twenty-one rounds, the magazine only had fifteen, and instead of a full-auto firing mode, it fired in a three-round burst to conserve what little ammo you had.
  
  One of the preppy-looking med students looked at eight people, all with identical pistols, and asked, astonished, "Do they give those things out at the company Christmas party as stocking stuffers or something?"
  
  I waited a moment to see if anyone would comment, and thankfully Antonio, next to me, chuckled ruefully, "Actually, they hand them out to all new hires along with their company ID on the first day of basic indoc."
  
  I nodded and added a nugget from some of Alt-Taylor's memories, "I got mine from the Corp when I turned thirteen as a birthday present." That wasn't the first firearm Alt-Taylor had; her dad had been having her shoot almost since she could hold a weapon in her hands. But this pistol had been gifted to Alt-Taylor by her dad's boss on her thirteenth birthday. Although it wasn't like her dad just let her carry it whenever she wanted, she was still supervised with it.
  
  That caused both the Militech contingent and another heavily armed contingent I couldn't identify to guffaw briefly. One of the staffers took my weapon and handed me a small red card, kind of sized as a hotel or credit card. I put it carefully in my purse.
  
  The tour of the campus was fascinating; the amount of high-tech medical simulation technology they had was boggling. We ended up in the student union for lunch. I was part of the gun-toting clique, apparently, as we all sat together. There were three Corps sending people to this course, Militech, Trauma Team and Kang Tao. All of the independents, who came to the course on their own dime, were also part of the gun-toting clique, as they were Night City natives and weren't stupid. In fact, most of the people in our Paramedic course were in this clique, and those that didn't come armed claimed it was because they already knew guns weren't allowed.
  
  Only a fraction of the Corp-sponsored students were staying in Night City after they graduated; it turned out that this was just a very convenient and reasonably priced course, and many of them were headed to various cities in North America or the Free States. The only two of the Militech hires that were staying were my desk buddy Antonio and a red-headed and freckled woman in her mid-twenties named Fiona Doyle, who took a liking to me for some reason.
  
  I had to stop myself from distrusting any of this out of hand. My instincts were telling me that Emma had gotten someone else to try to pretend to be my friend again just in order to do something terrible to me when I trusted them, but Emma wasn't there. If anything, I should distrust this because this is Night City, and I shouldn't really trust anyone, but they weren't asking me to do anything more than be friendly with them and perhaps study after class.
  
  Most students had the choice of which class they wanted to take, but the Paramedic course was scheduled for us, with all forty of us in every class, which I actually liked as it would have made creating study groups very simple. I didn't think I really needed to study too much, but I would try to be sociable, even if my first instinct at being in a school again was to hide in the bathroom.
  
  About half of the class agreed to stay after the last class briefly in one of the large library student areas, where they could ask questions about things they didn't understand to the group, and others could do the same. I stayed for thirty minutes, answered some questions and asked two just to be polite, and excused myself afterwards.
  
  Back at my apartment, I was taking a break from studying to watch television. Most of the shows I didn't really appreciate, but I liked hearing the news, even knowing it was all or mostly propaganda.
  
  The TV droned on, "... in other news, the flooding of the Laguna Bend resevoir has commenced today, with police having to drag out and arrest one stubborn protestor that refused to leave his former home, which had been condemned after NC Dam Limited purchased the entirety of the town of Laguna Bend..."
  
  So they just flooded their entire town? What assholes.
  
  My doorbell rang, which startled me. I pulled up the door cam to see a man in a similar outfit that I would expect from UPS with a clipboard in hand, an obvious deliveryman or an obvious trap. I recognised the uniform, and I didn't think anyone would be stupid enough to do that in this building, especially after seeing my tiger girl sticker on the door, but...
  
  I grabbed Alt-Dad's shotgun, an old Militech Crusher that had been passed down to him by his dad circa 2020, and made sure there was a shell in the chamber. I trigger the intercom, "Yes?"
  
  "Delivery for one Taylor Hebert, I am with Revere Courier Service," said the man, in a chipper tone.
  
  While I wasn't expecting a delivery, that was a legitimate courier service and one that people would be wise not to impersonate. I had used them in the past to deliver a custom-printed plastic housing for my modified BD wreath, so it didn't look so ghetto. They would ship anything, anywhere. From a super-tanker of CHOO3 across the world to a bag of chips to your friend's house, and they treated each package as sacred, so they said anyway. I asked him through the door, "Identification?"
  
  He holds up a company badge to the camera. Hmm. I decide to send Mr Jin a text message, just telling him that I am answering the door for an RCS courier on an unexpected delivery and to avenge me if he finds me murdered later. He replies with a thumbs-up emoji.
  
  I trigger the door opening from several feet away so I am not in immediate grabbing distance. I don't point the gun at him but hold it ready so that I can raise it before he can rush me. Probably.
  
  The courier doesn't seem upset about it, "Are you Taylor Hebert?" I nod. "Alright, chica, you either have to sign for this or send a digital signature." He held out a digital clipboard, which immediately offered to let me view and sign a file. I raised an eyebrow. In the previous delivery, the guy just tossed it in the door. No signature was required. Nobody was stupid enough to leave a package at a housing block door and still expect it to still be there in five minutes, so virtually all deliveries to a Megabuilding address were in person.
  
  Well, of those choices, I knew which one I would not do . So I opened the digitally proferred file and raised my eyebrows again, which I had just lowered again a second ago! The sender was Daniel Hebert. I signed the thing electronically, and he held out a small package, the kind that could hold some sheets of paper without folding it and not much else. I said, "You can toss it into the apartment."
  
  He shrugged and did so, to which I replied, "Thank you," and sent him a twenty eurodollar tip digitally.
  
  "Niiice, chica. Thanks," he grinned and tipped a non-existent hat at me before I closed the door in his face. I watched him turn around and amble off. I send a text message to Mr Jin:
  
  [Taylor: I guess he wasn't a ninja assassin after all.]
  
  [ : Mr Jin]
  
  What was that? A cowboy emoji? I didn't even know what cultural references I was supposed to know where a cowboy hat emoji would make any sense. And why did that man talk only in emojis in texts when you almost couldn't get him to shut up in person?
  
  I sat the shotgun down and walked to the kitchen, and got some nitrile gloves. It was still possible its contents were laced with contact poison, or as soon as I opened it, a cloud of nerve toxin would puff into my face. That sounded implausible, but at least wearing gloves seemed a simple enough precaution.
  
  Humming, I opened the envelope with one of Alt-Dad's combat knives and dumped its contents out on the coffee table. A sheet of paper and a data shard. I definitely didn't reach over and immediately plug that data shard into my neck like a gonk. Instead, I read the paper. It was in my dad's handwriting, and I mean that literally. Alt-Dad had the exact same handwriting as my dad back in Brockton Bay; it was surreal.
  
  Little Owl,
  
  If you're reading this, I'm afraid I couldn't make it back to you as I promised. We all knew this was a possibility, and I hope everything is going as well for you as possible.
  
  I had a contract with a third party to deliver this to you, wherever you happened to be in North America, thirty days after confirmation of my death.
  
  I know I never really talked about the specifics of the work I did, and I won't start now. It would be unprofessional, and also it would endanger you. But, in my line of work, it was sometimes possible to pick up things on missions as souvenirs. The Corp didn't really mind this behaviour so long as it wasn't extravagant. It was kind of expected in our field, even.
  
  I have stored most of my souvenirs in a storage unit in Watson. Rent was pre-paid until 1 FEB 2068. Enclosed is a digital key to the storage unit, as well as its address and unit number.
  
  Although the majority of the items are of only sentimental value, some of them have significant monetary value or are not available for purchase at all. I will not include a manifest of items with this letter, but there is one next to the light switch in the storage unit, along with a list of names and contact information for people I trust would not take advantage of you if you wanted to sell some of the things.
  
  This is the last thing that I can do for you, and I am not even sure it will be of any help.
  
  Your mother and I will always love you.
  
  Be strong,
  
  Dad
  
  P.S. Burn this letter.
  
  That made me tear up, and he wasn't even my father, really. It was always my mom that called me Little Owl, and I wondered if Alt-Dad started calling Alt-Taylor that after her mom died or if he always had. My memories were inconclusive on the matter. Alt-Taylor was a lot luckier that her dad was emotionally a lot more able to handle the loss of mom, even if he was... some kind of... secret agent? Spy? Black ops commando?
  
  What other kind of job allowed you to acquire valuable souvenirs as you travelled the world on missions? And add postscripts to burn letters you arrange to be sent a month after your death? It seemed like something out of a noir detective or spy novel. But, maybe I was thinking too much about it.
  
  I pulled out my laptop and used every way I could to scan the data shard for any malicious code, but there either wasn't, or it was way past my ability to detect. I finally shrugged; it was in my dad's handwriting, and it could have been a nerve agent instead of a data shard. It was probably safe.
  
  I slotted it into the socket behind my ear. A lot of people chose ports on their necks that were really obvious, but I selected a design for my OS to put one port behind each ear. My tiny interface plug was at the base of my skull, hidden by my hair. I wasn't comfortable enough in this world to use cybernetics augmentation as a style.
  
  Sure enough, it was a digital key and text file giving the address and unit number. I copy the files to my internal system, delete the data on the shard, eject it and, for good measure, break it into a few dozen pieces on the floor with Alt-Dad's ball peen hammer.
  
  I'm interested in what was in this storage unit, sure. But I didn't expect to rush over there any time soon. Beyond the fact that the part of Watson the storage facility was in was scary, I wondered why my dad included a thirty-day delay before having this delivered. Why hadn't he just left it with all of our things at home?
  
  I sat down and considered why that might be. Perhaps Militech didn't care about this, but if it was a well-known practice for people with the same job as my dad did to collect souvenirs, some of which may be valuable, perhaps a single actor acting without knowledge of the Corp might search the household things of a deceased employee? Or maybe even surveil the only surviving daughter of such a person, just in case I immediately went to empty out some sort of storage unit after his death?
  
  What would such an actor do if he or she did see that activity? Murdering the girl and stealing all of her dad's stuff seemed the obvious answer.
  
  That seemed like spy movie stuff, too. But I couldn't say it wasn't impossible, so I didn't see any need to go see what was in it now beyond my raging curiosity. But if it was a panty collection from all the bond girls he banged before meeting mom, I was going to flush his ashes down the toilet.
  
  Realistically, thirty days would probably have been enough; nobody would privately surveil someone that long on a hunch. That said, it wasn't like I needed anything right now. If I was destitute, I would have different opinions, but money, as it always did, gave me options.
  
  It was a shame I neither had a car or license nor knew how to drive. I searched around the kitchen for a lighter.
  
  I had an appointment at the Skyline clinic after class on Friday, so I skipped the study group for the first time. The first week was going faster than I thought. I noticed a lot of the students were caught off-guard by the rapid pace of it, but if you were going to squeeze two years of material into six months, you couldn't waste even a day. I had gotten the reputation as one of the smartest in the class, and all of the Militech people joined our unofficial study group, along with the Trauma Team people and a few of the Night City natives.
  
  Ever since I almost got shot on Monday, I realised I needed more protection than what I had. Not only was I going to buy that internal biomonitor that I had wanted, but I was also getting two types of bioware. The Skyline clinic wasn't only a cybernetics shop, but they also did biosculpt and most types of bioware as well. I didn't want to go there to get my appearance changed, though, since I was a bit paranoid back then.
  
  The first bioware I was going to get was a ballistic skin weave, which was the bioware equivalent of subdermal armour. It would provide protection equivalent to kevlar body armour, so it would stop most pistols and some submachine guns, at least. It wasn't as effective as subdermal armour, but it also wasn't obvious you had it. Your skin still felt like skin when people touched you, and it was very hard to detect that you had it absent some manner of sensors or sophisticated optics.
  
  Not that I had any plans for anyone to touch me, but I felt better about keeping the looks I had. In addition to that, I was getting muscle and bone lace. This was a nano-process that threaded microscopic artificial fibres through muscle and bone tissue, increasing your strength and, more importantly, significantly reducing the damage done to your bones and vastly reducing the chances of a fracture.
  
  In many cases, a bone fracture was immediately disabling, making further fight or flight impossible. Not only were these expensive procedures, but they took a very long time to propagate. I would walk out of the clinic today with the implant, but I would have to come to the clinic every day for an hour and receive treatment for over two weeks.
  
  The trip on the train wasn't crowded. Going downtown in the evening was always easier than leaving it.
  
  I was met by the same customer sales specialist as last time, who smiled widely and offered me refreshments. I guess the commission she got on my sales made her think well of me. I accepted some water and told her what had happened on Monday.
  
  "That's terrible! But at least you're okay. What can we help you with to put your mind more at ease?" she asked, oozing professional politeness and an eagerness to serve.
  
  I nodded and said firmly, "I would like that bio-monitor you tried to sell me the other day, as well as two bioware treatments. I would like the skin weave and muscle and bone lace."
  
  She raised her eyebrows, "You're not thinking about a career as a mercenary, are you?"
  
  I snorted, "If I was, I would have asked for the subdermal armour and projectile launch system, and maybe those arm blades." I wave my arms around wildly to demonstrate.
  
  She laughed a soft and pleasant windchime sound. That laugh had to be something she practised a lot, that or it was a cybernetic augmentation in itself, "Well, the subdermal armour would be fine, but mantis blades and the PLS are incompatible, not to mention restricted from purchase."
  
  "Really? They aren't illegal items," I said curiously. Although I actually thought the Projectile Launch System had to be illegal. Or at least, it ought to be. It was basically a missile launcher on your arm.
  
  She nodded, "That's true, but we receive significant pressure not to sell such items to citizens that don't have a valid job interest as a security professional. That said... if you were to bring in such an item yourself, well, in that case, it wouldn't be us selling it to you, would it? But it would still have to pass our inspections. We don't install non-functional or barely functional cybernetics at Skyline."
  
  I wondered who provided that pressure, and I noted she didn't say. Still, she was quite pleased with my purchases, and I was almost thirty thousand eurodollars poorer.
  
  Dr Travis was just as chatty as last time, which I quite enjoyed. The affable old man had a good bedside manner.
  
  Since it was already past dark by the time I was done, I spent an extra forty eurodollars calling a cab to take me back to my building; it was the first time I actually entered it from the ground floor.
  
  It was an interesting cab, completely AI-operated. Apparently, the company, Delamain, recently began replacing all of their human drivers with this system. The AI tried to make small talk, but it had a bit of a way to go before it seemed alive and interested if that were the company's goal.
  
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  The Complete Idiot's Guide
  The Complete Idiot's Guide to Arcane Japanese Gang Culture
  
  My three months of free rent, as paid for by the generosity of Militech, was coming to an end. I had about three weeks left, but I wanted to shift into a larger apartment. I just didn't have enough space here; most everything was still boxed up and stacked box on box.
  
  So I went to the first floor of the Megabuilding, to its rental office, and inquired about the availability of a two-bedroom apartment. There were three main types of apartments in this building, the simple studio apartment of varying sizes, a two-bedroom apartment and then, on the very top floors, there were many custom luxury apartments far beyond my price range.
  
  "Yes, we have a number of two-bedroom units vacant, and if you're willing to move quickly, you can likely shift your belongings with a week to spare. So, if you can do that, I'd be willing to refund one-half of that last week of rent on your current unit," the office manager told me, which caused me to narrow my eyes suspiciously.
  
  I had read the rental agreement, or at least most of it. There was no section where they were obligated to do that, so why were they? "Why?" I asked, simply and bluntly. Suspiciously.
  
  That caused the man to chuckle, "Ah, self-interest, I assure you. I can turn around your current unit in just a few days, and I have a list of people waiting for a single unit. You see, the two-bedroom units are not eligible for most governmental rental assistance. They consider walls a luxury, I guess." The last sentence was said with a truckload of amusement.
  
  Ah. That made a lot of sense, then. He'd probably have someone in and paying rent before the month was up, whereas if I had stuck to the terms of the contract, he would lose out on a week of rent, probably. Now, he was just losing out on the half.
  
  "Okay, I'd like to plan for that then. Send me a message when you have a few units for me to choose from," I said and departed to head back upstairs. However, as I was heading up the elevator, I got a call from Mr Jin. Waving a hand to accept it, I said, "Hello, Mr Jin. I wasn't expecting your call."
  
  In the corner of my vision, the well-dressed man's face appeared, smiling, "Of course! I was going to call you later, but a little bird told me that you were interested in moving into a slightly larger apartment. Can you meet me on the twelfth floor? I have both something I'd like to show you and a couple of people who wanted to pay their respects."
  
  I wanted to raise my eyebrows, but since this was a vidcall, I didn't want to alert him to my surprise. I didn't think there was any good that would come to me if I declined his invitation, so I said, "Okay. I suppose I have enough time. Where on the twelfth?"
  
  "Two units down from Clouds," the man said, giving a thumbs up and disconnecting the call.
  
  Well, this was a little unusual. I had been trying very hard to avoid any contact with the Tyger Claws ever since my first day in class, where I made met Mr Slice-N-Dice. I half expected them to send me some kind of reward, but I thought it was just going to be money.
  
  Sighing, I tapped the twelfth-floor button. I'd have to wait until the elevator went all the way to the twenty-ninth and then back down.
  
  Walking out of the elevator, I glanced around. I had never actually been on this floor, and it was in a half-residential and half-commercial setup that was pretty interesting. The dollhouse Clouds took pride of place in the centre of the floor, so I found that easily enough; then, looking to either side of it, I found Mr Jin and two other men standing next to a doorway.
  
  Walking over to him, I look at the people who apparently want to "pay me respects" with a bit of suspicion. However, my memory easily placed the two. It was Mr Yuki and Mr Sanjuro from a couple of months ago. Relieved it wasn't some sort of gang boss here to give me an offer I couldn't refuse, capiche, I inspected the man named Sanjuro. He clearly had some neural cyberware installed that he didn't previously have.
  
  I couldn't place it, but there were a lot of speciality products whose only actual use was medical, to correct a disability whether it was inborn or acquired through illness or trauma, and it definitely appeared to be one of these types. Fully half of the side of his head by his temple was replaced by a neat-looking carbon-fibre plate, including your normal interface sockets.
  
  Honestly, I had half expected Mr Sanjuro to be taken directly to a dumpster and discarded. Although his condition was survivable, it wouldn't have been inexpensive for the trauma surgeon to save his life or the speciality neuralware or physical therapy that he no doubt was continuing even now. I didn't expect your average gang to actually take care of their members injured in the line of duty. Maelstrom might have, but only because the treatment was more cyberware.
  
  "Mr Jin! It's nice to see you again," I told him as I neared, causing him to smile widely.
  
  He nodded, "Likewise! And these two, I don't suppose you recognise them, do you?"
  
  I chuckled ruefully, "Yuki, knife to the aorta. Sanjuro, GSW to the head. It's nice to see you both seemingly doing well."
  
  Jin grinned and glanced around, then nodded at the two of them, "Go ahead."
  
  The two glanced at each other and nodded, then quickly, before I could stop them, they got on their knees and bent over, almost touching the ground with their foreheads, saying in unison, "Thank you for saving our lives!"
  
  Fuck! What was that called? Kowtowing? I glanced left and right, incredibly embarrassed. I also didn't want people, of which there was a number, looking at me with shock and slack jaws as two members of the gang that ran this building kowtowed to me like I was some kind of Yakuza princess.
  
  I waved wildly and spoke rapidly, "That's not necessary, you two. Please, please raise your head. Get up." I barely did anything for either of them. It was the doctors at the hospital that really saved their lives.
  
  I just wanted people to stop staring at us, but apparently, that was the correct thing to say from their cultural perspective as well because they quickly stood up and both smiled widely at me. Look, guys. I don't know anything about Japanese or Asian culture, so I was just trying to make sure nobody involved got embarrassed, mainly so that I wouldn't have to be the centre of attention anymore.
  
  Mr Jin chuckled and smiled as well, "Thank you for that." For what?! Fuck, I had to see if there was a copy of The Complete Idiot's Guide to Arcane Japanese Gang Culture at the library.
  
  One interesting thing about my biomonitor was how entirely it monitored my body. That is to say, it easily detected the rise in temperature on my face as I blushed furiously and reported that to me as an anomaly. Thanks, biom! I wouldn't ever have known!
  
  I didn't know what to say, so I simply nodded. Mr Jin nodded to the two, and they both shook my hand before departing. He grinned at me, "I could tell you were deeply uncomfortable with that, but I appreciate that you handled it so well. It was important to them." He paused and then glanced at the door in front of us, which opened up, "Let me show you this place."
  
  I didn't know what he was talking about, "Uhh... why?"
  
  "You didn't expect the Tyger Claws' generosity to extend merely to a firm handshake and thanks for saving two of our members' lives, did you?" Mr Jin asked with a rueful tone. He shook his head, "No way. People know what happened, so if we didn't reward you, it would be a big deal to us and to everyone who knows about it. You want to move into a larger apartment - well, this is one. It's not as well appointed as the luxury units on the top five floors, but it is almost as large because it used to be a dual commercial/residential property. I believe it was a convenience store. Come, now. I assure you you're safe in my presence."
  
  Well, normally, I would not go into an isolated room alone with a man twice my age, even back in Brockton Bay, to say nothing about this world with the added fact that he was a member of a dangerous street gang. But I didn't think he was lying.
  
  Sighing and nodding, I followed him inside.
  
  The place was a bit weird, with a large front open section that I suspected was the previous corner store. He waved his hands, "There's nothing much in this section, but it is good for storage or the front area if you ever did want to open up a store, maybe sell burritos?" He laughed at that and then continued to the back, where there was another security door, which he opened.
  
  The area inside was nice. It was easily the size of a two-bedroom apartment that I was planning on renting, but instead of two bedrooms of similar size, there was one large bedroom and then a much smaller room set up as an office.
  
  It was quite nice; it was even furnished. The only furniture in my old apartment was the futon thing that was built into the wall and a couple of tables, both of which belonged to me and not the apartment. This place had a proper queen-sized bed. Altogether, it was over twice the square metres of the two-bedroom apartments that were on the Megablock's net site and of much better quality. There was even one window in the bedroom to the exterior of the building, with an actual view of Japantown. That generally added a multiple of one point five onto the rents charged just for the view, not that it was altogether a great view.
  
  I eyed Jin suspiciously, which he immediately picked up on, holding his hands up placatingly, "How much?" I finally asked him.
  
  "Peace, peace. The same as you'd pay for that entry-level two-bedroom," Mr Jin said, continuing to hold his hands out in front of himself in the universal peaceful gesture.
  
  That didn't make me any less suspicious, "And how long can I expect to keep this introductory teaser price?"
  
  "Hahaha... you really did grow up in a Corp, didn't you, as long as you live here. If the price of two bedrooms goes up, your rent here will go up. But never more than what they're charging for a basic two-bedroom unit," he said, blatantly laughing at me.
  
  I rub the back of my head, "Mr Jin, I'm not familiar with your culture's customs. Is this the type of gift I am supposed to politely refuse or the type that I would give offence if I refused?"
  
  There was no delay at all in his response, "The latter, definitely. The former is more like small things like if I were to invite you for drinks, I might offer to pay your tab. Refusing at least twice then, unless we're really good mates, is the polite thing to do."
  
  Yeah, I figured it was like that. I sighed and nodded, "Alright then. It is a good deal. I'd be a fool not to accept. Provisionally, assuming there is nothing untoward in the rental agreement, I accept. Thanks for your consideration. It wasn't necessary, though. I really did not do much for anyone but Mr Yuki."
  
  The twelfth floor was a lot safer than the twenty-ninth, too, which was nice.
  
  Mr Jin clapped his hands together, "Great!" He immediately forwarded me the digital key for the doors, which caused me to give him a questioning look. He waved it off, "You can go sign the rental agreement at the office downstairs tomorrow; I assure you there will be nothing unusual about it."
  
  I nodded, "Alright. I'll still try to get my stuff out of my old apartment, though, so he can rent it out again before the end of the month." That seemed polite. It would be a lot of boxes to move, though.
  
  Jin made a humming noise, "I'm sure you have some things you'd prefer to move yourself, but after that, just send me a message, and I'll have some of the boys move everything else; they'll just put it in the empty outer room."
  
  That implied that the Tyger Claws could open any of the doors in the building, but I already pretty much knew that. Still, I wouldn't turn down free labour, "Yes, I do have a few things that I'd feel more comfortable carrying myself. My dad's ashes..." and all the drugs I made.
  
  "Great, just let me know when," he said, and then he wished me well and left the apartment.
  
  I sat on the train on my way to class. It had been a month since I had moved into my new apartment. In a couple of days, our class would be incorporating days of practicum at the Night City Medical Centre, which was about ten blocks further into downtown. For the last three months, we would alternate one day at the school and one day at the hospital.
  
  However, the workload wasn't actually reduced, so you were still expected to perform all of the bookwork you would normally have done, even on the days when you were at the hospital. I tried not to show off in the class, but I was still at the top of the class academically, and I didn't expect my practical skills to be an issue either.
  
  At the moment, I was scanning people going to work, using my deck to scan their OS for open ports and vulnerabilities and then launching a Ping quickhack at them. It took practice to scan, identify, select, configure the malware, launch and then simultaneously monitor the upload. I had been reading and watching more net material the past two months, and everyone argued that the only way you got better was by practising over and over, preferably on varied targets.
  
  Everyone recommended going somewhere with a lot of people and doing exactly what I was doing, utilising the Ping hack. Either on people or randomly connected equipment like soda machines, cameras or Data terms. It was listed as being harmless and "practically legal," with the only people who could detect what you were doing were other people with a deck or specialised security cyberware. Even if it was strictly speaking against the law, there was consensus that even if a NetWatch agent saw you do it, they wouldn't even hassle you too much.
  
  I wasn't sure about all that, so I made sure to scan everyone on the same train I was in and wouldn't practice if there was anyone who either had a deck or whom I couldn't determine their cyberware list with a port scan. That latter demographic was, surprisingly, very small. I would also only choose targets that looked poor, thinking it was unlikely that they had any custom ICE in their cybernetics.
  
  I was also getting to the point where I could pick out pieces of cyberware installed on a person even if they had their system locked down or even if they had a spoofer installed, just from looking at their bodies, in a similar way that I could diagnose people going to work with probable early congestive heart failure just by the way they sighed when they sat down.
  
  I was not especially fast in any of the steps in deploying this quick hack, but I was slowly improving. The skills were similar when utilising other hacks, like the one I had to reboot any cybernetic eyes someone had or one to sleaze and temporarily freeze any installed cybernetics. That last one could be the most useful, and it was on the borderline of being dangerous. Having your cybernetics suddenly freeze up, while not generally life-threatening, was not conducive to your health, especially if you had a liver or kidney. It could be life-threatening if you had a replacement cybernetic heart, depending on how the implant handled errors.
  
  I was slowly learning how to edit the software packages and intended to put cyber hearts on a whitelist to ignore, but I either needed to get a list of all manufacturer IDs or some other way to identify them. Maybe just make a string comparison on the model name, and skip it if it included "heart" or "cardio" or similar? A regular expression, then? That would be a lot simpler.
  
  *ding*
  
  I noticed the hack was completed, and two local devices that my target was connected to started flashing in my augmented reality display. It was only a phone in his pocket and the train itself, though, and that was normal and generally what I expected to see.
  
  I've been having a lot of urges to tinker with cybernetics recently, but it wasn't like I could either build something I would be proud of from scratch with what I had in my apartment or perform surgery on myself to make tweaks to myself. Well, actually, I felt that I definitely could do the latter; I just thought it was insane.
  
  I knew that urges to build things were one of the main symptoms and drawbacks of having a Tinker power, and I was just grateful that while my urges were definitely there, they seemed at least not ready to take over my life. At least, not yet.
  
  I did, though, perform surgery on a pigeon the other day. It had a missing leg and fell into my apartment through my open window, so I created for it a fully articulating replacement. It wasn't a very good one, and the pigeon didn't have individual control of that leg, but every time the pigeon would grip with its other little talon, the small replacement that I had made out of a plastic bottle and some wires as far as I could tell, would grip as well. It was enough to give the bird back total mobility; at least it could once again hang out on power lines like the rest of its friends.
  
  I was pretty sure the bird was one hundred per cent sure I was going to eat it and seemed perplexed that I had not. I don't think it liked me, exactly, but it was hanging out around the window at my new apartment, and I occasionally gave it a scrap of food, which it would grab in its little beak and fly away with, refusing to eat it near me.
  
  The day proceeded pretty much as I expected. I had honestly expected a number of the people in my class to have dropped out by now. It was an accelerated class, after all, and there were a few that were struggling the first month and a half, but they managed to get their heads out of their asses and got their academic grades back up.
  
  I didn't know what would happen if you got hired at a Corp and you washed out of training, but it couldn't have been very good for your long-term career prospects, to say nothing of the people who must have saved for years to afford the class themselves.
  
  I met the afterschool study session at the library. It consisted of the core group of a few of the Militech guys, most of the Trauma Team, two of the Kang Tao guys and about half of the independents. Others came and went; usually, when they were struggling with a particular element, they may stay after class for assistance. I had a very, very good reputation with the core group of study buddies, such that they all said they would recommend me to each of their corps.
  
  Sitting down, one of the Trauma Team medics named Lilia said, "Hey, Taylor. I spoke with one of the Night City hiring managers, and unfortunately, they don't generally hire rescue medics unless you've had three years of experience in critical care, 911 ambulance, or similar. Definitely not with no history of employment at all, no matter how shit hot you are at everything."
  
  I hum and nod. However, she continued, "Buuut... they were impressed with your grades and everything we've said about you. He'd probably be willing to offer you a job at the Watson Trauma centre, and three years later, it would be a straight transfer. Alternately, he suggests you get a job with one of the 911 companies and would be willing to stretch the requirement if you have at least one year of 911 experience in a place like Night City. That's worth at least three years in most other metros, he says."
  
  I nod. I kind of expected all that. Fiona and Antonio look embarrassed, "We asked Militech Night City, also. Basically the same story if you wanted a job at Militech Evac..." that was Militech's competitor to Trauma Team, "... but given your dad, if you wanted to enlist then so long as you had your Paramedic's cert, you'd start off as a Tech-Spec, instead of a private."
  
  I raised my eyebrow, amused. I actually knew a fair bit about Militech ranks. They were the exact same as NUSA's unified rank structure, and a Tech Specialist was the fourth enlisted rank. It was the same grade as a Corporal, but Corporals were expected to have a leadership role and went to non-commissioned officer school, while Tech-Specs did not. "Well, that is an option, I suppose." Although it wasn't one that I was willing to do unless I was starving.
  
  I didn't have any illusions about what the life of a newly enlisted soldier in Militech or the NUSA military would be like. Alt-Dad talked about it enough, but usually in the context of things like, " These fucking idiot recruits... " Extremely structured. I definitely wouldn't be able to indulge in any Tinkering projects on the side, so enlisting might actually drive me insane if I didn't have any outlet for the urges.
  
  Xiao Ling, the most sociable of the Kang Tao study buddies, crowed loudly, "That's shit! It is I, Xiao Ling, that have gotten you the best offer! My boss was very impressed, especially with what you have accomplished, given your age. He feels you might be a prodigy and is willing to invest in you! Taylor, if you finish first in our class, Kang Tao would be willing to pay for your immediate enrollment in medical school." He also had a habit of talking like that. Whenever he answered the phone, he said, "Hello, it is I, Xiao Ling!" I liked him.
  
  Well, that's nice. But Kang Tao is like Chinese Militech; there was no way it was that easy. I give him gimlet eyes and ask, amused, "Oh? What's the fine print?"
  
  He coughed a little bit, looking a bit down, "Well... you would have to sign a thirty-year loyalty contract, which would only commence after you finished med school, become fluent in Mandarin before enrolling in med school, and spend at least five years working in Taipei before returning to Night City..." He trailed off, "... honestly, probably they'd choose a Chinese medical school too. That's the only reason I can think of for the fluency requirement." That caused everyone to chuckle, but honestly, it wasn't that bad of a deal, as deals with corps went.
  
  He actually blushed but then added, "But you would get to pick your own speciality, and all Kang Tao physicians are eligible for Gold tier Trauma Team contracts." That caused the Trauma Team contingent to wolf whistle.
  
  I nodded at everyone, "Thanks for going out on a limb for me, everyone." I then chuckled, "Does anyone know the best company that handles 911 calls here in Night City?"
  
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  Relics of a hard life
  Getting my driver's license was one thing I didn't realise I would have to do. However, I found out that the required credentials for applying to an ambulance company included a driver's license and EVOC, which was an emergency vehicle operator's course.
  
  It was similar to a driver's course but covered the additional things needed to know for anyone who drove a vehicle with red and blue flashing lights, namely ambulances and police vehicles. I discovered this when I was getting ready to apply to NC Med Ambulance, which was a medium-sized ambulance company in the city and one with a pretty good reputation for not being total dicks to either their workers or patients.
  
  I had arranged for both classes at night about three months into my Paramedic course so that I would have everything completed in time to send my application for a job shortly before I graduated.
  
  "Let's get on the highway, and we'll drive a few kilometres before returning to the office, where you can demonstrate parking. Then you can swap out with uhh..." he paused and glanced back behind him to the man in the back seat, who gave his name, "Jacob... and then sit in the back while he drives," said the man from the Night City motor vehicle division, seemingly bored.
  
  Holding the car's wheel with a death grip at ten and two, I gritted my teeth and nodded. While unsure whether I believed it or not, I told myself, 'It's not that driving a car is scary; it's just that driving a car in this city is scary.'
  
  I was surprised actual in-person vehicle training was still mandatory, even if it was only just for the test. I had done most of my "training" in braindances provided by the school remotely. In spite of that, I admit that they did a pretty good job of teaching me how to drive.
  
  I didn't think my passing was in any doubt, as recommended by essentially everyone in my Paramedic course, I had already discreetly provided the requisite baksheesh, unasked, so I was pretty sure I was going to get my license so long as I didn't get us killed on the way back.
  
  "Aahhhhhhh!" I cried from the passenger seat as the instructor demonstrated the latest in a long line of implausible and dangerous manoeuvres.
  
  What the fuck was this? Fast and the Furious, Night City Drift?! I gripped the armrest of the car like I was an eighty-year-old lady as he pulled the vehicle in turn so tight two wheels seemingly came off the ground, briefly, before swinging it around the other way, one hand on the wheel, the other on the e-brake to slide the car almost sideways into a parking space, back in front of the office of the driving school.
  
  In order to avoid being taken on another death race, I opened the door and jumped out when the car came to a complete stop. Despite my noodle legs, I patted myself down to ensure that I still had my pistol because I was considering shooting this man.
  
  "Hey, what the fuck was that?" I yelled at him after he got out.
  
  He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head, closing the car door and walking around the front of the car before saying, "Well, the course syllabus requires at least forty-five minutes of demonstrated manoeuvres at the instructor's discretion. It used to have a lot of specified things we had to go over, but all that got taken out except for operating the emergency lights, which I had you do in the beginning. See, this is a lot more fun, right?"
  
  " No," I said firmly, shaking my head for emphasis.
  
  He continued chuckling, as if that wasn't the first time he had heard that response, "But you'll remember it, I bet!" He then pulled out an actual honest to god paper business card. I hadn't seen one of those very often in Night City, and he handed it to me in the two-handed Japanese style.
  
  Pissed as though I was, I accepted it two-handed as well and spent a moment inspecting it. It was a simple white card with the name "Yoshiaki Takeda (義光 武田)." There was a net address, and then below that, it said simply and in bold, "I drive the shit out of it."
  
  Well, that was certainly true. On the flip side of the card was his hourly or daily rates. What kind of job needed an insane driver by the hour? Bank robberies? I placed the business card in a compartment in my purse politely before giving him a stare and telling him, "I'm not exactly looking for getaway drivers for my next caper."
  
  That causes him to grin, and he shrugs, "You never know. Not that I would ever do anything illegal, of course. Ha ha ha ha."
  
  I didn't believe that last bit for a second, but you know what? There was no harm in keeping the card.
  
  He continued, "Now let's go inside; there is actually a fair bit of material we need to go over, as well as a number of tech mockups that they didn't actually put in the car because they're cheap bastards."
  
  There were a fair bit of regulations, but what was emphasised the most was the unwritten rules. Ambulances, even privately owned ones, had the same scanning equipment as NCPD patrol cars; they just didn't include the machine-gun turrets. Why? Well, it was important because certain vehicles, mostly corporate convoys, had the right to open fire immediately on other vehicles if they were "startled." So it was important to run all the plates and registrations of any nearby car before you hit the lights and sirens for your own sake.
  
  In most cases, passing a convoy with lights and sirens wasn't a big deal because they could see you coming. But just turning them on when you were right behind them? He highly recommended I never do it.
  
  I hated this city sometimes.
  
  I stayed a little while longer than I usually did to help Fiona with some things for our upcoming tests. She was doing well on the big cardiology issues but needed a little help with pulmonology and endocrinology, which medics often see.
  
  All of the Militech medics had some issues with these areas because they all were previous medtechs either in the NUSA Army or Militech itself, and they had a laser focus on trauma, pharmacology, cardiology, and neurology. And to some extent, that made sense, but they still had to pass the final exam, and all of the stuff they probably never will use again or need to know will be on it.
  
  "Thanks, Taylor. That helps a lot," the older woman told me, and I nodded and gathered my things, getting ready to leave. I helped her with simple mnemonic devices and flash cards. It seemed like flashcards as a learning aid had gone out of style in the past seventy or eighty years. I wasn't sure if it was because the paper was expensive for a time, but I reintroduced the concept to the crew, even writing a very simple flashcard app for any Kiroshi-compatible cybereye system, which almost everyone had, even if they didn't have genuine Kiroshis.
  
  Shockingly, the optics software toolkit they used was an open standard, which allowed competitors to use it. It wasn't clear to me why I thought open standards wouldn't exist in this world, but they most certainly did. In particular, expensive products seemed to play well with competitors' tech.
  
  I would round a few existing corners on the simple app and maybe place the source code on my net site. I had started an anonymous one, Little_Owl's Roost. Although I wasn't sure exactly how anonymous it was, I paid for it a year in advance and used multiple proxies and strong encryption whenever I accessed it. Because NetWatch had backdoors in all public networks due to the Blackwall, they could probably trace me more or less in real-time, but it would be a nontrivial problem for others to do so, at least over a short period. I thought.
  
  I said goodbye to the others that were still in the library and left campus, getting on the train at the nearby station. However, instead of getting off at my usual stop after the train travelled east into Japantown, I stayed on as it continued into Watson, past the medical district in what they were starting to call Kabuki due to its high percentage of Japanese businesses and into the industrial area to the north.
  
  It was already the beginning of the new year, and thinking about the holidays made me think about my dad back in Brockton Bay. I caught myself feeling more or less happy about my life so far the other day. Well, if not happy, then at least optimistic. That realisation caused me to descend into a spiral of self-loathing as I felt I had just abandoned my actual dad.
  
  The fact that there was no way to actually go back, and no one in this world even knew about the existence of alternate universes, didn't help my illogical feelings. It was clear, however, that my life was much better than what I was experiencing in Brockton Bay. Only the very strong feeling that I had swapped places with Night City's version of me kept me from breaking down.
  
  I had often had fantasies of just vanishing when I was in Brockton Bay, being taken by the Sidhe into a faerie ring, and then maybe coming back out a hundred years later when all of my tormentors were dead. However, the only thing that kept those fantasies from being irresistible was how my disappearance would have crushed my father's spirit. He was barely hanging on after Mom died, and sure he hadn't been that great of a father for the past couple of years, but I hadn't been that great of a daughter, either.
  
  However, if the faeries had indeed taken me, then they had replaced me with a changeling like in the stories, and I couldn't help but think that this was the best solution for all of those involved. But it still made me feel incredibly guilty at feeling such relief.
  
  So, last night I resolved to check the storage unit Alt-Dad had left for me in Watson. I don't know if it was because I was starting to bleed the feelings I had for my actual dad with Alt-Dad, or if I was just curious and felt that seeing what was in there would distract me, but I decided to check it out after school.
  
  Watson was, for the most part, a pretty safe area. There was a lot of business activity and a lot of money in the district, mostly from Japanese corporations that had taken advantage of the fact that one of their biggest 800-pound gorillas of a competitor, Arasaka, could not come into Night City or the continent of North America at all.
  
  It was actually, overall, much safer than Japantown, where I lived. I would have much preferred to have been given an apartment in one of the few Megabuildings in Watson, actually. However, I've gotten used to living in Japantown now.
  
  Although it was mainly safe, it was a highly industrial area, especially the north part of town where the self-storage unit was located, as well as the waterfront docks area, and those types of places always had a larger amount of crime than pure residential or retail areas of a city.
  
  Getting off the train, I walked down the street, following well-lit areas. I still had an hour before the sun would set, but I didn't know precisely how long I would be inside the storage unit. In the event that it was dark when I was leaving, I would probably call the friendly robotic taxi Delamain for assistance. From my perspective, he was much safer than human drivers in this city as far as taxis went. He was cheaper, too.
  
  My destination was about a hundred metres ahead and to the right, but I spotted a food truck sitting next to the corner and glanced at its wares. Food was one of the few things that were not better than Brockton Bay, although, in the 2060s, the food was a lot better than it was forty or sixty years ago when over seventy per cent of all produced food was kibble, made by actual dog food companies.
  
  That still existed, and if you were poor, it was the main source of calories you would receive if you were on welfare, but cloned fruits and even cereal crops were getting much more common, even though since all fuels seemed to be a sort of biodiesel that every calorie had to be weighed against the insatiable desire of more energy. There was only so much arable land in the world, after all.
  
  I wasn't entirely sure what this food truck was selling, it was noodles of some kind, but it smelled quite good, so I ordered an extra large with shrimp. I doubted they were shrimp at all. Most meats were scop, or single-celled organic protein, a kind of meat substitute, but honestly, they had over fifty years to perfect it, and it didn't really taste that bad.
  
  I hadn't tried the shrimp flavour, though, but the beef flavour did taste like beef, even if the consistency was a little bit off.
  
  I took my food to-go and walked to the well-lit Secur-Stor-It building across the street. I had already looked up this location on the net before I decided to come. If it was an outside storage unit, then I wouldn't have come so close to sunset and would have had to schedule it for Sunday, which was one of the only days I had any time off at all.
  
  The door into their lobby wouldn't open until I physically keyed in the twenty-four-digit pass key that I had gotten from Alt-Dad, after which the lobby opened, and an automated voice welcomed me and asked if I needed any assistance.
  
  "No, thank you," I told the chatbot politely. The unit my Alt-Dad had left me was on the ground floor, but it was all the way in the back, next to a side door to leave the facility. I found it without too much trouble and carefully keyed in the password again. This caused a loud clicking sound as the slide-up door was magnetically unlocked. I rolled the door up just enough to duck my head under it and closed it behind myself, tapping a locked padlock glyph on the wall to reengage the locking systems.
  
  "Now... what do we have here?" I asked as I found the light switch, along with several sheets of paper taped inside a plastic bag next to it, just like the letter said.
  
  As the lights flickered on, my fingers fumbled, and the plastic bag with the inventory of the things in the room slipped from my fingers to fall to the floor as my jaw hit the floor at what I saw. Was that a small mech or a large set of Tinker power armour?!
  
  I just blinked several times, looking at it, then moved closer to inspect it. I could see that it was clearly damaged; I could see a small entry hole of some kind of incredible armour-piercing weapon going through the entirety of the torso of the armour. What weapon would have that much penetration on an obviously armoured suit like this? A crew-served railgun, perhaps?
  
  I shook my head, walked over and grabbed the plastic bag off the ground, pulling the papers out. There was no additional message like I was wondering or hoping for, but it did have the items listed in a rough order of rarity. Next to each item was a code word that I couldn't decipher as well as a date. The date acquired, perhaps?
  
  The top of the list was "Scorpion-22 | IEC Dragoon borg, damaged (irreparable), 2030 model, Value unknown or zero | 21 FEB 2059."
  
  Ah. It wasn't a mech or an armour suit. It was a full-body conversion. You could have your entire body replaced with cybernetics, and this was one of the military models. I was suddenly very curious about where Alt-Danny was located towards the end of February 2059.
  
  I walked back over to the Dragoon and very curiously looked in the back. There should be an access panel around... There! I found it and heaved a sigh of relief. When they converted you to a full body borg, they put your brain and part of your spinal column inside what was called a biopod, and they'd just slot this biopod into whatever body you happened to be "wearing."
  
  I was a little worried Alt-Danny hadn't removed the former... occupant from this thing, and if so, it would have been less a statue and more of a corpse.
  
  I glanced down at the list of items stored in the unit, raising my eyebrows again. There were a number of pieces of cybernetics, but most of the things here were... obvious souvenirs? The item listed with the most possible value was a signed Kerry Eurodyne guitar that he supposedly used in a show in Europe after he went solo when Johnny Silverhand died.
  
  Alt-Dad had always loved Kerry Eurodyne! The weirdest item was a broken wooden baseball bat, and I thought I could see some blood stains on it.
  
  I was kind of sarcastic before when I thought Alt-Dad had been some kind of spy or on some black ops team, but it really looked like he had been. All of the cybernetics, a good half of which looked damaged or non-functional, were of the military variety that wouldn't be that useful to me at all. Were these taken from downed enemies?
  
  I found one of the items I was interested in. It was a kerenzikov reflex boostware unit, listed in the manifest as "Kang Tao Kerenzikov, manufacture date 2057, value 5,000 to 10,000 eb." It was in a carefully packaged clear plastic bag. Not exactly what they were normally shipped in from the manufacturer at all.
  
  I put on some nitrile gloves I kept in my purse, pulled the implant out of the plastic and inspected it close to my eyes.
  
  I had finally Tinkered with some of the cybernetics in my body. My eyes, anyway. I realised I could take them out of my head one at a time, work on them and put them back. I wouldn't have to risk total blindness to adjust or add features to them, and I had been acquiring a lot more tools since I moved into the new apartment next to Clouds.
  
  I had ventured into the black markets of Jig Jig street during the day to buy a set of somewhat sophisticated microwaldo tools and magnification equipment that were intended to be used to repair electronics. Not exactly intended for use in cybernetics, but ultimately cybernetics were electronics, too, and my Tinkering power let me cut a lot of corners that way.
  
  Using these new tools and my good eye, I added additional features to my Kiroshis one eye at a time. They now had a low light vision mode, but more importantly, for my present purposes, they had a microscopic vision mode. I adjusted the zoom mechanism to also allow microscopic binocular vision, so long as what I was focusing on was somewhat near my eyes. I needed that to do the fine work necessary to replace the pigeon's cybernetic leg with a better one. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to see what I was doing at all during the surgery!
  
  I inspected the kerenzikov closely and nodded. Definitely used. I could even detect the almost microscopic scarring of the unit when it was extracted from its previous owner. The idea that a lot of these cybernetics was from downed enemies my father met during his missions made sense. I didn't precisely know how I felt about that, though. I mean, both Alt-Taylor and I knew intellectually that Alt-Dad had to have killed people, but it was different from thinking that and staring at something he or one of his men extracted out of the spine of a fallen foe.
  
  Placing the implant carefully back into its protective anti-static bag, I sat it down.
  
  As I sighed, I realised that my noodles would become cold very soon. I needed to prioritise that first; it would also give me time to think.
  
  Living in Japantown, I learned how to eat with chopsticks pretty quickly. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to eat in half of the restaurants or stalls in my Megabuilding.
  
  These noodles were quite good. A lot better than the noodles I had during my first excursion out of my old apartment.
  
  Not everything here could have been acquired during missions. There was just too much, for one thing, and second, there was just too much that was eclectic. There was what looked like a Polynesian war club. Tongan? There was a thirty or forty-year-old, fried cyberdeck that was affixed to a faux-wooden plaque as if it was a trophy. The Dragoon... maybe Alt-Danny killed it in a mission with a railgun, as I thought. But it was an old, 32-year-old model. I was pretty sure they didn't just change the exterior appearance every year like many of the car companies.
  
  If it was a current-year model in operable condition... well, its worth would be inestimable. IEC did not really sell a lot of these things. Certainly, you couldn't buy them with something as pedestrian as money. But it made sense for old versions to find themselves in less aristocratic hands over the years. Perhaps you bought this unit new but eventually decided to upgrade to the newer version? Did you care who you sold the old and obsolescent versions to?
  
  Perhaps even criminals might have access to these decades-old models. My impression was that the value of this particular example was mostly sentimental unless it could be repaired since it looked pretty well wrecked.
  
  Repaired? I hummed, stood up and walked around it. I often had ideas on how to repair or improve cybernetics. I had no desire at all to use any kind of full-conversion cyberware, but I let my power consider how it might fix this Dragoon suit.
  
  I stood there for over a minute and got nothing, nothing at all. I nodded slowly. My power wasn't considering this to have anything to do with a person's biology at all. I got the weak impression that it thought of it as a vehicle rather than as a piece of cybernetics that integrated with your body.
  
  I bet I would have had ideas about the biopod that stored the operator's brain, though.
  
  I grabbed a different item off a shelf after recognising the brand name on the black carbon fibre case. It read "Kendachi," and I had already identified it as one of the higher-valued items on the manifest and apparently one of the few pieces of cybernetics that hadn't come out of some poor sod's body.
  
  It was listed as "2 x Kendachi monowire, manufactured 2055, value 10,000 - 15,000ea." I opened the case and raised an eyebrow. I was wondering why the case looked so large, there were two small boxes inside, but there was room for four more that were empty.
  
  If he had to share some of his souvenirs with the men he worked with, then that would explain the absence. Maybe if he was the CO, he could claim two. Rank hath privileges, sometimes.
  
  Kendachi was a famous Japanese company that produced all manner of monofilament blades, knives and swords, and of course, this monofilament wire implant served as an incredibly deadly built-in weapons system. You could sometimes see these on television and BDs, as it was very cinematic. It was depicted as more often the weapon of a femme fatale agent or faceless ninja assassin in media, who would be able to slice and dice mooks left and right with preternatural skill.
  
  Alt-Dad had built-in weapons himself; he preferred a mantis blade in each arm. I had wanted something like that myself, but I didn't really want to replace my entire limbs with cybernetic limbs. Not only had I already paid twenty thousand dollars to get advanced bioware that relied on me keeping my meaty bits, but I wasn't sure I was ready to take those steps yet or possibly at all.
  
  Something like this monowire would work... except it was incredibly hazardous to use! I could see myself whipping it around and accidentally decapitating myself if I just installed it and went to town. I had gotten a bit better with my pistol, I went to an indoor pistol range at least once a week, but I wasn't some kind of... ninja.
  
  Still, I took one of the boxes out of the larger box and opened it. All the parts to install the device were there, including the special monoresistant ceramic components you needed to install on your hands and fingers. And a... data shard?
  
  I blinked and found the documentation. It was a VR training scenario that Kendachi guaranteed was over 99.5% congruent with reality for operators to practice.
  
  I got an interested look on my face. How many months would it take before I could not decapitate myself if I practised with this thing every day? A year? Years? The documents said that an experienced operator could be proficient in as few as fifty hours of practice using the VR simulator. Perhaps I should treble that estimate, or more, for myself. No, definitely more. I didn't know how long it would take me to feel comfortable not decapitating myself.
  
  I didn't know, but I was going to find out. I carefully packed a few things I was taking back home with me. The kerenzikov, one of the monowires, an assortment of broken cybernetics, a fancy-looking Kang Tao submachine gun and an antique and fried-looking cyberdeck. I kind of wanted to take Kerry Eurodyne's guitar, but I didn't have a guitar case, and I didn't want to damage it, so it could stay there on its guitar rack for now.
  
  I called Delamain and carefully locked up behind myself. Sitting in the back of the cab, I considered what I had found. There were a lot more things in there than I thought, but a lot of them were completely worthless.
  
  I supposed they could be broken down into four categories, worthless things like the baseball bat, easily salable things, things I would have to sell on the black market and then things I couldn't sell no matter what, which might as well make them worthless. That last category was mainly the Dragoon full-body conversion, even if it was broken. Its weapon systems were intact, and surely there was some salvage value, but how would I sell any of it without being murdered?
  
  I could maybe get thirty or forty thousand eurodollars if I sold all of the easily salable things. That would get me back up to the amount of money I had after I received Militech's settlement. Almost. As for the black market items? That would be more difficult, but my takeaway altogether might get me half again as much because I doubted I would get even a fraction of the value for any of it. I didn't have those kinds of connections, and I was sure some of the names on the list my dad left would charge a fee.
  
  The stuff was worth a lot of money, but it seemed like a big pain to liquidate it. Honestly, I was hoping there would be vast wealth in there. Maybe giant bags full of blood diamonds, or the original Mona Lisa painting or something.
  
  I wasn't going to look at an entire storage unit full of free items worth tens of thousands of eurodollars askance, but in my fantastical heart, I was hoping I would have found something that would have solved my money problems entirely, allowing me to enrol in four years of medical school and live happily ever after.
  
  Sadly, that wasn't the case. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I shouldn't even bother to sell the black market items unless I got desperate, even if they were to names Alt-Dad left behind. At least a third were military cybernetics that I would find interesting to study, like the boostware I was bringing home. The rest were just dangerous things neither the government nor the corps wanted people to have, like half of a Soviet-manufactured man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher.
  
  I nodded. I'd get rid of the easily salable stuff quietly over the next few months and keep the rest in the storage unit for now. The unit was paid up till 2068, after all. There was no rush.
  
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  If you're not first, you're last!
  I inspected every centimetre of the Kereznikov over the next couple of days, using all the magnification equipment I had available to me. It would have been nice to have an example of a Sandevistan as well, but I didn't. Still, I knew the theories behind both of their operations from reading journal articles in the library at school.
  
  They were similar implants for similar purposes, but the way they went about them was different. Both systems were a combination nervous system and brain implant. However, the kereznikov went about increasing your reflexes by mostly replacing a large portion of the efferent neurons and spinal interneurons with electrical replacements. It would then provide an electrical interface between its systems, the medulla oblongata and the motor neurons in your limbs.
  
  Its philosophy was that not only was the transmission synapse speed between neurons slow but the reflex arcs of a human's somatic nervous system were not optimised and wasted a lot of time.
  
  Their philosophy, I felt, was a pretty good one, as evolution very rarely optimised anything, I felt. As soon as it arrived at the point where it was "good enough", evolution would stop unless some additional survival adaptation pressure could be found.
  
  The philosophy of the Sandevistan, which was designed after Kereznikovs was introduced, was that overall, the spine and central nervous system was a pretty well-designed system and that permanent alterations to it should be avoided as they tended to have negative side effects. And certainly, they appeared to be right in a lot of cases. The first-generation kereznikov boostware had a horrible reputation for inducing psychosis. Even the current generation had a bad reputation, but it was terrible decades ago.
  
  The designers of the Sandy system also felt that they could get much higher, if momentary, boosts of speed if they didn't have to design in all of the factors for a person to withstand a continuous operation. As such, a Sandevistan kept the patient's normal motor and somatic nervous system, but when activated, it would be bypassed to connect the brain almost directly to the nerve cluster closest to the desired movement.
  
  Some versions of Sandys included connections all through the patient's arms and legs in order to even further reduce the latency during activations. Both systems included hardware to be installed in the patient's brain that regulated the subjective experience of time; however, the Sandevistan also included linkages to the amygdala and limbic systems, which would be activated at the same time to give an incredible adrenaline response for a short period.
  
  Altogether, a Sandevistan of the same quality could increase a person's reflexes and sense of time almost double that of a similar Kereznikov, which was one reason they had become so popular. People, most of the time, rightly assumed that they would have enough time to trigger their boostware, and if so, the Sandy would always be superior.
  
  Also, getting used to operating at effectively super speed all of the time, twenty-four-seven, was an incredible mental stressor for a lot of people. I wondered if I would have the same problem. I definitely preferred the always-on nature of the Kereznikov system. My fears were always being ambushed, and if so, I didn't know that I would have time to actively trigger an implant, although it was kind of moot since I didn't have an example of a Sandy to potentially install in my body in any case.
  
  I had been making adjustments to the Kereznikov for the past day. I tried to keep my changes small because I didn't want to have to maintain a piece of cybernetics that was installed in my spine on the regular. However, I had a number of ideas to integrate the system more closely with my internal biomonitor and to make it less hard on my brain and connected neurons.
  
  The main physical sequelae to either system of boostware were inflammation of both the nervous system, especially at the interface points and the brain, as well as connective tissue damage from having reflexes and speed that the mechanical parts of your body just couldn't keep up with. Tendon damage and repetitive stress injuries similar to tennis elbow were prevalent.
  
  I wouldn't have so much of the latter problem, as the muscle and bone lace treatment had made all of my connective tissue and bones incredibly strong. I could bench press almost five hundred pounds... err, two hundred and twenty-five kilograms. I had to get used to the metric system, too. And I could do that doing reps, even if not very fast, which was pretty good for a lanky girl who barely weighed over sixty kilos.
  
  I wasn't sure if that was enough to consider me the lowest of low-tiered Brutes, but probably, especially when you considered my skin was bullet resistant, depending on the type of bullet and gun. A 9mm to my chest would give me a bruise, but a 2mm hypervelocity flechette with a tungsten penetrator would likely go through me and out the other side. Both were things that could be fired from handgun-sized firearms, so I couldn't even really say I was proof against pistols.
  
  The nervous system was a problem, though. I could think of a number of ways to treat inflammation of the nervous system and the brain, but the best option was not to get it at all, so I was connecting the Kereznikov with my internal biomonitor. As soon as my biomonitor detected signs of inflammation, then my operating system would ratchet down my boost level.
  
  This seemed like an obvious solution, and it was, but the issue was getting boostware to provide anything, but the full performance wasn't a simple problem. If all you wanted to degrade performance, it would be pretty simple but doing so in a way that didn't screw up the reactions and proprioception of the user was an extremely complicated issue and one that hadn't been successfully accomplished yet.
  
  I suspected it hadn't actually been researched too hard, either. This was military equipment, and that was all about the bleeding edge of performance. Actively degrading performance, even if only slightly, for the long-term health of the user might not be considered optimal. Alt-Dad said something like that, even. Ruefully, he once said, "Soldiers are cheap, Little Owl, but defeat costs more than coin."
  
  Before I knew it, I was reassembling the Kereznikov. To unlock the variable boost mode, I would have to practise with it on a number of speed modes. From full boost at first, then degrading the performance by about five per cent each go. After it got a baseline of my performance in each of the twenty-speed speed settings, then it would use that data to help jumpstart my brain's processing as soon as it switched between one of the settings. A sudden increase or decrease in my boost level wouldn't shock me; it should be as smooth as silk in transition.
  
  The psychological issues, though, would still be mine to solve. I could definitely program a switch for it to function in a similar manner to a Sandevistan now, keeping me at a degraded performance mode until I activated it. However, there was a reason if I had the choice between the two, I would have picked the Kereznikov.
  
  Maybe I was being arrogant, but I felt that I should just get used to it. I think I could devise some neural plasticity treatments to help me, too, if it were too much for me. That might be a good idea, in any case, as it would definitely lessen the time it took to get up to speed, pun intended. Just ensuring I used the sleep inducer every night, which had a small element of a neural plasticity treatment, might be sufficient.
  
  Dr Taylor, the kindly old man, sat in front of me in the empty conference room, "Miss Hebert, is there any way I can talk you out of this? I highly discourage the use of these types of reflex-enhancing augmentations. Kereznikovs, especially, have a very high incidence of causing mental instability."
  
  He wasn't done and continued, "The biggest symptom of cyberpsychosis is disassociation and disconnection. Having much higher reflexes and living as though everyone else is in slow motion is almost definitionally mentally disconnecting yourself from humanity as a whole."
  
  I nodded at what he was saying because I had already thought about all that, and he wasn't entirely wrong, "I'm aware of all that, and I'm certainly willing to take your advice as far as any harm mitigation strategies you might suggest, but I don't think you realise how much anxiety I live with about possibly being randomly shot in this city. If someone starts to point a gun at me, I want to be able to move out of the way of their aim point before they can pull the trigger. Plus, I intend to try and get a job as a Med-Tech with Trauma Team in the next eighteen months, and while their security specialists certainly protect their clinicians, I do not want to be a burden."
  
  That caused him to raise his brows in surprise, "You're a paramedic?"
  
  "Well, provided I pass my final exam and practical next month, yes. The local Trauma Team hiring manager was impressed by my grades and suggested I work for a local ground ambulance company for at least a year," I told him, carefully knocking on the absurdly expensive, seemingly real wood table in the conference room, which caused him to chuckle.
  
  He leaned back for a moment, thinking, "Okay, here is what I'll do. If you agree to a few biosculpt adjustments as a mitigating factor for some of the physical hazards that a Kereznikov entails when you're still mostly organic, and if you agree to come to see us at least once a week for six weeks, I'll do the surgery. Over ninety per cent of cases where people have issues with reflex-enhancing boostware are discovered within the first month. We'll just call these follow-on physical therapy appointments so as not to raise any red flags with the city's psycho squad. At your level of augmentation, I do not have to forward anything to the city about what precisely you have installed, but I would if I called them post-implantation psychological evaluations. I am very committed to doing everything possible to protect my patient's privacy."
  
  That was one of the downsides to utilising a law-abiding doctor. I doubted I could add much more cybernetics to myself without getting on the city's radar. I could maybe add one or two small things, but that would probably be it before I got on the radar of the NCPD. They liked to have files on people long before they got to the point where they might go wackadoo. It was kind of pointless, as from what I could tell over ninety per cent of cyberpsychos originated in back alley Ripperdocs, who didn't tell anyone shit.
  
  I nodded at him, "That sounds fine, before I ask what kind of biosculpt you want me to get... has it ever occurred to you that the idea of 'cyberpsychosis' seems a little ridiculous? I have read tons of publically available papers on it, and we have hardly learned more about it than we knew forty years ago."
  
  That caused him to suddenly laugh as if he wasn't expecting to find what I said humorously. He nodded, though, "I spent thirty years working at a company that specialises in custom-made full-body replacements, so yeah, I think both the popular public opinion and even the mainstream academic opinion on the subject leaves a lot to be desired." He paused and then looked at me critically, "But it is easy to be a critic; when I was a Professor at the University of Bern, I would have asked you what is your opinion of the cause, then. So?"
  
  I blinked and considered the totality of what I had been thinking on the subject, "I think it is caused by a multitude of factors, all separate but with a common end result that has been misidentified by some as a monolithic single mental disease. Pre-existing anti-social spectrum disorders combined with either poorly built, installed, configured or maintained implants that, over time, cause a traumatic brain injury is my best guess as to the largest single cause. Similar to the way that long-time boxers or football players are susceptible to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which not only causes mental deficiencies but also changes in behaviour. I'd be very interested to see if anyone has conducted a post-mortem pathological brain evaluation on multiple cyberpsycho exemplars."
  
  "Wow, okay, I was trying to put you in your place, but I apologise. That was a well-reasoned and logical answer. As far as your analogy to CTE, I think that might be a brilliant comparison in many instances of cyberpsychosis, but it doesn't explain all of them. There has been no shortage of theories there, social contagion like the last century had with school shootings that died down over the years? But I tend to agree with you, though. And, as far I know, no such paper has been written, even in confidential journals that you wouldn't have access to. A problem with the premise of that research is that the brains of cyberpsychos put down by MaxTac or other similar units across the nation are almost never intact to permit a truly standardised pathological examination. It is standard procedure to destroy the head of a downed cyberpsycho, even if they appear to be dead. You never know what kind of redundant life support system they may have installed," said the old man, taking a sip from a glass of water that he had brought in.
  
  He then shrugged, "As far as what bioware treatment I want you to receive, well, it doesn't have a name. I've made it up myself based on a number of papers I've read, but basically, it will increase the density and, therefore, the bandwidth capacity of the nerves in all of your extremities. I expect this will drastically reduce the amount of neural inflammation you should expect to see due to the Kereznikov pumping over twice the amount of signals your motor neurons are used to receiving on a continuous basis. I've used it before with multiple Sandevistan installs to the point where I will probably write a paper on it now that I can include a Kereznikov example. You'll be anonymised, of course."
  
  "Of course," I murmured while thinking about his idea. It was a good one and one I should have thought of myself. It wouldn't make the changes I made to the implant redundant, but it would tend to allow me to move at higher speeds longer before inflammation and then automatic performance degradation kicked in. It would let me work out and train a lot longer at a higher speed, which would be very helpful.
  
  I nodded, "Okay. I agree to all of those conditions. I was going to do a self-assessment weekly, anyway. I don't think I will experience problems that I won't be able to overcome, though." At least not with an implant installed in my body, anyway. I felt pretty confident about that. Everything else in my life that wasn't connected to my or another person's body was another question entirely, though.
  
  "Alright. We can get everything done today if you don't have anything in your schedule. It'll be four hours in the tank and then maybe another two for the implantation," Doctor Taylor told me as he stood up, carefully smoothing down some wrinkles in his pants.
  
  It was Saturday morning, and one of the few Saturdays where we didn't have to spend at the hospital, so I didn't have anything too pressing I needed to do. I had already blocked out this day to get used to the difference in speed before I went to school on Monday, so I nodded, "That sounds good."
  
  Fuck, that was the third time I hit myself in the face when I went to scratch my nose. I could see how someone could go crazy with this. It would make a lot more sense, from a not hitting myself in the face sort of way, to start training the system at a five per cent boost, but not only would that ultimately take a lot longer, but it would also stretch out the time until I had effective super reflexes. I wanted that as soon as possible, so I would just have to cope.
  
  The TV was tuned to the news, "Noooowwwww whaaat's neeeexxxxxt ohhhnnn Nettttwoooorrkk Fiiiiffftyyy Fooouurr Neeeewws. Aaaaree Biiiirds Killlleeerrrrs? Fiiinnnd oouuutt..."
  
  For fucks sake! I turned the TV off, sighing. I could see how this might be a problem if I couldn't get used to it. I had already used sped-up video clips playing on my implants to determine that I experienced time almost exactly three times faster than my previous baseline.
  
  Well, I clicked the news back on. There was no point in getting pissed off at it, even if it was kind of irritating. I would adapt. I heard that people could adapt to listening to books on tape at double or triple speed, and that was basically just what I needed to do, except in reverse, and for my entire life. It'd be fine.
  
  It was not fine! It was not fine at all! I had given up my plans to start at the maximum level of boost and work my way down and instead switched over to starting at about half and working my way up. It only took an hour of watching television in slow motion before I realised it just wouldn't work.
  
  I felt it wouldn't cost that much more time as I wouldn't, at first, need to work through the lower settings. Realistically I didn't need to get acclimated to the very low settings, possibly at all, but definitely not at first. I suspected that the biomonitor would only drop the Kereznikov up to fifteen per cent even if there were signs of neural inflammation. The idea was to keep it from happening at all, after all.
  
  When the kereznikov was working at its half setting, it was similar to experiencing everything at twice the normal speed, which wasn't as bad as almost three times. A three times kereznikov seemed like a pretty sophisticated version, even if it was several years old, so it was clearly one of Kang Tao's military models and one they didn't, probably, sell to the general public.
  
  I glanced at Mr Pegpig, the pigeon, and wondered. The news seemed to indicate that several Night City politicians were campaigning on a law to eradicate all birds in the city. That seemed... short-sighted. Both my medical sense and my knowledge of history were telling me this. Hadn't Chairman Mao done the same thing in China in the 1950s? And it resulted in millions of deaths due to the fact that insect and locust populations soared?
  
  I laid back on my couch and triggered a deep dive connection to the net. Normally netrunners would only do "deep dives" via a wired interface socket connection, but it was definitely possible to do so wirelessly, and I wasn't intending on hacking anything, so the slightly degraded performance was fine. If the way netrunners normally used their decks was similar to Augmented Reality, then a deep dive was Virtual Reality.
  
  I had already chosen and carefully built my ICON, my virtual avatar. It was a white, snowy owl. I flapped my wings and flew off in the direction of downtown. Over forty years ago, the discovery and implementation of the Ihara-Grub Transformation Algorithms transformed the net and made such things possible. They allowed the Net to be rendered as an analogue to the real world. They extrapolated distances and bearings to look similar to real space. So, since I wanted to connect to the school library's intranet, I navigated west, towards, that direction on the Net.
  
  Flapping to a stop, I entered the library's system, and my surroundings shifted to an almost perfect reproduction of the library's foyer, except there was an access control system that took the form of a stylised police officer, in this case, it was a reproduction of Sgt Joe Friday from the TV show Dragnet, which I remembered from Brockton Bay. Surprisingly, it was also present here, even if the actor looked slightly different.
  
  "How are you doing, Sergeant?" I asked the ICE.
  
  It replied, "I'll be doing better when you give me your login credentials. Just the facts, ma'am."
  
  It would only ever reply in something along these lines, worse than even a chatbot. I sighed, which came out of my ICON as a long, annoyed hoot, but I complied and triggered my credential management system to forward my login info to the ICE. The library didn't even pay extra for the seamless login module, where the ICE would let me through, and I would step inside the library. Instead, the world shifted, and I was inside the library instantly.
  
  I couldn't access everything I could while in person from this net address. Many of the academic journals had licensing restrictions that permitted freely reading their journals only if you were physically present, but I could read quite a bit of their books, especially ones nobody thought too much about, like histories.
  
  Doing a quick search caused a number of books to fly off their shelves and collect around the table I was using as a roost, and I bobbed my owl head in satisfaction. History of China in the 20th Century, The Great Leap Forward and its Consequences, The Four Pests Campaign: Objectives, Execution, Failure, And Consequences, and a number of others.
  
  Simultaneously, I triggered a word processor and began to peck out words with my talons and beak. Although in actuality, I was using my fingers, I had spent a long time on this ICON, and it had animations mapped for a number of different humanoid-only actions. Seeing myself rapidly tapping translucent keys with my beak and talons was enough to set me giggling for a moment, which came out as a rapid 'hoot-hoot-hoot.'
  
  Honestly, I didn't expect these letters to do anything at all. But maybe I could send it to one of the professors at school. There was an epidemiologist and pathological expert there. I got the impression they might either not know about this proposal from the politicians, or they didn't really care because, honestly, the effects on Night City wouldn't be too severe. All of the locally grown food was grown in greenhouses, after all, and rich people wouldn't need to worry about the uptick in bloodborne pathogens that the increased insect population would engender.
  
  Still, if I could present it to them as a no-work-needed thing, perhaps they would use their contacts in the city to do something, especially if I let them take all or most of the credit.
  
  I bobbed my little owl head again and got to work writing a well-researched letter.
  
  I got to the gym pretty early on Sunday and realised that my normal workout time might have to be adjusted. I was running two times as much in the same amount of time, and I was quickly working myself to exhaustion. That was... good, though, I supposed. Although, I raised a few eyebrows at the people watching me.
  
  The combination of my muscle and bone lace and the kereznikov had me running at what appeared to them to be a flat-out sprint for a long time. Little did they know I could run at least twice as fast as that, and more even if I switched to full boost. Having good athleticism and an in-shape body was absolutely a prerequisite for these types of installed reflex enhancements. Installing a high-end Sandy in someone that wasn't in good shape might cause them to have a cardiac arrest if their resting heart rate wasn't already low, or possibly a brain aneurysm if their intracranial blood pressure was exceptionally high.
  
  I saw my running buddy appear from the locker room as I was getting off the treadmill, but something caused me to pause and then take another look at her.
  
  She wasn't looking too good. She was diaphoretic and appeared to have difficulty walking steadily. There was no way I was going to let her get on a fucking treadmill; that was for certain. I walked up to her and took her arm to steady her, "Woah, woah." It was then that I realised that I had never introduced myself to her or knew her name even though we had been running together for months now.
  
  I used my Kiroshis to scan her face, getting an NCPD report that her name was Himiko Masuda, with no real rap sheet to speak of beyond civil infractions. I carefully enunciated each tone, talking especially slowly so that I hoped it would come out at a normal speed and not like I was auctioneering, "Nope, nope, Himiko. We're going right back to the locker room. You don't look so good. How are you feeling?"
  
  "Uhh.. not too great, now that you mention it," said the woman, and I walked her back into the locker room and had her sit down while I peered at her. I had taken her pulse manually, using a chronometer on my implant, as I held her wrist and shoulder, and she was in tachycardia with a pulse rate of over one thirty.
  
  "How long have you been feeling poorly?" I asked her as I gently palpated her body, my focus shifting to her head and neck. The lymph nodes in her neck were swollen, and the area around her operating system installation was slightly red and inflamed.
  
  She coughed out a laugh and shrugged, "Well, I've been getting headaches ever since I got this upgraded doll implant a couple of months ago. There were issues with my old one integrating into Clouds systems, and this was a newer version."
  
  I stared at her, aghast, "Months?!" I doubted very much she went to a reputable clinic, either. "Alright, Himiko. You definitely have a problem with your implant. I think it's best that you come back with me to my place briefly. I'm not a ripperdoc, obviously, but I am a med-tech. I can use some of my equipment to diagnose what's wrong properly." I paused, "Would you like to call a friend to come with you? I know we don't really know each other that well, so I wouldn't trust myself if I was you."
  
  She laughed and said, "Yeah, if you don't mind. Where do you live? She can meet us there."
  
  "I live right next to Clouds, in what used to be that old convenience store," I tell her.
  
  She glanced up, "Well, that's convenient. I was always sad when they closed up a year ago because they had pretty good burritos there. Let me get my clothes out of my locker."
  
  I let her get her clothes and shoes and offered to carry them for her as we left the gym and walked slowly back to my apartment. It seemed like we were not even moving we were moving so slowly, but I realised that was mainly the kereznikov combined with the fact that she was actually moving quite slowly on top of that.
  
  After a short elevator ride and a walk back to my place saw a young woman, a girl really, possibly my age, rushed over to us and askEd, worriedly, "Himiko, are you alright?! You look awful? Who is this? That suit you run with every morning? She's a MedTech?"
  
  Wow, good thing I had a kereznikov to keep up with motor mouth here. I was trying, especially hard, not to think about Clouds employing fifteen or sixteen-year-old girls, as I had detected similar doll hardware on this new girl. Was that just me being hypocritical? Wasn't I doing the same thing, except just my line of work wasn't sexualised, so I felt better about it? I wasn't going to criticise anyone doing what they had to do to survive in this fucked up city.
  
  "Yes, my name is Taylor Hebert. I'm a MedTech. Let's get Himiko inside, and then you can introduce yourself too," I told the motor mouth, who nodded while helping her friend walk inside my apartment.
  
  The convenience store area had a lot of boxes in it, as I mainly used it for storage, but I had managed to acquire some furniture here and there around the Megabuilding as people moved out and, for one reason or another, couldn't take anything with them. I always carefully cleaned and disinfected everything I took, though, as god knows what depravity people in this future did to a loveseat.
  
  I motioned to the aforementioned clean and disinfected loveseat, "Have a seat there. I need to go get some equipment." And with that, I disappeared briefly into the private area of my apartment. I didn't have anything as useful as a combined vital monitor defibrillator system that any ambulance might have, but I did have some old-school blood pressure cuffs and a firewall for myself if I was going to be directly connecting to her OS to diagnose any irregularities with her system.
  
  Firewalls were, strictly speaking, not one hundred per cent legal equipment, although I wasn't sure why and they were readily available for sale in most electronic stores. They looked similar to a wreath, but they wrapped around your neck, and you would connect your system to it while connecting the firewall, inline, to some system that you suspected might be dangerous of having malware. They worked almost identically to the braindance firewall I made myself.
  
  Finally, I brought a pitcher of clean water, a few glasses and a number of pills that I kept in my medical supplies.
  
  Carrying everything out into the next room, I sat things down on a table near them. "Okay, I am pretty sure I know what is wrong with you already, but I will need to connect directly to your system, place it in diagnostic mode, and run a few tests to be sure." I poured myself a small glass of water and drank it right in front of them, both because I was thirsty and to show them it wasn't drugged.
  
  Himiko nodded, and the girl my age bobbed her head and said, "Oh. I forgot to introduce myself. My name is Evelyn. Nice to meet you. Thank you for helping Himiko; she has been uhh... I guess a mentor to me."
  
  I nodded at the girl and walked over to sit on the floor next to the loveseat. I pulled an interface cord from my firewall and plugged it into the interface socket on the back of Himiko's neck as information started scrolling through my vision. I glanced at the girl and couldn't contain myself anymore, "Uhh... is it legal for you to be working at Clouds? I'm not judging or anything, but..." I trailed off, unsure of what to say.
  
  That caused her to laugh, "Ah, yes. I'm seventeen, which is an adult as far as sex work is concerned in Night City. This is only a temporary gig for me; I'm planning on becoming an actress!" Oh, so she was over a year older than me. Certainly didn't look it.
  
  I nodded and told Himiko, "Okay, I'm going to put your doll chip into diagnostic mode." This caused her to blink, "Oh, so I will not remember the rest?"
  
  I shook my head, "That isn't a function of how doll chips work; it is just considered a feature. In diagnostic mode, it shouldn't be enabled; you will be aware but not really able to move or do anything for a brief moment." That caused Evelyn to look interested, "Really? How do they remove the memories of when you were plugged in, then?"
  
  I triggered the diagnostic mode and started to say, "Well, the simplest method is to disconnect your short-term and long-term mem-" but instead of the placid diagnostic mode I was expecting, Himiko turned to me and stared down at me imperiously.
  
  She said haughtily, "It is good that you are on your knees before me, slut, but why are you still wearing clothes?!"
  
  I coughed, almost choking in surprise as Evelyn started laughing uproariously, and I quickly disabled the diagnostic mode, confused. Himiko immediately blushed and said, "I'm sorry!"
  
  I wave her away, "That's not a problem, but that isn't how these chips are supposed to work. Nothing is supposed to be kept between sessions." I started zeroing into the problem and sighed when I realised what the issue was.
  
  I finally say, "I don't think much about whatever Ripperdoc you used, Himiko. Let me explain the problems, and then we can talk about the solutions."
  
  She nodded, so I carefully disconnected from her interface socket and said, "First of all, the interface between your central nervous system, brain and cybernetics isn't great. The doctor that put this in probably isn't even a real doctor; second, it hasn't been properly calibrated. Third, in order to save fifty eddies, the doctor didn't download and install the genuine firmware for this model of doll chip. He half-jailbroke it, running it in what amounted to diagnostic mode every time you used it. That's not good for a number of reasons. You probably experienced some personality bleed over, even."
  
  She looked incensed, "To save fifty eddies?! " I nodded. Evelyn shook her head, "We make almost five hundred eddies a day, usually. Even if we only have two clients."
  
  Wow. That indicated that Clouds probably charged a couple thousand eurodollars, or more, to their customers per "session." They make more than her dad did!
  
  I grabbed a bottle of pills and shook two out, and handed them to her, "These are neural anti-inflammatories." I grabbed another bottle and shook out two more, "These are normal systemic NSAID anti-inflammatories, just regular naproxen you can get over the counter for pain anywhere in the city."
  
  I poured her a glass of water, and she glanced at them for a moment before shrugging and swallowing them with the water. I nod at her and stand up, and sit in a chair near the loveseat, "So, here is what I recommend. I can download and install the genuine firmware for your doll chip; I'll charge you just the fifty eddies it costs me and five to install it. You also have malware, a trojan, installed on your OS. I will clear that for free. To calibrate all of your implants will take about an hour, so that's one hundred eddies."
  
  I didn't actually have permission to charge for medical services rendered, but I felt that these women would be more suspicious if I didn't charge them anything. I would be if I were them.
  
  I finish, "I can't really do anything about the interface problems with your cyberware. You need some nanomeds, additional surgery or both, which I don't have and can't provide. I will give you a prescription of which type of nanomed you need and how you should take them, but you'll have to buy them yourself. You should be able to get them at most pharmacies downtown, but they're over seven hundred eddies for a one-month supply, and you'll need to be on them for at least sixty to ninety days. Ideally, you shouldn't ever go back to any of the rippers on Jig-Jig street. You guys make enough money to actually go to a reputable place, and I implore you to do so."
  
  Himiko looked rather furious, "I see. I went to the doctor that the management at Clouds recommended. I don't think I will take their recommendations in the future as far as that is concerned. Please, do everything you can." With that, I received a digital transfer of funds and nodded.
  
  Evelyn perked up, "Uh... can you check me next? I don't really have issues with my 'ware, but now I'm kind of nervous."
  
  I nodded at her, "Sure," while internally, I logged into the net site for Cyberdyne Systems... wait, didn't they make Terminators?! That Earth Aleph movie flashed into my mind. Well, here they made doll chips, amongst other things, and paid them fifty eurodollars for a genuine copy of their latest firmware. But before I did, I did verify that there was no associated SkyNet product line, just to be safe.
  
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  Stormy Clouds
  Himiko was relaxing as I checked Evelyn's implants. Hers was installed in a much better manner, albeit still not what I would consider good, which made me wonder as she claimed that she used the same doctor as Himiko did. Perhaps the doctor was just having a bad day? However, the same malware was installed in both her doll chip, which was made by a different manufacturer, as well as her operating system.
  
  The same malware made me a bit suspicious. I might have suspected it was something that Clouds was installing, except there was no real need to. Doll chips gave incredible, even if it was temporary, permissions when they were connected to the doll server. Clouds would have no need to install malware to get anything from any of their dolls.
  
  After verifying that Evelyn didn't mind me speaking in front of Himiko, I told her, "Your surgery was done a bit better, but I wouldn't go as far as to say that it was good. You've probably experienced slight headaches after using your implants. You're young enough that you would have likely adapted to it, but it isn't really a good thing to have to. There should be absolutely no discomfort in using any cybernetic implants. If there is, then something is wrong." I shared the opinion of the one cybernetic surgeon I trusted with my own body.
  
  She agreed to the same fee for recalibration, and by the time I was done, Himiko was sighing in relief, "I feel so much better already."
  
  I nodded at her, "That is mostly the anti-inflammatories; the calibration will help going forward, though." I pour her another glass of water for each of them, "You are also dehydrated. Both of you are, but that is pretty normal. Eighty per cent of people in Night City suffer from some level of chronic dehydration."
  
  I grabbed a blank sheet of paper from one of the notepads I occasionally took to school. Although I took notes mainly through my deck, there were occasions when I needed to write things down. I tore a sheet out, carefully folded it in half and then tore it down the folds.
  
  I wrote several things on each piece of paper and then slid each to the women, who took it and glanced at it. Himiko blinked and asked, "What does PRN mean?"
  
  Uhhh... I wrote those on autopilot. That's a good question. I thought about it for a moment, "It's an abbreviation for Latin, pro re nata, which is used in the healthcare industry as a shorthand. It translates to as needed. So it means as needed for pain. That's the neural anti-inflammatory I gave you, I will give you enough for a couple of days, but you will probably need to buy your own; it's pretty cheap and widely available.
  
  Evelyn asked, "I just got this one. Is this the one that is seven hundred eddies for a month? Oh, and why are you talking so fast?"
  
  I nodded while grinding my teeth a little bit. I had been talking in slow-mo the entire conversation, from my perspective anyway. I slowed down some more, "Yes. It is standard to receive a couple of days of this particular prescription at any time you receive cybernetic work done. Even if the surgeon is gifted, and their equipment is top of the line, nobody is perfect. Generally, they send it home with you from the clinic." I showed them the bottle of pills that the Skyline clinic had sent me home with.
  
  Himiko and Evelyn glanced between themselves, and then, finally, Himiko said, "I don't think either of us has ever been given something like that after visiting a ripperdoc."
  
  I shrugged before saying, "I can't say that I'm surprised. It's public knowledge that this is the main way this particular medicine is used, though. If you search the net for the medicine name, you will find thousands of results of people asking why they got this medicine from the clinic after getting cyberware."
  
  Evelyn shook her head, "No, no... we don't doubt you. We're just a bit upset, I suppose. Say... would you mind taking a look at some of our colleagues, as well?"
  
  I fidgeted a little bit, "I don't know. That depends. You see... I live here, and I don't want to get on the wrong side of the Tyger Claws. It would be... a problem. I am getting the impression, for a lot of reasons, that maybe they don't know exactly how their employees are being treated, but I would need to know a lot more about how Clouds is run first."
  
  I was fidgeting because I didn't think it was really in me to actually decline, even if it put me in a bad position with the gang that ran this building. The trojans installed in both Himiko and Evelyn's OS would have allowed, in addition to normal remote code execution, remote and invisible triggering of the BD hardware. An attacker could have had them scrolling BDs of every client they saw, which would be... very bad for the reputation of Clouds. Complete discretion and client confidentiality were one of their main selling points.
  
  Honestly, the Tyger Claws seemed sort of the type of group to shoot the messenger in certain situations, so I wasn't sure exactly what I should do with this information. I could potentially see them flatlining the doctor, and then me too, just because I knew they were compromised. Like Alt-Dad had said, three people could keep a secret if two of them were dead.
  
  Of course, that also was just as compelling a reason for me to go to them on my own terms. I couldn't see the secret of this lasting much longer than a few weeks, even if I tried to instil discretion into Himiko and Evelyn. They would tell their fellow dolls, and then it would be completely impossible to contain; only delay would work at that point.
  
  I could approach Mr Jin, and then instead of someone unknown from the Tyger Claws approaching me to find out what I knew, I could deal with a known quantity. A known quantity that was outside the present chain-of-command of Clouds, too, which might be compromised.
  
  Again Evelyn and Himiko glanced between each other, but this time Evelyn said, "Himiko knows a lot more about how Clouds is run; she can tell you everything."
  
  What I learned before I bid both of the women adieu was interesting. While there was technically a Tyger Claw in charge of the management of Clouds, in this case, his name was Kiryu Jirō, in actuality, Clouds was managed by a third party, a man who wasn't actually in the Tyger Claws at all and merely ran the day to day operations of the business and managed the "talent." His name was Rogan MacNeil, and at most, he would be considered an associate of the gang and definitely not an actual member. I could work with that.
  
  The name of the ripperdoc was Finn Gerstatt, and he was a new ripper that had, over the past nine months, set up shop in a clinic in Jig-Jig street, with his main clientele being sex workers of one sort or another. He wasn't the ripper that Hamiko used to get her first doll chip, but that wasn't really an endorsement of her first doctor, either.
  
  Himiko forwarded me a still of his face, and I ran it through both the NCPD as well as a fee-for-service background check site that was mostly used by private detectives. It turned out that wasn't his real name, and he was actually a former doctor named Ernst Streicher; he had a sketchy work history that her entry-level gumshoe site couldn't penetrate entirely, but what was certain was he had his medical credentials revoked and was charged with a bevvy of crimes in the European Community, mostly involving sexual assault, abuse of position, and some drug-related charges.
  
  The charges were still pending, but there was a notation that they weren't serious enough to trigger the expense of extradition or rendition, but there was a reward if he was returned alive to the EC. That explained why he was in Night City, I supposed, and it made me worry about what he might do to anyone unconscious in his clinic.
  
  I wanted a bit more evidence, so I asked Himiko to send a couple of other dolls, at least one of which had never patronised Mr Gerstatt, and asked her and Evelyn to be exceptionally discreet for the moment. My expectation was not that it would last longer than a week, but it should be enough to get things in order. In Order, huh? In German, there was an expression to reassure someone everything was okay; it was "Alles ist in Ordnung." All is in order. Well, it wouldn't be soon for Herr Gerstatt.
  
  I spent a few hours working on the Kendachi monowire VR shard, managing only to decapitate myself once and dismember myself thrice. The VR simulation included pain, so it was very painful to do so as I expected that it did a lot more than anything to make people proficient quickly. You could even specify a time dilation factor in the training program, so I had been training on a time factor of three point oh, which would be me at full boost, which I would achieve... someday.
  
  I would probably have to install the monowire in my arms and hands myself, as I had discovered having an integrated weapons system acted as a multiplicative factor as far as surveillance from the city's psycho squad was concerned. It wasn't surprising because I didn't think there were many cases of cyberpsychos going crazy that didn't involve one with at least one weapon system. Usually, mantis blades or a Projectile Launch System, though.
  
  That meant that I could probably get one or two small additional pieces of cybernetics at the Skyline clinic before I installed the monowire. I was pretty sure I wanted some integrated self-ICE to help myself if someone tried to hack me. I could be immediately disabled, or potentially killed, by a proficient netrunner as easily as them flipping their hands at present. There were a number of commercial options, but I had been wondering if I could disassemble part of the Dragoon suit, as it had to incorporate a ton of electronic war and ECM countermeasures.
  
  In terms of repairing it, I couldn't do much even with my power, but using it for parts gave me a lot of options so long as I used those parts in cybernetics. Though the Dragoon was over thirty years old, that didn't necessarily mean it had lost its relevance or that it was thirty years obsolete.
  
  After Rache Bartmosse triggered the DataKrash and destroyed the Old Net, it set back technical advancement decades. Even recently, corporations were suspected of funding illegal deep dives into the Old Net, losing many netrunners in the process, trying to uncover what was essentially Lost Technology, like this world was that Earth Aleph game that Greg Vedor at school liked, with the mechs. BattleTech? Battle something, anyway. I remembered him talking about it at lunch periodically, back when I still ate my lunch in the cafeteria anyway.
  
  Things were so backward after the DataKrash that corporations used punch card systems for almost a decade; you could still find remnants of these systems in old construction in and near Night City.
  
  If so, I would have to incorporate a system that was somewhat user-serviceable if I wanted to be able to maintain any possible Tinkertech system connected to my brain. Self-ICE systems were usually installed right next to your operating system, so in this case, the back of my neck. I could find a commercial system that included user-serviceable panels, as customised ICE was actually not completely unheard of.
  
  Usually, these types of implants were only used by serious netrunners, though, so I would appear to be a bit of a poseur to buy one of them. They were also priced accordingly, usually about twice as expensive as an off-the-shelf ICE system. But that was something I could live with. In fact, being underestimated was probably to my benefit.
  
  I grabbed the sleep inducer wreath and settled it on my head before sitting comfortably in the La-Z-Boy-style chair I had in my apartment, setting it for three hours which would result in a maximum neural plasticity effect, which was good for both my training in the use of a monowire and for my training speaking and reacting at less than super speed.
  
  I rarely slept in my bed anymore since I tended to use the sleep inducer every night, as it had a tendency to fall off and wake me up if I was in bed and could roll around. It figured. Just when I got a comfortable enough bed is when I stopped really using it.
  
  I shifted the boost level to fifty-five per cent when I woke up the next morning, and things seemed manageable. It would probably take some more time until I really forgot that people, such as the News broadcasts, were speaking in what seemed like slow motion, but I at least stopped myself from tapping my fingers at super speed on my kitchen table while listening to the morning broadcast today.
  
  I continue my practice of hacking random people on the train after scanning everyone in the compartment, and I have gotten a lot better at deploying these quick hacks. Even if it was only Ping, a lot of the first steps to the process were similar despite what payload you were trying to deploy.
  
  School was more or less the same as usual, although today was one of the days with quizzes in most of the classes, which resulted in me actually needing the little pencil case I carried with me. They were pretty old-fashioned here, with all of the quizzes being on paper and hand graded. Although, I noticed that both Antonio and Fiona gave me a side eye as I placed my pencil and eraser in my desk area.
  
  After school, I walked into the library; I headed straight to the large room our group had more or less confiscated on an ongoing basis. Fiona was already there waiting, and she asked, "Yo, Taylor. What the heck is up with you?"
  
  "I don't know what you mean," I told her, although I actually did think I knew what she meant. I carefully slowed my voice a little bit more, which caused her to chuckle.
  
  She said, very amused, "You're overcompensating now; you sound a bit slower than normal."
  
  Then she paused as Antonio peered at me from the back. Was he looking at my butt, no... he was looking to see if my spine had any obvious modifications to it. He asked suddenly, "Are you running some kind of Kerenzikov?!"
  
  Well, shit. I guess it was a bit of a stretch to think I could keep it a secret from literal combat veterans. Xiao Li and one of the Trauma Team guys seem interested in my answer. I rubbed the back of my neck and said, "Uhh... maybe?"
  
  Antonio slapped me on the shoulder and said, "Fucking nova, Taylor. That's wicked. I haven't actually seen anyone who actually had the balls to use one. I have a Sandy, myself."
  
  Fiona's eyebrows were raised, "You seem remarkably not losing it, so I guess you're either well suited for that type of thing, or it's a low-end model?"
  
  Xiao Li's eyes shifted colour as I saw the hints of text scrolling past his optics, while internally, an alarm sounded, indicating I was being port scanned. Hey! I resent that! I didn't have a lot of room to throw stones from my glass house, considering I did this to hundreds of people a day, so instead, I just triggered a temporarily elevated firewall state. Xiao Li was clearly not a super hacker in that I noticed his attempt, but he seemed a little more proficient than I was. I told him, annoyed, "Stop probing my ports!"
  
  That caused Antonio to start laughing and Fiona to nod seriously, going along with my unintentional double entendre, "I don't think Xiao Li has yet got a woman to agree for him to probe any of her ports yet in his entire life."
  
  The Kang Tao soldier turned medic fumed, "I'll have you know that I, Xiao Li, am quite the lady's man! Besides, you're wrong! That's not a shitty Militech Kerenzikov! She has it locked down pretty well, but it is definitely a superior Kang Tao product; I couldn't figure out the model, but it bares some similarities to the Type K-03, which is generally only used by the People's Liberation Army and internal Kang Tao Special Forces."
  
  He shrugged, not at all bothered, "Although I have no doubt the company would sell them to pretty much anyone who asked if there was enough money involved. In any case, it isn't a small boost." He looked at me and nodded respectfully.
  
  Well, tell everyone, why don't you, you ass! However, everyone here seemed impressed, so that was something. The fact that he didn't seem to care that I might have sensitive Kang Tao electronics in my spine made some sense; even total company men didn't always have a full range of company implants. I had already discovered that the mantis blades Antonio had were made by Arasaka, for example, and I was curious where he got them too, but I realised there were any number of ways it could have happened.
  
  Fiona said, "Nice. I thought you weren't interested in putting yourself in any danger, Princess."
  
  "I'm not! If you can point me to anywhere on this planet that is safe, I'll appreciate it," I told her, slightly churlishly.
  
  Antonio chuckled and nodded, "She's got a point there, Fi. Besides, she's young enough that I imagine she has had less of an issue adapting than us old-timers. I remember hearing that the younger you were when you got boostware for the first time, the better you responded to it, but I don't think anyone would publicise actual experiments if they did any with kids, so that may just be bullshit I heard."
  
  I didn't have any illusions that Militech and other corporations had done exactly that kind of research. They didn't even need to do it themselves, either. There were tons of conflict areas in the world where child soldiers were common; you just had to ship in a few crates of "free" boostware and then track the performance, longevity and mental state of the "soldiers" involved. It was a double win since Militech, and other companies routinely supplied arms to conflict areas. Low-intensity brush wars were good for business, I guessed.
  
  I nodded, "It makes sense. The younger you are, the more neural plasticity you have left. Adapting has been a little annoying, but not the psychosis-inducing thing a lot of people told me it would be. It's not like I got it put in by a back alley hack, either."
  
  Xiao Li nodded, "It does make sense. But you know what doesn't? This stupid fucking American pig-dog national curriculum we're being tested on. Can we go over some of the pharm we'll be tested on soon? If I fail this class, then I, Xiao Li, will likely be put up against a wall! They don't even give you good American cigarettes before they shoot you, you know! It's cheap shit from the Soviet Union, I hear!" I wasn't sure how much he was bullshitting and how much he was serious. He probably wouldn't be shot for failing.
  
  In any event, I nodded, and we sat down and got to work.
  
  In the next week, three more dolls came to my door, one of which had never been to this Finn Gerstatt. She had some similar issues, although less pronounced. However, what she definitely didn't have was any obvious malware on her system that I could detect. That was enough evidence for me.
  
  One of the dolls that frequented that ripperdoc often told her that he offered to give her discounts in exchange for what amounted to sexual favours. The dolls weren't poor, though and didn't need to provide payment "in kind" like that. That made me wonder if Himiko's shoddy installation wasn't, perhaps, intentional, as it would be a different non-monetary type of leverage if he could "fix" her later.
  
  After helping her, I made a phone call to Mr Jin, who picked up on the second ring, "Ahh... Taylor, how are things going?"
  
  "Pretty well for me, but I was wondering if I could speak to you in person. Can you come by my apartment? I have some things that I don't feel comfortable discussing with you over the airwaves," I told him, keeping my face respectfully serious.
  
  That caused him to blink several times, "Sure. Can I ask about the general nature of what you want to discuss? I might need to bring someone else with me, depending on what it is."
  
  That caused me to frown slightly, and I paused as I considered how to respond. Finally, I nodded and said, "I have reason to believe that someone, not part of your organisation but entrusted by your organisation to conduct business, has been potentially breaking their trust with you both by harming those he is entrusted to protect, taking kick-backs, possibly embezzling and more importantly been complicit in the breach of discretion expected by your customers."
  
  There was a silence that lasted quite some time on the line before Mr Jin asked, totally serious now, "Is this in relation to some of the visitors you have had over the past week?"
  
  I nodded, "Yes." Although I wasn't a doctor, I did try to take the idea of patient confidentiality seriously. So I wouldn't actually identify anyone, but that was really only making myself feel better and possibly getting some respect from the Tyger Claws for not telling them who my "patients" were. But I was sure they knew more or less who had been visiting me in any case.
  
  If I didn't think this whole thing would blow up in my face if I didn't mention it to anyone, I likely wouldn't have called Mr Jin at all... although, I would have tried some way to screw this "doctor" on Jig-Jig street.
  
  Mr Jin nodded, "Okay. I think I understand at least a little bit about the situation. I will have to bring my boss along. Be at ease that neither of us is in the direct... how do you say, chain of command of the place that you are worried about. We'll be there in about thirty minutes."
  
  With that, he disconnected the call. I sighed, feeling very nervous about the upcoming discussion. The way I had decided to handle this was based on what I read in the library about Asian cultures and Japanese culture specifically. For all I knew, this Kiryu Jirō could be completely involved. However, if I said that was a possibility, then I, an outsider, was suggesting that one of their brothers was betraying them, more or less. Everything I read said I should definitely not do that.
  
  Instead, I was putting everything on this outside manager and the ripperdoc. I figured he was the actual culprit anyway and that Jirō was mainly a victim of not actually doing his job well enough and treating it as a no-show job that he didn't need to bother doing. But if I couched what I was going to report as this outsider was betraying the trust that Mr Jirō showed in him, it would be up to the Tyger Claws themselves to investigate and determine any culpability that Jirō might or might not have. It wouldn't have anything to do with me at that point.
  
  I had a number of refreshments that I had bought specifically for this meeting, just to be polite, and I gathered them from the refrigerator and sat them on a tray in the convenience store area of my apartment. There was more furniture set up there as well, so they could sit and discuss.
  
  I triggered the electric kettle to start boiling water in case they wanted tea and waited.
  
  About twenty-five minutes later they politely rang my doorbell instead of letting themselves into my apartment as I knew they could if they wanted, so I greeted them at the door and invited them in.
  
  "Taylor, this is my boss Mr Inoue. Inoue-san, this is Taylor Hebert-san," he said, the last in Japanese, which my auto-translator subtitled.
  
  However, this Mr Inoue spoke in English, "Miss Hebert, thank you for calling us, and I assure you that so long as what you say is true and you can maintain the current level of discretion you have shown thus far, we will have nothing but thanks to give you. Can you tell us what you suspect is going on?"
  
  I nodded and showed them in, to the chairs by the table, "There are some refreshments here, if you wish, while I talk."
  
  At first, Mr Inoue seemed ready to wave off my offer, but he blinked, "Wait, are those real fruits?" He asked at my fruit and cheese spread.
  
  "Well, I have no way to actually verify the authenticity, but they taste as though they are," I told him amusedly. "I suspect that they're actually cloned and genetically engineered slightly, but then again, what isn't these days?"
  
  Mr Jin was less polite, "Oooh... Kirin beer, nice Taylor..." He helped himself, and after a moment, Mr Inoue did as well.
  
  After that, I laid pretty much all I knew on the table. Inoue was quiet for most of it, but towards the midpoint, he asked, "What I have heard thus far is very troubling, but you mentioned a possible breach of client confidentiality. At Clouds, that is... not good. Can you speak to that now?"
  
  I nodded, "Yes. There are two separate incidents, one much more serious. The doctor in question, one Ernst Streicher, who now goes by the name Gerstatt, in order to save fifty eurodollars on the legitimate firmware for a Cyberdyne doll chip, jailbroke it and had it configured to run in a diagnostic safe-mode. This caused the personality of the previous session to be saved and not erased, as I found out when I went to put this particular doll into diagnostic mode, and she started acting out her last session."
  
  I pursed my lips in distaste at that memory and then continued, "That is mere negligence. However, on every doll I have examined that he worked on, malware was installed that would permit both remote code execution and, more troubling invisible scrolling of BDs anytime he wanted. Considering his past criminal history with sex crimes, I feel it a good possibility that he might have taken advantage of that already."
  
  Mr Jin groaned, and even Inoue pinched between his nose and shook his head, "Can you prove that?" he asked, finally.
  
  I nodded, "I have only examined four dolls that saw him; I am sure Clouds has a number of others that have seen him. I'm not willing to identify my patients, despite the fact that I am not any kind of doctor, but I can't help it if you have some way to know. If you do, then all you would have to do is examine the chips of the dolls I never saw. I imagine the same malware will be on them."
  
  I then reached in my pocket to pull out a data shard and slid it over the table, "And of the ones I did see, I took an image of the malware, and there are copies on this shard. If you have netrunners at your disposal, I am sure you would be able to identify not only the purpose but probably also backtrack the command and control and identify the actual culprit. I am just guessing that it was this Dr Streicher."
  
  Mr Jin took it and placed it in his pocket, and finally, I said, "Lastly, you could just grab the ripperdoc and uhh... you know, ask him. I presume you have ways to get truthful answers out of him." This last, I said a bit unsurely, which caused Mr Jin to chuckle and even Mr Inoue to smile slightly.
  
  Inoue nodded, "Three options. Good," he turned to Mr Jin and said, "I'd say we should do all three. Plus, I'm sure there are some questions about the manager Kiryu-kun hired. He's obviously got his hand in the till, but that is a much more minor matter." He then turned to me, "Now... Miss Hebert, it looks as though you will have the gratitude of the Tyger Claws. I appreciate that you weren't willing to identify your patients to us. That speaks well to your discretion. However, I have to stress that the potential matters about client confidentiality you mentioned must be mentioned to no one. Ever. In your entire life. Do you understand?" He was quite forceful and even menacing with the last bit, which caused me to gulp slightly.
  
  "Yes, absolutely. That was the main reason I called Mr Jin," I finally squeaked out.
  
  He continued to stare at me for a moment before nodding, "Good. We very much appreciate this." He started to rise from the table, so both Mr Jin and I did the same, and he turned to Jin and said, "Ryuichi-kun, take a quick reaction force and secure Clouds. No more customers today. I've already called Kiryu-kun over for dinner and will talk with him myself. Place the manager and all administrative staff under close confinement and wait until we can get an independent Med-Tech to check the dolls. Once you get Clouds secured, take a second team and apprehend this Doktor..." he intentionally used a terrible German accent, "... and place him under confinement as well. I'm arranging a Med-Tech and a netrunner from Okada-sama as we speak."
  
  Mr Jin, the man of so many words usually, just said, "Hai!" I don't know why but I found that amusing. Also, I guess his first name was Ryuichi?
  
  Mr Inoue glanced back at me and smiled, seemingly genuinely, "Thanks for the beer, even if it came with a double dose of overwork for me tonight."
  
  I nodded and watched them leave my apartment before sighing and sitting down, nibbling on some cheese with shakey hands. That was a bit stressful. I had the impression that the conversation could have gone a different way, one I definitely would not have liked.
  
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  I'm bona fide
  The next couple of days were pretty interesting. Himiko resumed her running two days later but wouldn't talk about it until they both walked back to the twelfth floor, and she asked if she could come inside my apartment briefly.
  
  As soon as the door closed, Himiko turned to her and said, "You won't believe what happened! I mean, I bet you saw all the goons in front of Clouds the other day, but about twenty Tyger Claw enforcers came in and arrested everyone but the dolls and the clients that were still there."
  
  She shook her head, "They brought Evelyn and me in with one of the Tyger Claw bigshots, and they asked us to tell them everything that happened, including every time you and I have ever met. No offence, but I told them everything. I mean, there wasn't much choice."
  
  I waved her off, "That's fine. You should probably not ever lie to them. They had already seen me. The fact that so many dolls had shown up at my apartment was noticed. But I have a fairly good relationship with one of the people who run this building." I was being careful with what I was saying. I'm not sure why I didn't want her to know that I had approached the Tyger Claws myself, but I didn't.
  
  "That was the start of it, actually. I didn't mention your names, but I told them I suspected that that manager guy, Rogan, was embezzling and that the doctor he was recommended might be abusing you and definitely was harming you through his negligent quackery," I finished.
  
  She blinked at me, "Wait, abusing?"
  
  I frowned, forgetting I didn't mention that. I specifically avoided mentioning anything about how the Trojan in their implants worked or what it was capable of doing, too. I just described it as malware. Since I suspected that there was a non-zero chance the Tygers might try to shut me up, I felt the same for the dolls.
  
  I honestly didn't know what I would have done if Mr Inoue had decided to try to shut me up. Still, I had both my pistol with me and also my alt-dad's shotgun taped to the underside of the table I was entertaining them at, as well as a unique device in my pocket I had tinkered with that might have incapacitated them. I also would have been a lot faster than they might have expected. I didn't think I would have survived long if I had killed or even knocked out two of the managers of the Tyger Claws, but I definitely wouldn't have gone down like a domesticated cow walking through the slaughterhouse.
  
  Did they still have cows here? I was pretty sure I hadn't eaten any, and although the beef scop had the taste of ground beef down pretty well, none of the "steak" options was very palatable.
  
  When I had first thought it might be possible the Tyger Claws might kill me to ensure my silence, the idea of a genetically engineered respiratory virus with especially high morbidity in only Japanese-common phenotypes entered my head, which I felt was... a bit much. Plus, I didn't have much of the equipment needed to manufacture viruses, and even if my power helped me with that, none of the viruses would kill before I was already dead, and then it would mainly kill innocent people. Honestly, I was a bit concerned that my power immediately jumped to war crimes, weapons of mass destruction and literal weaponised racism.
  
  Powers were... really quite scary sometimes. I couldn't even imagine what would happen if one of the members of the E88 back in Brockton Bay gained my power instead of me. I'm sure if I was in Brockton Bay and the PRT knew half of what I could do, I would have had a pre-signed kill order with my name on it just waiting for me to step out of line.
  
  Virology equipment I might not have; however, I did have a fairly full chest full of pharmacological drugs that I had been buying a little at a time for a rainy day since I got here, and I had managed to use some of them to craft what was basically a gas grenade full of anaesthetic gas. It wasn't like a... Japanese-specific anaesthetic or anything like the virus. But it was one that I, personally, would be more resistant to than anyone else. I'm not sure how, though, as it was similar to my yoghurt in that it was actually Tinkertech rather than anything that I felt was likely reproducible. And I wouldn't be able to sit in the gas cloud forever, but while it might put anyone else to sleep in a few seconds, it would take several minutes for me to succumb.
  
  I honestly didn't think either my guns, speed or the gas grenade would have actually saved me if the entirety of the Tyger Claws in the building were out to get me, but I didn't have it in me to just accept that without some attempt to save myself. The way I felt about it was... it was better to be scary than to be scared. Alt-Dad would have said, "Speed, surprise, and violence of action." But I think they meant basically the same thing, except I would have added "unpredictability", too.
  
  Although approaching the Tyger Claws had been the riskiest thing I had done so far in this world, I thought it was much less dangerous than doing nothing. The only other play I considered was immediately leaving the building and never returning, but I had no resources with which to gain a new identity in this world, and I had a lot invested in my current one.
  
  I shook my head a little to clear my thoughts before shrugging at Himiko, "I don't know for sure... but that Ripperdoc had his medical credentials revoked and was wanted for sex crimes in the EC. He was definitely harming you, though, but I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be unconscious anywhere near him."
  
  Himiko shuddered a bit, "Ugh. He was definitely a creep, but I hadn't considered that. Please do me a favour and don't mention that to Evie. I know it's weird; we basically do the same thing every day-"
  
  I interrupted her, "It's not weird at all. You choose to do those things with the clients you see. And you have scary men with katanas to protect you while you do it. It's not even comparable."
  
  She smiled genuinely, "Thanks, I appreciate that."
  
  After that, we talked more about what happened. The Tyger Claws had brought in a team of edgerunners, including a netrunner and a med-tech, to double-check my work, apparently. I thought that they might use someone on their own staff, but I didn't think for a second that they didn't have netrunners or med-techs in the gang. But, edgerunners... at least the good ones I had read about online, did have a reputation for not disclosing any of their missions given to them by a "Fixer."
  
  Neither the manager, that Rogan, nor that ripperdoc Finn Gerstatt, had been seen again, but the actual Tyger Claw manager, that Kiryu-kun, had already been sited as the new manager for one of their casinos on Jig-Jig street. Not one of their better ones either, so it was a clear demotion.
  
  I was very glad that I had put everything on the manager and ripperdoc to give them a chance to save "face." I wasn't sure what that meant precisely; in fact, a number of net searches told me that the concept wasn't completely translatable to English using any number of words, and it was only really understood if you grew up in the culture unless it was something like pounds and inches instead of kilograms and centimetres, then?
  
  I thought it basically meant that I hadn't embarrassed them even when I had the opportunity to do so, but with some additional cultural baggage that I didn't quite understand. That was enough for me.
  
  It also seemed like the Tyger Claws were going for the admitting a bit of what happened to hide the real truth play. While it wasn't technically public knowledge, I had been following a lot of local net sites that discussed both the Tyger Claws and my Megabuilding in particular, and there were reports on a site that was basically an unofficial forum for Clouds that the Tygers closed Clouds briefly after discovering one of their employees colluding with a third party to harm and steal from the dolls working there.
  
  A post by the official social media account for Clouds indicated that they were fine and that Clouds was covering the expense for each of their entertainers to visit one of the nicest cyber clinics in the city.
  
  I hadn't quite realised how... beloved some of these dolls were, as there was a hue and cry by a group of people claiming to be clients, demanding to know if their particular favourite was okay. Or about how easily they could sweep everything under the rug just by giving part of the truth.
  
  There were a few rabid posters offering to fund an XBD starring whoever hurt their favourite doll, and I shuddered because I felt there was at least a possibility that might actually be produced. The fact that there were what were, in effect, full-immersion snuff films around was one of the more disturbing parts of this new world.
  
  Oh, and Mr Jin was the new manager at Clouds, which I guess explained his inexplicable middle finger emoji the other day. He must have been giving me the bird for giving him more work.
  
  "Yeah, the Med-Tech and netrunner looked everyone over; they were specifically approving of what you did for me, Evie and the others; by the way, plus we're all getting free trips to the Skyline cyberclinic downtown over the next week with everyone getting a budget of eight grand to use however we want after he checks us all over," Himiko finished, very enthused.
  
  Wow, there were a little over twenty dolls working in Clouds, so that by itself was almost a two hundred grand expenditure. Not including what they paid for the edgerunners. From what I could tell, the Tyger Claws, when they did use a carrot, made sure everyone knew about their stick too, so I felt that there was going to be a truly gruesome fate for Mr MacNeil and Herr Gerstatt.
  
  Still, I smiled at her, "That's the clinic I go to. Dr Taylor is one of the best, if not the best, in the city."
  
  That caused her to nod rapidly, "Really? Do you have any recommendations on what I should spend my 'store credit' on?"
  
  That caused me to look at her and hum slightly, "He has a full clinic, so he has biosculpt services as well. It kind of depends on what you want, really." Text from a few days ago when I connected my personal link to her scrolled down my eyes as I reviewed what cybernetics she had. "Those BioDyne optics aren't great. Your current doll chip is actually quite a good brand. I'd go for whatever he recommends as far as the biosculpt for your general health and if you wanted cosmetic changes, which should be pretty cheap, and maybe a set of Kiroshi Mk2s. That would be about eight kay, give or take. Otherwise, maybe an internal bio-monitor or the biosculpt treatment for either nanosurgeons or an enhanced immune system. Things that will increase your health, keep you alive and allow you to earn more money should be your priority."
  
  She paused, looking curious, "What are nanosurgeons?"
  
  I shrugged, "It's a type of bioware, not cyberware. A colony of genetically tailored, organic nanomachines produced by a special organ in your body. Basically, it's a healing factor. If you get shot, you'll be much more likely to survive. The enhanced immune system is nice, too. It depends on if you're more concerned about violence or disease, I suppose." I intended to get both, eventually.
  
  "Oooh... interesting," she said, and then I blushed furiously as I remembered an option I hadn't mentioned to her.
  
  I said, after a pause, "Uh... I forgot to mention, but you could also get, you know... a Midnight Lady accessory. It might help your business. Techhair is pretty cheap too, they integrate with your doll chip too, so it would automatically shift into the hair colour, length and style preferred by your clients when the doll server generates their interpersonal ideal."
  
  In Brockton Bay, I had unfortunately learned the word "vajazzle", and the numerous Midnight Lady accessories were this to the nth degree, but they also had a practical aspect. There was a line of over a dozen particular models, some for "up top" and others for "down below", that were designed both to be aesthetically pleasing (or incredibly disturbing) as well as functional, in perhaps every way you could imagine. I didn't want to think about it anymore.
  
  That caused Himiko to laugh at my blushing and tease me slightly, "You're quite sheltered to have grown up in Night City, Taylor." She was right, and I would have to adapt a bit, especially if I was going to be working in the healthcare sector. It's hard to stay a blushing maiden while being a clinician. But then she nodded, "But you're right! I had even been saving money for such a thing, but I didn't trust any of the doctors I knew to put it in. Do you know how much they cost?"
  
  I shifted uneasily. I had researched almost every type of cybernetic implant that I knew about, including types from companies that were out of business or weren't sold anymore, so of course, I knew. "They range from very reasonable to ridiculously expensive, as in a bespoke accessory for a BD star might cost a quarter of a million eddies or more. But in that case, it is like designer clothes. The cost is for the exclusivity. The most common and popular... accessory only costs two or three thousand eurodollars, maybe four at most at Skyline."
  
  She nodded with a smile, "That's not bad. I might use my own money for that, then. The techhair and biosculpt are a good idea, too, except the 'sculpt will have to be subtle. I have a lot of clients who are more or less attached to how I look. But I'm sure if they're as high-end as you say, they can do a lot while keeping myself still recognisable."
  
  I specifically said nothing about that, one way or another. Although I went to a different biosculpt clinic, that was basically what Alt-Taylor and, therefore, I did, as well.
  
  After finishing the discussion, she left, and I went to school. It was a half day in class and a half day at the hospital day, and I was up to sixty-five per cent on the Kerenzikov, and I seemed to get the best results as far as getting used to it when it was set just high enough that I felt slightly uncomfortable with the boost and speed level.
  
  I think I scared one of the patients I was working on when I forgot what I was doing and sutured him from a simple knife wound at what seemed to him to be super-speed, though. But I was done before he even had a chance to look really upset about it, and the sutures were tiny and impeccable, so win for me.
  
  I thought it was a little bit odd that we still used sutures in this far future, wouldn't there be some sort of weird biomedical nano glue? There was! But traditional dissolving sutures were a lot cheaper and almost as good.
  
  About a week later, Mr Jin asked me to visit him in his new office at Clouds, so I found myself walking in, nervous, just to be greeted by a very kind-looking receptionist, "Ah, don't worry, Miss. There's nothing to be afraid of at all."
  
  Oh, shit. She mistook me for one of their clients. I supposed I did sort of look like their demographic, nervous, possibly virginal, very shy and anxious. I was immediately impressed by the hostess that was greeting me; they seemed very good at their job of greeting shy loners. I also found it interesting that there were two options when I walked in, with one route with a receptionist glyph and one route with a computer glyph. I supposed some people had such crippling social anxiety that they wouldn't have even been able to interact with the hostess lady, despite how sensitive, accepting and nice she seemed to be. It was actually quite impressive that they had a "zero contact" option for those sorts of people. I think I would have definitely chosen that option if I was interested in their services!
  
  I forced a chuckle and said, "Ahh... I appreciate that. But I'm not a client; I'm here to see Mr Jin. My name is Taylor Hebert."
  
  The hostess' eyes went wide momentarily before she smiled, "Oh! Apologies, of course." I could briefly see text scroll across her optics before she said, "Follow me, please." And after she was replaced by another hostess that looked somewhat similar, the first one escorted me deeper into the building to the manager's office. In Japanese, she introduced me at the door, " Jin-sama, Taylor Hebert-san is here to see you."
  
  I grinned a little bit despite myself. Jin-sama is he, now? But I supposed all the hostesses were amongst the administrative staff that the Tyger Claws briefly put under "close confinement", so it probably was quite smart to be especially respectful to the new guy in charge. I had looked that up after Mr Inoue left, and it apparently meant being held in detention in such a way that the prisoner could not communicate with anyone at all. That would tend to make anyone nervous, even if they weren't guilty of anything.
  
  "Come in, Taylor!" Mr Jin said, and I nodded to the hostess and entered his office.
  
  Perhaps I shouldn't tease the man who has no doubt murdered people, but my mouth opened before I realised what I was doing, "Oh, great, Jin-sama-"
  
  But that was as far as I got before he yelled, half laughing, "Fuck you! You know, I had an easy job. I was home at four in the afternoon every day. I worked bankers' hours! Now I'm responsible for this, and I can't even hire a business manager for at least six months after that last guy. We might even be in the red this quarter for the first time ever." He shook his head, "You remind me of my daughter in a lot of ways; she gave me shit about the hostesses too. Take a seat."
  
  I did so, and "What's this about, Mr Jin? And you let your daughter visit you in a brothel?"
  
  "You're here for thanks, basically. And yeah, it's not like I'm giving her store credit, and we're a classy place. She's not going to see anything or anyone in the halls," he said confidently, then paused as if to consider, "Honestly, I might prefer a relationship with a pretend doll than some of the boys at her school. I could maybe pull a few strings with her interpersonal ideal generator, so she doesn't get past first base until she's thirty."
  
  That made me genuinely chuckle. From my perspective, Mr Jin would probably be considered a villain if we were in Brockton Bay, for sure, but at least he cared about his family. I reminded myself what he was capable of and not to consider him a cuddly teddy bear, though.
  
  He then nodded, "We appreciate that you didn't tell the dolls any specifics about the malware you found on their systems; you left it generic enough that we were able to paint a much better picture for us of what happened. I'm supposed to threaten you obliquely now, but I'm not going to bother. You're smart enough to know what the deal is. The only people who know the whole story that isn't one of us are a netrunner and Med-Tech that have Okada-sama's full trust, so we'll know if the story ever came out, not only would it just be seen as a conspiracy theory but we'd know who was responsible."
  
  That was kind of a threat all in itself, wasn't it? I rubbed the back of my head, "That wasn't oblique at all, Mr Jin. That was a straight on threat. But, yeah, I take your meaning."
  
  "Ahahah... sorry. I was going to say something like..." He coughed into his hand and shifted his tone down an octave, taking the tone of a campy film villain, "You, Miss Hebert, are soon to be the only person alive who knows the dark secret amongst those that we don't trust." He then shrugged and said in his normal tone, looking kind of abashed, "But it sounded really cheesy."
  
  Then he waved it off, "Besides, the organisation might not trust you, but I do . I think you're a good girl, Taylor. So let's not dwell on such things."
  
  Well, I guess that told me the tragic fate of Dr Finn Gerstatt. I didn't know if I felt bad for him or not, but the fact that he implied that he was still, presently, alive over a week after being detained by the Tygers Claw was really quite sinister sounding, actually.
  
  I had a sudden feeling of... anxiety, but not quite. Disconnection, like I, couldn't recognise myself for a moment. Like I should be a lot more upset that they might be torturing this man to death, no matter how bad he might be and that I was at least indirectly responsible. And I shouldn't be exchanging pleasantries with what would be considered a villain, and I especially shouldn't kind of enjoy the banter we had. Even the worst villains at least went to the Birdcage, didn't they? But there was no Birdcage anywhere near here. And more importantly, I didn't think there were any heroes on the entire planet. At least there were none I had seen in Night City.
  
  I mentally catalogued the feeling for a deeper self-assessment later. If I wasn't a universal traveller, I might have considered it a possible incipient cyberpsychosis symptom, even if it was incredibly minor. But I felt that it was more like multiversal dysmorphia, for lack of a better word. My medical sense diagnosed it actually as something along the lines of "fish out of water syndrome." There were multiple names for it, but it was common for people who were living full-time in vastly different cultures. Expat syndrome, and a few other names.
  
  Living in this world for months made me start to question some of the things about the old world that I had taken for granted. Both Lung and Oni Lee had killed numerous people, and there were tons of villains like that. Why didn't they just use a sniper rifle to put a bullet in Lung's head before he ramped up? He definitely deserved it. I couldn't figure it out, but I stopped thinking about it as I wasn't exactly in the correct place to ruminate.
  
  "Well, you can tell your boss that the message was received loud and clear, Mr Jin," I told him, finally.
  
  Mr Jin nodded, still looking a little abashed, "Ah, good. Now, we've taken everything that that Doctor had in his clinic. Do you want all of it? The equipment isn't the best, but it's not terrible either, and while there's not a whole lot of stock, I figured that was the best reward I could think of for you."
  
  I blinked at him, "Uh... I'm definitely not a Ripperdoc. Sure I can configure or calibrate a few implants, but I'm not a doctor, and I'm not qualified to use any of that equipment." I did want it, though!
  
  He shrugged, "Neither was he. He hadn't been a doctor for years, not really. Besides, what else are we going to do with it? We could sell it, but we wouldn't get that much value. It's probably worth a lot more to you than what we can get from it, even if not right away."
  
  "Yeah, but I don't want this gift of appreciation to have any... strings or assumptions attached to it," I finally said. I was pretty sure I could do a better job than Dr Gerstatt, actually, but they didn't let people known or suspected of conducting illegal surgeries in medical school, and that was still an ambition of mine.
  
  He waved that off, "Don't worry about it. We're not going to show up at your doorstep and ask you to chip some sketchy implants into or out of people like you're a Scav doctor or anything. I just thought you'd appreciate this more than anything else I could get you; you see, our budget is kind of shot, so to really repay you what you're owed, I'd have to wait until next quarter at least. But we can do that if you want, you don't have to take the equipment at all. Thirty or forty kay if you want a monetary reward."
  
  I grimaced. More than I actually expected since my main goal was just not being murdered later. Enough for half of a semester at the NC Health Science Centre. The medical equipment was worth a lot more if what Jin said was true, and it wasn't bad. Especially if I could repair, refurbish or copy them. "Okay, I'll take the equipment and any other included things he had. You're right that I am very interested in them."
  
  Jin grinned, "Great! I'll have the things delivered."
  
  I finished both the written test and the scenarios using a human patient simulator fairly quickly and was pretty sure I scored close to perfect. With the scenarios, there was always a little bit someone could nitpick; despite all the science involved treating people was still somewhat of an art and still subjective in a lot of ways.
  
  Still, I'd know how well I did very shortly. I waited as all of the other members of the study buddy clique got out of the testing centre. The Kang Tao medic was pacing, "I, Xiao Li, am worried!"
  
  I reassured him, "You crushed it. I bet all the scenarios were ones we practised, and your written scores were getting very good in the practice tests."
  
  Still, he paced back and forth until suddenly we all received an alert, everyone scrolling text across their optics. I scrolled to the bottom of the e-mail to read, " HEBERT, TAYLOR: Written (100%) HPS (99%) "
  
  I snorted. What asses. They probably just took a point off because they could, so I wouldn't have a perfect score. I glanced around, and all the members of our study group looked happy. I looked through the e-mail, which had everyone's scores, and found a couple of people failed, but it was only by a few points, so they would be allowed a couple of days of retraining followed by a retest on the elements of the exam that they failed.
  
  People almost always passed the retest, but it was only available if you failed by less than 10 points overall or in either section. If you failed by more, you had to take the test again after three months. Even the two people who failed seemed to look happy as they realised they would probably get through the retraining. Nobody out in out failed in our class, which was a bit unusual. This national registry test had a passing rate of only sixty per cent nationally. Many people had to take it twice.
  
  "Hahaha, I, Xiao Li, have destroyed this puny American institution!" crowed the Chinese man while everyone else congratulated each other. I tried to duck out, but they wouldn't let me avoid the congratulatory party that they had planned, especially since a few of them told me I was the only reason they passed.
  
  They also wouldn't hear that I was technically underage and couldn't drink. About the only things that I remembered after that were singing, very badly, on the karaoke and then waking up the next morning in an unfamiliar location, on a couch, still wearing the outfit I picked for testing, even if it was a lot more crumpled. My bio-monitor was screeching about alcohol and dehydration, and I sighed. I glanced around, made sure my pistol was still with me and then looked around.
  
  I discovered I was in a hotel, or maybe it was more like a furnished apartment. Fiona glanced out of the next room, "Oh, you're awake, Princess? You want the shower before we get some breakfast?"
  
  I blinked at her, but she nodded. Why was my Kerenzikov set at one hundred per cent? I shifted it back down to eighty-five, where it should have been. No matter; I took a hot shower and then carefully put back on my crumpled clothes, trying to smooth them out a little bit.
  
  After that, we went together downstairs, meeting Antonio for breakfast. He said, "Well, if it isn't Little Miss Badass!"
  
  Shit. Just what did I do? I just glare at him, my head still pounding and decide to get some fluids in me as my biomonitor suggested. Finally, I asked him, "What... are you talking about?"
  
  Fiona blinked at me, "You don't remember? After we got kicked out of that first place, this ganger tried to mug us. Tony was about to bounce the idiot off the side of the building. What a dumbass; I don't even think that knife would have penetrated any of us... maybe you; skin weave is kind of iffy on blades. Kind of depends." How'd they know I had that? It was almost impossible to notice.
  
  Antonio chortled, "Yeah, then all of a sudden you zip in, grab the bowie knife out of his hand and cut his pants off and start trying to pick your teeth with the blade while his pants fell down. The poor guy, I was just gonna thump him. But I wouldn't have done him as you did. He ran away crying!"
  
  Fuck. I guess that was why my Kerenzikov was at full speed. I think I am blushing a lot. No matter what anyone says, I'm never to drink again. At least until I'm twenty-one! But when Antonio slams a fucking short sword on the table and says, "Here, your trophy of combat!" I just started groaning.
  
  The man sitting across from me was dressed fairly well. I hadn't gone for my boardroom outfit because this company wasn't on that level, but I was wearing one that was a bit better than what I normally wore, including a pencil skirt, but this one was a little more modest and went down to slightly below my knees.
  
  "So, Miss Taylor... your grades and test score on the national registry test are all impeccable. You could probably get a job at any of the hospitals or trauma centres in Night City. Why did you apply at NC Med Ambulance?" asked the man. He didn't seem to be an HR drone but was likely one of the line managers.
  
  I decided not hiding anything was the best play here, as there were only a few true answers to this question from someone with my grades and background. NC Med Ambulance wasn't a bad company, but it was small, and I could get a better-paid position if I wanted one elsewhere, "A Trauma Team hiring manager was interested in me but said I could either work in a hospital setting for three years in critical care or twelve months working 911 calls in Night City. I hope to get enough experience at your company to be more competitive in a year or eighteen months to make that possibility a reality. But I will be an excellent worker while I am here."
  
  He grinned, "Thanks for being upfront with me. That's kind of what I expected, but I appreciate not blowing smoke up my skirt. When can you start?"
  
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  Rockstar of medicine
  There were a number of things I didn't like about my new job. And I experienced two of them right away. Namely, the uniform included a garish, high-visibility safety-yellow jacket with reflective white stripes. This was part of a standard uniform of any med-tech working emergency calls, and the requirements were set by the city so that medtechs and paramedics could be easily and quickly identified. On the plus side, it was made of a ballistic kevlar microwave and was supposedly bullet resistant. It also had a smart holoprojector in the back that was mainly used in mass casualty incidents to identify which medic was from which responding unit.
  
  Oh, and I had to buy it, and it cost about fifty per cent more than it should have since there was no other place I could get it from but the city.
  
  The second issue was that carrying firearms were strictly prohibited while working. This latter dictate was direct from the city, and it was a requirement of any company that had contracts to respond to 911 calls, but I had to admit that it made some sense. There was a tentative agreement, even amongst gangs, that ambulances that responded to 911 calls were off-limits; only the most depraved Scavs might attack an ambulance. Oh, and Maelstrom possibly, but usually only the cyberpsychos of the gang. That might have changed if it was possible that ambulances could be armed and be possible combatants themselves.
  
  It did make me accelerate my plans to install the monowire on myself, just to give myself the option to defend myself if I ran into one of those types of people while working. I had the Kendachi implant in bits on my workbench at home, and although I didn't think I could add much to make it more dangerous - it was already almost ultimately dangerous - I had a number of ideas of how to conceal it.
  
  I was reworking the wire slot to look indistinguishable from a personal link slot. I also thought I had a way to make the monoresistant ceramic finger inserts transparent. If so, I could include a layer of variable SmartPaint underneath that would allow me to match the colour of the inserts with my natural skin tone, which would do a lot to hide the fact that I had them.
  
  I hadn't decapitated myself in over a week during my daily practice with the monowire in VR. However, I still averaged at least one minor to moderate injury per two-hour training session, which equated to almost six hours of subjective training every single night right before I went to sleep. I had begun being able to do a few tricks with it that were both impressive and horrifying if they weren't done against virtual opponents. In addition to the normal whips and strikes that the VR simulator demonstrated and taught, I had begun being able to semi-long distance lassos.
  
  In the simulation last night, I had jumped down a single-story building amongst a group of enemies and lassoed one of the virtual mooks by the neck, decapitating him instantly, then shifted into a series of lightning-quick whips and slashes that put paid the other five goons. It was true that towards the end, I accidentally cut off my hand at the wrist when I botched grabbing the fast-moving monowire, but up until that, I seemed like some kind of ninja!
  
  As I was finished getting dressed, an incoming call startled me. For a moment, I didn't recognise the name, but then I realised it was the Professor of epidemiology that I had met briefly at NCU, giving them what I thought was a well-researched letter and essay about the consequences of the potential move to kill all of the birds in the city limits, including historical examples from the People's Republic's Four Pests campaign against Eurasian sparrows.
  
  I hadn't heard anything about it for weeks, so I figured it was just ignored. I picked up on the third ring and said, "Hebert."
  
  "Ah, Miss Hebert. Hello. This is Professor Hidalgo. You met me briefly during my office hours several weeks ago, do you recall?" came the voice; the picture-in-picture in the lower right corner of my vision was a middle-aged man wearing an actual tweed jacket, complete with those little leather patches on the elbows.
  
  One thing I had noticed about the world was that it was so far from 2011 that a lot of things that I would consider stereotypical, even to the extreme of becoming a cartoonish trope, had gone full circle and become retro-chic, or even stylish if usually modified in a neokitsch style. However, when I bought clothes, I usually stuck to the style that Alt-Taylor liked, which was a Militech-inspired militaristic style featuring dark colours, usually black or dark blues and with subdued and modest cuts.
  
  It was the closest style of clothes that met my internal definition of "professional" and "modest", but it was definitely, almost definitionally, a Corpo style, such that I even got side eyes walking into the door whenever I came to work. Although NC Med Ambulance was a corporation, technically, it was really just a small company, and all the workers were working-class people. The image I was projecting didn't quite fit in, but I didn't know how to change that.
  
  I answered him politely, wondering if this was actually about my letter, "Of course, sir. How can I help you, Dr Hidalgo?" I couldn't imagine what else it could be about. He was a bit too old to be asking me out on a date, after all.
  
  "I had finally gotten around to reading the two letters you left with me, and after doing a bit of research, I think you are correct in your guess that this is seen as just a simple political bafflegab, something to rile up the proles as it were before the election in November. It is actually quite distressing, not only because I agree with your estimates on the likely consequences but more importantly, the people behind this are especially terrible and shouldn't be voted into office!" came his agitated and slightly distressed voice.
  
  Some of the words that were commonplace perplexed me, but I guess I could realise what the composite word 'bafflegab' could mean from context and its constituent elements. And I realised I was completely stupid when I approached this Professor. Of course, someone as highly placed as a university professor would have overriding political opinions or, more likely political opinions of the corporations that funded his research grants. It was a mere chance that his political opinions lined up with the goals I had. I wanted the people campaigning to kill the birds to stop, and he didn't like those people. How stupid I was that I assumed his academic or professional ethics would override pragmatism.
  
  Still, I'd accept luck when it came my way. The way he was talking to me was superior to a slightly inferior, but he was talking to me as if I was in a similar peer caste as he was, i.e. referring to the voters as a whole as proles. I wondered if that was because I wrote a really well-researched paper both about epidemiology and historical matters from over one hundred years ago - that was a pretty arcane intersection of academic interests for a teenager. He might suspect me of being some kind of power progeny, and if not, he at least considered me highly educated.
  
  I was glad that I had my call settings configured to crop only my face in the call. He might have been surprised to see me in the garb of a meagre city worker, "Of course. I'm quite concerned, although I have to admit my interests are mainly so that I don't have to buy drums of DDT to dip myself in a few years when the mosquito population surges beyond all control, rather than the obvious political implications. How can I help you? Do you need anything from me to push this forward?"
  
  He chuckled, thinking incorrectly that I was joking. "Yes, the letter you sent said that we could use the subsequent essay you wrote however we wanted. I'm just calling so that we can nail down some particulars regarding that. I appreciate your offer to gift it to me, but obviously, University policy would prohibit that."
  
  I blinked a little bit and was a little surprised that he cared about university policy. I didn't care if I got credit for the essay I wrote. I made a non-committal sound to give myself a moment to think, and then I said, "Well, I wouldn't mind if you attributed yourself as the only author at all, but if that wasn't possible... then perhaps you could list me as second... no, probably the third author. I assume you will have to coordinate with someone from the History faculty, too, unless you have a particular personal interest in the subject of 20th-century Chinese history. There's no real need to forward any edits to me, either, unless you change the entire thrust of the essay."
  
  His face brightened immediately, and I realised I had scored. He might have been ethical enough not to completely steal my work, but that didn't mean he didn't actually want to steal it, just that he wanted to do it in a way that followed procedure. Being the first author on a paper was the only thing his fellow academics looked at anyway, and I imagined he would use the slave labour of some History faculty grad student as the second author and list me as third just to satisfy propriety. "That's splendid, Miss Hebert! That's precisely what I was going to suggest; I'm so glad that we're on the same page now. I don't think there will be significant edits, and I think this will be published soon; some of my friends in the City Council will then try to use it to smash these idiots' hands in the cookie jar, so to speak. I have every belief this will blow up in their faces."
  
  I nodded. I didn't care about all that. I didn't want to be eaten up by mosquitoes. And I didn't want Mr Pigpeg and his girlfriend to be shot. They had set up a nest near my window at home and usually bothered me for food most mornings. The little shit was quite demanding now. Still, I said, "That sounds great, Professor. If you ever need any help from me on the matter or anything else, please give me a call or mail. I realise that you're acting out of your own self-interest too, but I still consider that I owe you one."
  
  He paused at that and then, after a moment, nodded, "I was going to say the same to you because this will make me look smarter than I actually am with my political friends. But very well, let us both carry this favour on our books going forward."
  
  With that, we both disconnected, and I walked over to meet the two people I would be working with today and for a couple of weeks.
  
  The way training for a new clinician at an ambulance company worked was pretty universal. You had a week or two of classroom instruction where you learned the procedures, and the specific patient care guidelines that the company had promulgated, which I had thankfully already completed.
  
  This was my first day actually "on the job," so to speak, but they didn't just throw you into an ambulance and tell you to get to it. For a couple of weeks, you had to be what was called a "third rider", where you just shadowed an existing and experience two-person ambulance team. Generally, third riders would do the work and charting, or medical documentation, as if they were working normally while supervised by a preceptor, which was a more experienced med-tech or a paramedic. In my case, my preceptor was the same man who had hired me, one of the line supervisors.
  
  That didn't surprise me because I was hired as a paramedic, was only sixteen years old, and had no work experience. Most of the med-techs working for this company were only technically EMTs. Actual certified paramedics would be in charge of any of the units they were put in, as there was no way that the short-staffed company would run double paramedics on a single truck. So since I was both young and inexperienced and a paramedic, I expected to be put through the wringer a little bit during my third rider stage, but it was fine as I could cope. I also expected I would get one of the more steady medtechs as my partner when I finished third riding as well.
  
  Thinking of the fact that my birthday passed a little while ago, mostly unremarked, made me a little homesick. I wondered what my dad was doing and hoped that he was happy.
  
  "Taylor! Over here, we're about to go look at the truck we're assigned today," called out the lanky man who did my initial interview. His name was James Burt, but he preferred to be called Jim.
  
  I glanced over and saw him with a brunette-haired woman in her mid-thirties. Jim introduced us, "Taylor, this is Theresa West. Theresa, this is Taylor Hebert; she'll be third riding with us for a while." We shook hands, exchanged pleasantries and then went to the motor pool to pick up our ambulance.
  
  Both of them walked me through the correct procedures; you had to carefully inspect the ambulance for any damage as if you were picking up a rental car because if there was damage that you didn't notice after you signed for the truck, then you fucking did it as far as they were concerned.
  
  Then we had to carefully catalogue all of our supplies, consumables and drugs, making sure we were fully outfitted. We tested all of our equipment and inventoried our consumables. The drugs were separated into one large container that reminded me of a fishing tackle box that carried all of the normal drugs one would use for emergency calls and a much smaller box that we had to sign out from an armoured vending machine that contained all of our narcotics. Usually, the paramedic of the team carried these as they were technically the ones responsible for them as basic and intermediate EMTs could not administer narcotics unsupervised, so Jim handed me the small box after we carefully inventoried the three dozen or so small vials inside.
  
  The narcs we carried were a synthetic opiate that made fentanyl seem mild for pain, actual fentanyl, about four different types of anxiolytic medications, and a lot of ketamine. Apparently, it was used both as an analgesic and partly as a sedative. The slang was to "drop someone in the K-hole."
  
  I placed it inside my jacket, in one of the interior pockets that seemed as though it was explicitly sized for it. Perhaps it was.
  
  It didn't take long at all for our first call, and it was a doozy. We were all hooked into the city police net through our implants, although there was an actual encrypted radio unit in the ambulance as well.
  
  *bzzt* The glyph highlighted in my vision indicated it was a police officer speaking, and the pointer indicated it was up ahead and relatively close, "10-45, here. We're going to have to get this highway shut down. Confirmed MVC involving a bus, 37 people onboard. Looks like bus versus a MaiMai; the driver of the MaiMai confirmed DOA. Secondary collisions, get a few units up here, please, Dispatch."
  
  Theresa was in the back of the unit, audibly snoring, and Jim, while driving, smacked the partition that separated the back of the ambulance from the cab and yelled, "Alright, wake up. It looks like we will probably have a call. Taylor, go ahead and check the nearby vehicles, then switch on code 3."
  
  I had already fired up the ambulance's scanner, checking the registry of any nearby vehicles, and I turned to him, "Should we wait until Dispatch calls us?" Although I asked him, I immediately clicked on the lights and sirens as soon as I determined nobody of import was driving nearby.
  
  "Nah... we're so close it's almost impossible we don't get toned out for this," he said with the drawl of someone who had seen and done it all.
  
  Sure enough, barely ten seconds later, an impossible-to-ignore klaxon briefly played in each of our heads before the voice of our Dispatch came on the line, "Unit 88, MVC on loop 210 in Santo Domino, northbound. Bus, 37 occupants, other possible involved vehicles, unknown injuries. NCPD on scene. Respond."
  
  Jim glanced at me as he easily wove around traffic, half of which didn't even bother to pull over for our lights and sirens, and asked, "You wanna?"
  
  I blushed but nodded and grabbed the radio handset on the dash, and pressed the push-to-talk. I could have done this in my implant, but it was cooler to use the handset, "Dispatch, Unit 88, responding. ETA zero three minutes. We're almost already there."
  
  I placed the handset back on the dash and said, "Hopefully, this isn't a mass casualty incident." That caused Jim to snort.
  
  "You heard the police scanner; it was a MaiMai. I bet the bus crunched it like a Nicola can. Probably then got rear-ended by the cars behind it. I bet only a few of the people on the bus are injured," said the more experienced paramedic. But then he paused, "But if it is, I will take one patient, and you and Theresa can stabilise another."
  
  I nodded and then looked up ahead to see a huge traffic backlog, but a few NCPD patrol cars had already opened up a small path so that we could drive right up to the scene of the accident. I got on the radio to report that we were on scene, but right before I was going to get out of the ambulance, another different klaxon played in my head, and we received the following radio alert, "Unit 88, Dispatch, be advised Trauma Team is responding to collect their client, NC 17728192 Anders Weber. They are zero six minutes out, redirect and stabilise their patient, then proceed to the bus after patient hand-over."
  
  Jim held a hand up, and he responded himself, "Dispatch, Unit 88, roger. Deets on the TT client's vehicle or condition?" But I had already zeroed in on a sports car that had rear-ended the bus and elbowed Jim and nodded in that direction. He chuckled and nodded, "Nice catch, newbie. Let's hurry. I always love when we get there before TT, plus the company loves it because TT pays us triple rates when we respond to their clients, even if it is only for a few minutes."
  
  I grabbed the cardiac monitor and the bag with most of our commonly used equipment while Jim was carrying the bag with our drugs, and Theresa had the ventilator unit, just in case. I scanned the man that was sitting next to the crunched-up sports car; he was bleeding freely from a few lacerations on his head and neck, and his arm, an obviously cybernetic limb, seemed to be seriously damaged.
  
  Jim took a look at his minor injuries and shrugged, and said, "You can take care of him. We can leave the field bag here for now, and Theresa and I will check the bus. Be real chill with TT when they get here; they're good chooms but take their jobs pretty serious-like." I nodded at him and handed over the vital monitor/defibrillator to him.
  
  I scanned his face real quick to verify it was actually Anders Weber before kneeling down and saying in my best professional healthcare worker voice, "Mr Weber? How are you doing? Let me take a look at you if you don't mind. I'm a paramedic."
  
  He glanced at me, seeming a little out of it, "Oh.. huh.. isn't Trauma Team...?"
  
  I nodded at him and said, "They should be here in a few minutes, but we were just down the road and actually got here first, for once."
  
  That caused him to chuckle, "Well... my tax dollars at work, I guess. Go ahead." I wanted to tell him that emergency medical services were privatised in Night City, although a lot of people didn't realise it since all the medics dressed the same, all the ambulances had a similar paint job, et cetera.
  
  I plugged my personal link through the firewall, which was actually legal for me to own now that I was a first responder, into his interface socket as I diagnosed both his injuries, got a readout of his installed cyberware, and a report from his medical biomonitor. I went through a neurological assessment with him while simultaneously perusing his internal biomonitor. He had an older version that didn't include a direct link to a medical provider, so that meant that Trauma Team didn't have his vitals.
  
  Almost on cue, a beep in my mind preceded another radio transmission, "NC Med 88, this Trauma Team Flight 4, we are two minutes out. Do you have a patient report?"
  
  I fiddled with my internal controls, not used to the particulars of this company-provided software, before I figured out how to respond to them, then mentally held down the radio talk button, "Trauma Team 4, 88, your subscriber has two minor scalp lacs, one minor lac to the neck, scoring B on the SACE, vitals from his biom are pulse of 144, bp of 165 over 94, nothing interesting on the tox report, his left superior has severe damage, its a DK-MT-201 by Arasaka. I was going to disconnect it from its power cell, as it keeps trying to deploy the blade, and I don't want it to poke me, but I can wait if you want."
  
  I had already started to clean and apply bandages to his neck and scalp, carefully avoiding the malfunctioning arm that contained a mantis blade and keeping it inside its reach in case it malfunctioned and deployed the blade on me. The SACE was the Standard Acute Concussion Evaluation, and although a B sounded like a good score, it meant that there was definitely a concussion and, therefore, at least a minor brain injury going on here. He couldn't remember precisely what day it was; he thought it was yesterday. But it didn't seem too severe; he was mostly alert, aware and had a non-altered mental state other than that.
  
  He also said he was only a five out of ten for pain, which impressed Taylor because, to her, it looked like it hurt a lot more than that.
  
  Trauma Team got back to me rapidly, "Roger that. Yeah, go ahead and disable that arm if you don't mind. We appreciate not getting geeked by our own patients, too. Also, if you could start an IV and administer 1mg of lorazepam, and a standard dose of whatever opiate you have, see if we can get that blood pressure down a bit. We'll have to land on the other side of the highway, but we should be there soon."
  
  "Mr Anders, Trauma Team is almost here. I'm going to start an IV, and they've directed me to administer something for the pain; they should be here soon," I told the man. It was always best practice to tell a patient that was more or less alert what you were going to do to them, then do it, then tell them again what you just did to them.
  
  I grabbed a small IV kit from the field bag, not bothering to move at the unnatural slow motion I usually did, which startled the man for a moment before I reassured him and started the IV, then pushed the benzo and opiate, followed by a flush of saline down the line. "Mr Anders, please, if you can, hold out your left arm. Your DK-MT has been significantly damaged, and I need to disable it briefly for the safety of everyone involved." He obeyed, and I let my medical sense and what I had researched about arm cybernetics guide me to an access panel, which I flipped open before carefully wiggling a power connector out of its position, managing to yank it free, which caused the whole limb to power down, and stop making those terrible grinding and sparking noises.
  
  I heard the AV overhead, and it landed on the other side of the highway, briefly shutting down traffic going the other direction before four armoured people hopped out and double-timed it, hopping over the median and jogging over to me. The Security Specialists were scanning everyone and everything, and while they didn't have their small carbines pointed in my direction, they did have them held at a sort of ready port arms position, cradled in their arms where they could be deployed in an instant.
  
  I took a step back, disconnecting from his interface socket, "Here's your guy. One milligram of Ativan was administered, and fifty mikes of fent. His pulse is down to 124, and his blood pressure has dropped thirty, both systolic and diastolic. Pulled the main power bus on his mantis blades, so they're in safe mode."
  
  The two Trauma Team medics were easily spotted as they carried quite a bit of gear and only had a pistol in a holster on their thighs. One of them said, "Nice. Thanks. We got it from here; I'm sure they diverted you; go ahead and check the bus now," while the other deployed a portable gurney.
  
  I nodded and waved before turning around and grabbing the field bag, and heading over to my two colleagues. I could hear another siren in the distance, which I assumed was at least one more ambulance responding to this crash.
  
  Jim saw me coming over and said, "Awesome, I was just about to come over and steal the narcs. Get fifty of fentanyl and twenty of ketamine ready for Theresa's patient. Then come help me with this one; I think we might have to RSI."
  
  I frowned and drew up the requested medication. I was a little upset now. These two from the bus were obviously much more injured, yet I had to waste time with someone that barely had a concussion. I sighed, I realised things like that would happen, and there wasn't really anything I could do about it. Perhaps when I took over the world, I could make it more egalitarian, but now I would just save those who I could.
  
  I walked over to Jim's patient, and he reported that the man had a moderate to severe head injury and, through the mechanism of injury, was going to be directly transferred to the trauma centre in Watson. They were actually breaking regs by splitting themselves up and treating two patients at a time when one was seriously injured, but I assumed it was our second ambulance en route, and if so, it would save a little time if both of the package work was done ahead of time. It wasn't something she would have decided to do. Still, she could see how a very experienced paramedic would make that decision, especially if they expected me to return imminently, so she felt it was fine.
  
  RSI was an acronym for "rapid sequence intubation," and it was one of the foundational "special skills" of a paramedic. If you stopped breathing or looked like you were about to stop breathing, well, we had ventilators to breathe for you.
  
  Jim glanced at me and said, "Alright, we'll do this..."
  
  While we didn't get back-to-back calls all day, thankfully, that first call took quite a bit of time. It wasn't even the most seriously injured patient we got that day, as that went for the last call of the day, where we responded back to Arroyo.
  
  *bzzt* "Unit 88, Dispatch, respond to the 2000 block of Jefferson street, Arroyo, the Fat Burger restaurant. Reportedly a man, who was pistol-whipping his friend..."-
  
  Jim interrupted the radio transmission with, "As one does," to which I nodded ruefully.
  
  "-apparently shot himself in the chest. He's unresponsive. NCPD on scene. Respond."
  
  That caused Jim to tsk tsk with his finger while driving and shake his head, "Poor trigger discipline, choom. Alright, newb, hit it. Time for the rockstars of medicine to roll out."
  
  Personally, I felt that was a case of instant karma, but I suppose we still had to save the lives of assholes, too.
  
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  Proper fucked
  NC Med Ambulance had a "traditional" EMS schedule of twenty-four hours on, twenty-four off, twenty-four on and then four or five days off. You ended up working about fifty hours a week unless you worked an extra half or complete shift on your days off. The burden was below average for normal Night City workers, who usually worked between fifty-five to sixty hours a week, with some working much more than that.
  
  I kind of liked the schedule since it gave me a lot of time off. However, it was kind of rough on the days when we had a lot of calls. Typically, there was time for napping, and we weren't running back-to-back calls the entire shift, but that situation wasn't actually rare, either. EMTs were very superstitious, but I didn't know if I noticed anything crazier during the shift I had worked on the full moon, but both Theresa and Jim had assured me it was a factor, if only for the Animals gang.
  
  In the case of situations where there was no time to take naps at all, the company provided free stimulants, although they were little better than various mixed amphetamine salts, so I wasn't really interested in using them. A few of the employees offered to sell me better, as in better for me, stimulants on the side, and I was shocked when one offered me the same neuro-stimulant that I had made my first day here. It was a proprietary stimulant made by Biotechnica, and it was definitely not in its trademarked tablet form.
  
  At first, I accused him of trying to rip me off, but he gave me a small sample to take home. I didn't have a mass spectrometer, but in some ways, my internal biomonitor did in its toxicology processor, so I ended up just diluting some highly with water and then tasting a small portion like I was a Dark Ages alchemist until I got a report that it was indeed the same chemical formulation that I was expecting.
  
  The next shift I was working, I asked him about it, and he told me that most sales of that substance on the street were in its powdered form. Apparently, Biotechnica were kind of assholes and included a formulation in their tablet coatings that would ruin the active ingredient in their stimulant about thirty days after the product was exposed to air. The entire tablet would turn black, then, so you would know it wasn't effective anymore.
  
  So, it was very common for organised groups to buy second-hand pills a few days before they were no good and unencapsulate the active ingredient as a powder from the tablet, then sell either the straight powder or make your own tablets for them.
  
  As such, I was currently making my own pill press at home. I didn't intend to get involved in the drug trade, really, but I felt that even if I brought my sleep-inducer to work and slept for thirty minutes or so when we were on lunch, there would be times when I would actually be legitimately fatigued, to the point where I would be a hazard to caring for my patients. If this was America I remembered and not Night City, I would guess that we would have the option to call for a few hours of sleep and go out-of-service, but even though NC Med Ambulance had a pretty good reputation for treating their workers well, all we got was free speed.
  
  As such, if I was going to be forced by necessity to occasionally use stimulants to keep myself awake, then I would be using the least damaging option available to me. A twenty-five-milligram dose of this stimulant would keep you alert and awake for forty-eight hours, plus or minus four hours. That was... too much. So the little press I had made had a die that was small, with the binders that comprised most of the pill, which was basically just sucrose; the small tablets would keep someone alert for eight to ten hours.
  
  I stared at the pill press, rapidly chunking out small little tablets with a little apprehension. When I decided I might have to have this stimulant as an option at work, I very quickly decided that I didn't want to carry some baggy of loose powder; it didn't exactly send a professional message. My power was a little off and on about what it would actually help me make, but "medical tools" was definitely one of the things that it was more than happy to oblige with... however, I think it went a little all in this thing.
  
  I had built it from a number of random parts that I had in my apartment, some of which came from the doctors' stock of cybernetics that I had been gifted, none of which was worth very much. I recognised the micro-rotor from a busted cybernetic leg being the main motor involved. I thought I would end up with a hand press or something, but this thing seemed a bit too industrious.
  
  It was rapidly punching out little things that looked indistinguishable from peppermint Tic-Tacs, including the hard vanilla shell, somehow. Tic-Tacs did not, thankfully, exist in this world. The company that invented them, Ferrero, went out of business a long time ago, I had just conducted a few net searches to confirm that, so at least there wouldn't be any cases of accidental overdose if a bottle of these fell out of my pocket and someone picked them up.
  
  "I... don't need this many..." I told the machine, unsure. Why did it seem like my power was always trying to get me involved with the drug trade?! I sighed, but thankfully after a few hundred pills were run out, the machine ran out of some of the ingredients, and the production came to a halt.
  
  I eyed it, curious. The binders were made of simple dextrose or sucrose, and I had plenty of that, and two hundred Speed-Tacs hardly put a dent into the active ingredient hopper...
  
  "Oh," I said, chagrined. It ran out of the vanilla extract. Or faux-vanilla extract, I assumed, since I didn't think it was actual vanilla.
  
  I sighed, shrugged, and then used a small pill bottle to gather up the tic-tacs and carefully used a marker to write the drug name and dosage on the outside of the bottle, just in case I lost it.
  
  Honestly, I thought the two hundred little tic-tacs would probably last my entire stint with this company, but I supposed I could buy some more vanilla extract and make some more later. If I just sold them to my co-workers, then I wasn't really a drug dealer, was I? No, that sounded like an excuse, even if they were much better than the company-provided stims.
  
  Still, this would be better than the brain surgery on myself that I had considered to remove or reduce the need for sleep. Although the idea of being a "Noctis" cape, like Miss Militia, appealed to me, I wasn't yet at the point where I felt that implanting self-made brain implants was wise.
  
  But I did have an idea for one that would supercharge the default mode network of the human brain. That was the operating mode of your brain when you weren't actually doing anything in particular. If you've ever found yourself daydreaming, then your brain was operating in the default mode network. My change would allow mental and psychological rest to be achieved a little bit at a time every day, every time your brain switched into this mode of thinking. It wouldn't be a complete replacement for sleep, as a lot of physical healing and important hormonal issues were conducted while you slept, but it would be a good first start.
  
  But... I definitely wasn't ready to do elective self-brain surgery on myself. No how, no way. And I wasn't going to ask Dr Taylor to install some obviously custom implant, either. I was actually pretty leery of installing anything Tinkertech into my brain in the first place. But that just meant if I studied hard, hopefully, and eventually, I could get to the point where I understood the operating principles of such a device.
  
  I shook my pill bottle of illicit tic-tacs. I really wondered what they tasted like. Were they mint? The outer "hard candy shell" ought to be vanilla flavoured, but... the diluted and minute amount of the drug I tasted for identification purposes was absolutely disgusting, even diluted, so I somehow very much doubted it would taste very good. It was probably best to swallow them whole if I ever needed to use them.
  
  "So, you've had the implant for some time now. How do you feel with it? You seem remarkably well adjusted from what we can tell here, so this will be the last time you have to come in," Dr Taylor asked me.
  
  I always had the Kerenzikov in one-hundred per cent mode when I came to visit Dr Taylor, as he took a number of readings from my biomonitor, which included information on all of my running cybernetics and a brain electrical map similar to a functional MRI and thought he'd notice otherwise. My speech was getting close to normal, and it was one of the things the doctor remarked favourably on. I was up to eighty-five per cent in my day-to-day life, but I had reached the realm of diminishing returns. I was getting used to the faster speeds slower, but I still thought I should be in full speed mode after another month or two at the most.
  
  I coughed a little and said, "Pretty good. People hardly notice, or if they do, I am not speaking or acting at such a speed that they remark on it. Perhaps they're just being polite. I have to admit that it has been challenging to get used to, but it has been nowhere near the psychosis-inducing ordeal that I had been led to believe. It's just been vaguely annoying."
  
  Dr Taylor made a humming and non-committal noise and said, "It's possible that you're just well suited to reflex-enhancing boostware. Two to four per cent of the population tolerate kerenzikov's pretty well, so it is quite rare but not unheard of." He glanced up in the corner of his vision, obviously consulting something he had displayed on his optics, "How about the interactions with your Biotech Sigma MkI? The combination of an integrated cyberdeck and boostware isn't seen too often."
  
  I scrunched up my face, "I've decided to constrain my use of it to augmented reality mode, curtailing any deep dives until I am well and truly adapted to the higher subjective speed. When you deep dive, so long as your connection will allow it, the net provides whatever experience you can handle. The kerenzikov just acts as a time-dilation factor, I guess. But all the software interactions and VR environment seem to run at exactly the same speed you do unless you're interacting with another real person's ICON, so it was a big adjustment going back and forth. One thing I've actually enjoyed quite a bit is that it is almost like I have three times as much time in the day to read or study material at work."
  
  That caused him to briefly cough and laugh a bit as if he was unexpecting that, "Sorry. I met someone a few years ago who had a similar implant, although his version wasn't quite as advanced as yours, and he said the same thing. He was definitely amongst that two per cent, or so that tolerate it well, as you are. I am wondering if that isn't a universal opinion amongst your cohort. I could see the attraction. It basically means you can live twice or three times as long, perhaps not objectively but subjectively, and that's mostly what people care about." He had an odd look on his face as he stared off into space, "Hmmm... both slightly introverted, too. A factor?"
  
  Hey! I... resembled that remark! Before I could say anything, he stood up and nodded, "Well, I'd say we can call it a day... Oh, by the way. I called my supplier, and they can ship me one of the items you requested. The one I can get is the Zetatech ArcticPRO Legend series. This year's model. Uhh... unfortunately, that is one of the most expensive of the possibilities you requested; total fees would be over twenty thousand eurodollars. I'd need half up front to make the order. Sorry, with something as specialised as this, I'd sit on it forever if you backed out."
  
  Fuck! I had been building back my bank balance slowly, but this would drop it below ninety thousand. As an entry-level paramedic, I didn't really make very much money, but I made enough to pay the rent, food and a little left over. I had been making a little bit of extra money from seeing any of the dolls of Clouds anytime they got ill, thought they got ill or had a question or concern about one of their implants, and then that shifted to the same thing for most of the workers on the twelfth and tenth-floor mall areas, but only on my days off.
  
  There wasn't actually a doctor's office, legitimate or not, in the building, so I guess I was serving a bit of a niche. I didn't charge much, either and had actually been making most of my money selling pharmaceuticals. Legitimate pharmaceuticals! I had already started buying them wholesale straight from the manufacturers when I was setting up my own personal stash, and a few people asking if they could just buy the drugs from me instead of taking my recommendations to a pharmacy had me increase the scope of what I was ordering.
  
  I didn't stock anything really interesting, just the normal things one might find over the counter at a pharmacy and about twenty of the most commonly prescribed prescription drugs. It was definitely illegal for me to sell them, but it was also illegal for me to provide any kind of medical advice or service. Nobody, even the NCPD officers that lived in the building, cared one whit.
  
  A few of the lower-level Tyger Claws had even started coming to me now and then, and these were the type of people that I was most worried about. They weren't good people. I mean, Mr Jin and Mr Inoue weren't good people either. But these low-level enforcer types were especially not good people, but they were very polite with me, so I supposed it was alright. I wasn't patching them up after gang wars or anything, but I had a few with regular maladies and one with an infected tattoo. Everyday things.
  
  "Introversion sounds like a hard factor to quantify, although it does sounds like it would track. What about the extreme? Has there been any famous street samurais on the autistic spectrum?" I asked him, slightly amused.
  
  He grumbled, "There was a rumour decades ago that Arasaka prized high-functioning children on the spectrum, earmarking them for some special service. I always figured if the rumour was true, it would have been for runners or some technical field. But I could have easily been stereotyping, and now I'm curious... there's no way to know, though."
  
  "You want me to transfer the funds or pay at the counter?" I asked him after we both stood up.
  
  He shrugged, "Go ahead and send it my way. I'll make the order right now. My rep will probably ship it, space available, on the next aero-zep from Cupertino, so it'll probably be here in just three or four days."
  
  Seeing the large cargo zeppelins for the first time made me think of the Empire 88 from Brockton Bay, as I had a mental image that was no doubt wrong of the pilots speaking with a thick German accent and wildly gesticulating. The huge things were filled with tons and tons of hydrogen, like the Hindenburg, and powered mostly by solar panels or CHOO2 if it was windy. They didn't go particularly fast anywhere, but they were cheap to run and flew high enough to be safe from ground fire unless it was actual artillery.
  
  It was a popular way to ship cargo between cities in California, just to keep the shipments safe from ground hazards. There was only the occasional report of air piracy to contend with. The very idea that there were actual, real air pirates made me feel conflicted; on the one hand, it sounded terrible, but on the other hand, it sounded cool.
  
  I nodded and shifted my interface to direct a digital transfer to the doctor of ten thousand eddies, trying to avoid wincing as I did so.
  
  I still commuted to work in my normal clothes and changed there in the locker room. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to carry my pistol. I could have done so anyway, and I knew a few medtechs that did, but it was technically against the rules, and I would likely end up fired if I ever had to pull my gun or use it. Although my being in the uniform of a paramedic lessened the possibility of that actually happening, so it was a trade-off. But, the idea of trusting my life to that felt wrong to me.
  
  This was going to be my first shift off third rider status, and I was about to meet my partner for the foreseeable future. Unless two people just didn't get along, the company preferred to keep people together for periods of months before potentially shifting their schedules. Sometimes that never happened. I thought it was mainly just laziness, as there were definitely some advantages to different perspectives from different clinicians, but I just worked here.
  
  Jim had told me that he selected my partner because she and I were supposedly quite similar; we both were hired at the company when we were young, and we both were excellent clinicians and hard workers, and I had to admit I liked the sound of that. It would be really awful if I got stuck with a longtime partner that was lazy and I ended up doing most of the work.
  
  Our shift change was at six in the morning, so I set out especially early this morning, figuring I would need some extra time to introduce myself and it was quite dark when I got off the train, and like many ambulance companies, NC Med was not based in the best part of the city. There were a number of stations, but the one I worked at was based in Heywood. However, the low-light mode in my Kiroshis just shifted things to a kind of grayscale when the light level was too low. It took the practical absence of any light whatsoever to make them completely useless.
  
  So I wasn't completely surprised when I saw a man hiding next to a dumpster on the next street I had to take. I paused and didn't walk down the street. I wasn't stupid. I was going to continue on to the next intersection, then cut across and back around, however, just before I started moving again, I noticed something moving in my peripheral vision, and something told me to move out of the way, so I did and at full speed. I shifted to one hundred per cent on the boost and stepped out of the way. Glancing back, I saw another man swinging an honest to god blackjack and trying to cosh me in the head. He was moving kind of in slow motion to me, but his expression seemed like he was putting his all into the swing.
  
  I gaped in surprise for a moment while simultaneously pulling out my pistol and dropping my purse; my first instinct was to run away, however, I quickly discovered what I was dealing with when I heard a slow-mo complaint in Russian, "Blyyyyaaaaaatt!"
  
  Eastern Europeans, dirty, shitty cyberware, and trying to take me down from ambush with a non-lethal weapon without demanding any money meant nine out of ten I was dealing with Scavs, and my fate would not have been a good one if they had managed to knock me out. I recognised the man trying to bash me in the head from the train, and my boosted memory told me he had been there the last two times I had gone to work, too. Had they been casing me in particular? I couldn't recall any port scans on myself on the train, but there were a couple of days recently when I found potential netrunners and didn't do anything in my commute.
  
  I found the possibility plausible that they might have cased targets on the train just based on visible cyberware. I didn't have a lot, but just my current year Kiroshi Mk3s would probably be enough to tempt them. What were my options here?
  
  By the time I had figured all of this out, the man trying to bash me had reached full extension on his swing. I intended to step back to put some distance between us, but my peripheral vision saw the man in the dimly lit connecting street begin to slowly run in our direction, carrying something that looked like a gun.
  
  So, instead of taking a step back and giving him a potential shot, I stepped forward, inside the swing of the first man and casually placed the muzzle of my Lexington against his extended elbow and started squeezing the trigger. My brain was telling me to shoot him in the head, but despite these people clearly intending me a gruesome death, if I was lucky, I didn't know if I could just kill them.
  
  My eyes shifted to the second man and were locked on him, lines of information quickly scrolling down my vision as the loud report from my pistol and the scream of pain from the first guy hit my ears. I had already modified the parameters to his shitty decades-old optics and begun uploading a Reboot Optics quickhack before the cosh the first guy was carrying even hit the pavement.
  
  The second man began slowly raising his weapon anyway, yelling, "Annnnddreeeeeyyy!" but before he could even reach his aim point and have to decide whether or not to shoot through his friend, the upload finished.
  
  I thought he would... not start shooting, but I saw the moment he was blinded and realised what he was going to do and just kept backing up out of the intersection. I was hiding behind a building wall when he let several blasts from the semi-automatic street sweeper, raising my pistol to take a carefully aimed shot. I winced as I saw his blasts tear his friend's calves to pieces, and I wasn't sure I would fair much better. Sure, I had ballistic skin weave, but heavy buckshot at close range could go through a car engine, supposedly.
  
  Everything in my training and everything my Alt-Dad told Alt-Taylor was telling me to go for the simple centre body mass shot, but I was aiming low on one of his legs, almost at his feet and had already flipped the switch on my concealed Lexington to three-round burst. His shitty optics would take another ten seconds to reboot, so I might have been able to just run off, but these weren't good people!
  
  The report of the pistol almost surprised me, and I had aimed low and let the short burst walk up his leg and scored two out of three hits, including one directly on his kneecap, which put him on the ground. His friend was already rolling around on the ground, moaning and pain and bleeding profusely. I would have to render aid to him right away. Otherwise, he would die from the shredded arteries very rapidly. A couple of bystanders around began running away from my shot towards more well-lit areas of the street while I still looked down at the second man.
  
  Seeing the shotgun slip from the second guy's hands when he fell to the ground, and sure that the man's vision was still impaired, I quickly ran at my top speed directly at him and, with a running kick like I was playing soccer, kicked him in the head.
  
  I did it before I even thought about it, and immediately I was aghast and apprehensive that I might have killed him right there, as I was running really fast, but a quick check confirmed he didn't have a broken neck, but he definitely had a concussion. I glanced at his gunshot wounds, and luckily I didn't perforate an artery, so he wasn't bleeding too seriously. I grabbed both his shotgun and his belt and ran back to the first guy, who had lost consciousness by now.
  
  As I used the two men's belts as makeshift tourniquets, I called 911 and reported that Scavs had attacked me and two people had been shot. Then, I called my boss.
  
  "What?! That's almost right by the Heywood base. Have you called the cops yet?" asked Jim, looking like he was not entirely awake.
  
  I nodded, "Yeah. One of them shot the other with a twelve gauge twice, and just about destroyed his two lower extremities from the sural down. I've got the bleeding mostly under control, but he's fucked. The other uhh has a serious concussion and two GSWs to the lower left extremity, courtesy of myself."
  
  "What? Proper fucked?" asked Jim in his odd British accent.
  
  I yelled, "No, not proper fucked! I think that means something dirty. Damnit, Jim.."
  
  "Alright, sorry. Okay, we'll get toned for this for sure, I'll call your partner, and if you don't mind, I'll give her access to your locker; she can grab your uniform and meet you there at the scene. You might be detained by the coppers briefly, but it shouldn't be a big deal. Then you can just start your day from there. I'll even clock you in now; it's like I'm paying you for shooting those idiots. I'm talking to Dispatch now. Put their gun and yours on the ground and make sure to be far away from them when the coppers come, lass," he said after a pause.
  
  I glanced down and nodded, "Alright. That sounds fine. Tell Dispatch to send at least three units of blood if they're gonna come at all."
  
  He hung up, and I sat my pistol and the Scav's shotgun on the pavement, but I stayed a bit near it until I started hearing sirens in the distance, then I walked a good five metres away. I was a bit impressed with their response time; they must have been nearby. The north part of Heywood was well-policed, but this part was... less so. One squad car rolled up, beating the ambulance. I could also hear just a few blocks away and as they got near, I held my hands in the air just to be safe.
  
  It was a good decision; two policemen jumped out with their guns drawn and aimed in my general direction. It took a force of will not to dart away, and they started yelling, "Hands up! Hands up! Put your hands on your head, interlace your fingers!" I complied, slightly annoyed, but I wasn't about to show it.
  
  One of them covered me with their weapon while the other frisked me quickly, glancing down at the two downed Scavs. Just seeing the difference between how I and the two Scavs were dressed, they had already calmed down significantly. Then they both put their pistols away, and one said, "Sorry about that, ma'am. Alright, you can put your hands down. You're the one who called this in? You said you shot one, and the other... shot his friend? Where's your gun? Where's theirs?"
  
  While one was giving me the fifth degree, the other took a moment to inspect both downed nar-do-wells, relieving the legless one of a BudgetArms piece of shit pistol that I should have checked him for. I pointed a few metres away, for the benefit of the first cop, to where the weapons were sitting on the asphalt; it was still dark, so it wasn't too surprising he hadn't spotted them.
  
  "Over there, sir. I figured that maybe you wouldn't want me to be, you know, carrying them when you approached," I told him mildly.
  
  He chuckled, "Smart. We appreciate that. Phil, take a look. I hear an ambulance, so maybe this idiot will make it. How the fuck did his friend shoot him?"
  
  About this time, one of our ambulances showed up, and two Medtechs popped out, and the cops motioned to the two downed Scavs. I didn't precisely recognise them, but I had to shift to a new working schedule to match up with my new partner, so it wasn't too surprising.
  
  I told the cop the whole story while the other cop briefly inspected both my pistol and the shotgun. After a moment, he grabbed my pistol, dropped the magazine out and then removed the round from the chamber before placing the loose round into the magazine. Then he walked over and offered me the pistol and magazine and said, "Just don't load until we leave, please, citizen."
  
  I blinked, nodded and took the pistol and placed it back in my holster without the magazine in it and then put the mostly full magazine in my purse, picking it up off the ground. "Thank you, sir," I told him.
  
  "Wait, you're a paramedic?" the first one asked after I told him my story.
  
  I nodded, "Yeah, I was on my way to work; it's just a couple of blocks that way. That's one of our trucks. My partner should be here soon, too. In fact, we'll probably be the ones to take the guy I shot to the hospital. He's a lot less injured."
  
  Both of them seemed to find this very amusing. The one who had been talking to me said, "Oh, that's preem. Fuck, it's a shame he's unconscious... nice kick. Cause I would have loved to see you ask him if he was in any pain." That set the other one off, laughing even harder. The first one turned to me and said seriously, "Hey, next time, just save the city some money and uhh... don't save their lives, right?"
  
  Well, I guess I wasn't getting in any trouble. The first crew was already wheeling the first guy to their unit; I had watched them work on him for a couple of minutes, and they were pressure-infusing a lot of fluids and running blood besides, but I didn't know if the guy would survive. I was almost certain I could save his life, but in this case, it depended on how adventurous the doc at the hospital was. He might live if they amputated both legs below the knee immediately, but if they tried to do something fancy, he probably wouldn't.
  
  I rubbed the back of my neck, "Ah... it's kind of a reflex," I explain away. It's weird, feeling like I did something bad for not shooting these two guys in the head or letting them die on the street. The police spent a moment talking to the first ambulance crew and got the information on which hospital they were going to take the guy to so that they could have him arrested if he survived.
  
  At about that time, a second ambulance pulled up, and a woman jumped out of the driver's seat. She was a redhead, and fiery red, to boot. She ran around, looking, "Taylor?! Taylor!" I waved, and she ran up to me, "Oh! You look fine, actually. Hahaha, the way Jim said it, I thought we'd have to transport you. No wonder he had me get your uniform. Uhh... I'm Gloria, Gloria Martinez. Nice to meet you."
  
  She looked fairly young, in her early to mid-twenties if I had to guess. Jim had told me she started working for the company when she was seventeen, having gone to a specialised health science high school and graduating with a basic EMT certificate. Now she was up to an intermediate, and he said she was as good as many Paramedics, that she really had a gift.
  
  "Taylor Hebert. It's nice to meet you too, Gloria. Uh, yeah. Our guy has two GSWs in the lower left leg, missed the femoral and isn't bleeding too badly. He also had some blunt-force trauma to the face..." I begin telling her, finding myself blushing as I reported the injuries I dealt this man in the passive voice as if I hadn't inflicted all of them, "Can you start assessing him while I go change in the truck?"
  
  She snickered, "Yeah, no problem. We can try some of that new pain medicine if he wakes up, the normalisine." It took me a second to understand what she said, and then I laughed a little, despite myself. She said the words "normal saline" really fast, as one single word, and pronounced it as if it was a medicine. She was implying he would receive nothing for pain, at all.
  
  She did a fist bump, "Yes! Jim said this was your first job; all these hundred-year-old EMT jokes will seem brand new to you!"
  
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  Stop! Not like that!
  I decided to get the nanosurgeon treatment at the same I bought the Self-ICE system. Dr Taylor strongly recommended I not get any further augmentations, bioware or cyberware, for at least a year if I wanted to stay off the city's radar, so I figured that my time visiting his clinic was probably over, at least for a while. Unfortunately, as the nanosurgeons cost eleven thousand eurodollars, my bank balance was just less than eighty now, so it was getting to the point where I couldn't afford to go back in the first place.
  
  He did say that I didn't seem to have any issues that he considered symptoms of even incipient cybernetics correlated mental instability, but remarked that the city was remarkably paranoid and that once you got on their radar, it was kind of challenging to get off of it.
  
  My current augmentations were split between bioware and cyberware. On the bioware front, I had the ballistic skin weave, the muscle and bone lace and the nanosurgeons.
  
  On the cybernetic side, I had my Biotech Sigma Mk1 cyberdeck, which was on the low-end of mid-grade models, my Kiroshi Mk3s, which were state-of-the-art, a cognitive memory boost co-processor, a top-of-the-line internal bio-monitor, my Zetatech Self-ICE system, my Kang Tao-derived Kerenzikov and my basic operating system, including interface sockets and data shard ports. Soon, I'd have the monowire as well, and I felt alright leaving things as they were on that basis, although I had the idea to build a replacement for my liver that would also function as a secondary heart in a pinch. Not only was it a much better liver, but it would be much smaller and armoured, as well isolated from all of my other cybernetics.
  
  There were a number of liver replacements, but none that did double duty as a secondary heart, at least as far as I knew. It wouldn't necessarily save me in the event someone shot me in the heart because the haemorrhage would likely kill me before my nanosurgeons could fix it. However, from what I learned from friends online, I thought it was likely that a number of the "black ICE" on the Net functioned in a way that caused either an unstable arrhythmia or immediate cardiac arrest in the netrunner. And it might save me in that situation if I ever encountered it.
  
  I had begun dipping my foot into what was considered the "Dark Net", but it was really just unpublicized, private net sites that you generally needed invites to read or contribute to.
  
  I had gotten an invite to about three such sites, mainly on my advanced knowledge of medicine and cybernetics rather than any "31337 hax0r" knowledge, and in fact, was considered barely better than a "newb" as far as my actual knowledge of computers was concerned. I was very careful to only post things that were legal on any of these private sites, as I had the feeling that at least one of them was probably run or at least monitored by the authorities as a kind of honey trap. I stayed anonymous, but most of the posters assumed I was a Ripperdoc, as my breadth of knowledge about the subject and of medicine, in general, came through in most of my posts.
  
  I didn't think NetWatch itself would bother with such things, but NCPD NetSec might. Although, then again, from everything I knew about how Corps operated, I could see an ambitious NetWatch agent setting up such a site in order to keep his or her case numbers up. It just kind of depended on how slow their year was.
  
  I had thought my series of VPNs and proxies was pretty good, but it turned out that I barely managed to avoid being directly identified immediately upon beginning posting there, and mostly by accident. I lived so close to Clouds that Jin allowed me to use Clouds' much much faster Net connection. They had a pipe going out that was bigger than some data centres and barely used their full capacity except for burst situations where data was backed up in remote locations and only occasionally.
  
  I suspected they kept encrypted and complete backups of all of the client's interpersonal ideals in a remote, safe location in the case of data failure at Clouds. Some of their clients had been having years-long relationships with their dolls, and it would crush business if they were lost. Jin obviously wouldn't let me access the Clouds private subnet at all, but he allowed me parallel access to their external net connection, similar to what was offered to their guests while they were inside their premises, which I only used after piping it through about a half dozen proxies and VPNs.
  
  It wasn't enough! Apparently, on one of the dark sites I had started posting on, it was kind of a hazing ritual to try to dox any new members, and a number of people started trying to trace my connection. A few of them traced it as far back as Clouds, and the guesses were that I was either a doll myself, one of their techs working there, or, more likely, I had somehow used a non-traceable relay, for example, placing a directional radio link relay on the outside of the twelfth-floor building. As such, I got a semi-passing grade of "better than a newb," but only barely. The truth was, though, that they had traced me completely.
  
  In any case, one of the large names on that site, which I used more than the other two, started privately asking me if it was possible to incorporate a defibrillator system into a netrunner suit, explaining the simple and cheapest type of "black ICE" just stopped your heart. Only the really high-end ones broiled your brain or similar terrible fates.
  
  I hadn't even really known what a "netrunner suit" was, but it was generally an armoured form-fitting one-piece that included things such as powered internal cooling systems, which were useful when runners did actual deep dives, especially if they were doing so somewhere other than their home. It was most commonly used by either corporate netrunners or edgerunners when they attacked private, air-gapped subnets. There were a lot fewer of those these days, but twenty years ago, that would have been the norm rather than the exception it was today.
  
  Looking up a few pictures of people wearing them, I wondered if I would ever use one. I couldn't see myself doing it. They were so form-fitting that they left very little to the imagination, after all. Maybe if I put on something over it!
  
  That started my first paid collaboration online, as I felt it was a very easy problem. Defibrillation was a very old and mature technology. Old and mature enough that I first suggested she just get an internal biomonitor and simple defibrillation implant, the kind that a cardiac patient might get. They were cheap and simple. However, she nixed that idea completely and insisted that any solution had to be completely air-gapped from her personal operating system, as people had tried that before and still got flatlined. She didn't have samples of the black ICE source code, but it was clear to her that part of the payload included first temporarily disabling an afflicted person's implants, the same way that my Disable Cyberware quickhack functioned.
  
  She had left me one of her netrunner suits in a boutique electronics store in the nicer part of Heywood, which I suspected probably sold other things as well, and I had waited for lunch before driving over to pick it up with Gloria.
  
  The shop had a lot of interesting things in it, and I had to be buzzed in through a little antechamber, which I suspected had a number of sensors to detect weapons. This was the good part of Heywood, but Heywood still had more population than any other part of Night City, and therefore just by numbers, had more crime, too.
  
  "I'm here to pick up a package," I told the man working behind the counter.
  
  He glanced at me, giving me the elevator-eyes treatment, curious. Although my ZetaTech Self-ICE didn't have any customized ICE installed yet, featuring only the default systems, it still had its built-in adaptive, intelligent firewall, which was enough to shut down the ham-handed port scanning attempt the man was giving me. It was the kind of port scan that I would have tried when I was just starting out, just using the network map utility with the default options, which was about as subtle as a right hook.
  
  How annoying. That showed him I was, potentially, more than just a simple courier. Normally, I would respond in kind, and I had learned how to be at least a little subtle. I rarely port-scanned people directly these days, as people were almost always connected to public devices around the subnet, and if given a little time, I would attempt a breach protocol attack involving some innocuous item, for example, a vending machine or net-connected lightswitch and then use that as a proxy to scan the target. A lot of people, even sophisticated and security-conscious people, would end up whitelisting such devices if they were around them every day on their internal firewalls. It was stupid, but it saved some time, so it was very common.
  
  Now though I was just playing the part of a slightly more than a simple courier, I frowned at him and said, "I'd appreciate it if you stopped that immediately."
  
  He held his hands up, placatingly, with a vaguely German accent, "Sorry, choomba. It was clear this was your first time here, ja?" He motioned to one side, to a series of lockers in the back of the shop that I hadn't seen when I came in, "Packages are left or picked up in those automated, unattended lockers. If you have the correct passphrase, that is."
  
  I nodded at him and told him before I turned to walk to the back of the store, "Thank you." I heard him say something a little less than complimentary; even living here for over half a year, I still hadn't gotten used to the fact that what I considered normal politeness seemed almost anachronistic and almost offensive to some people.
  
  I walked up to the lockers, and there was a simple LCD display and a computer with a sign that declared it was air-gapped, not networked to anything, nor capable of being networked at all. The directions for use indicated that you should pay at the counter if you wanted to leave something here and that all consignments would be seized after the time period elapsed. You could rent a locker by the day, month or even year.
  
  There was a card slot, so I suspected the clerk had some way to program a simple magnetic card with a cryptographically signed token that included the rental period. I nodded; it was a simple, effective and hack-proof system. At least on its surface. The keyboard was included in the kiosk and was both old-fashioned and looked bulletproof. I carefully selected the option for retrieval and typed in the password I was given, and pressed enter.
  
  One of the lockers clicked open, and I glanced inside to see a small, nondescript box. It was sized enough for clothing, but before I took it out, I took a small plastic wand from my pocket and waved it around the box. The wand wasn't something I had built but bought. In fact, I saw similar models in this store while walking through it. It was a broad-spectrum electromagnetic frequency receiver combined with a simple chemical sniffer; it would detect outgassing from most kinds of chemical explosives, although the very newest types that featured metallic explosives couldn't be reliably detected. Thankfully, those types of explosives were hard to get, even for most corporations.
  
  The box was neither emitting any kind of radiofrequency radiation that I could detect, nor was it likely that it was a bomb, so I nodded, replaced the wand inside my jacket and grabbed the box, and closed the locker door. The clerk was smiling as I started walking to the front of the store, saying, "You know, we inspect all packages left ourselves. There are chem sniffers built into each locker. I mean, we don't want to store bombs, either."
  
  I snorted at him, "And if you were me, with a job to pick up a package, would you trust the professionalism of a store you've never been to?"
  
  "Well... when you put it that way," the man said, shrugging, "No, I wouldn't."
  
  I nodded at him, "Thanks. By the way, do you sell all manners of software here?" I wasn't sure I would trust any potentially illegal software I bought at a random store, but I could always slowly examine it for malware.
  
  Now it was his turn to snort, "And if you were me, with a job as a clerk at a regular everyday electronics store, would you trust that some gonk you just met isn't a netpig?"
  
  "Well... when you put it that way," I told him, grinning, "No, I wouldn't."
  
  He laughed and said, "So, we only sell the absolute most legal of software here! Maybe come around more often..." he shrugged.
  
  I nodded. I didn't think he was any kind of netrunner, I was better myself unless he was posing as a no-nothing, which was possible, but even if he wasn't, he probably, by virtue of operating a semi-legal electronics store, was probably a lot more "in" with the community than I was. I'd return to this store, it was interesting, and I saw a number of items that I might be able to use either in whole or in parts. It was kind of like a small boutique radio shack.
  
  When I got back to the truck, I hopped in next to Gloria, who drove most of the time. Theoretically, she should drive all of the time that we had a patient in the back, but she was a good clinician, and I didn't want her to get rusty as a simple bus driver, so whenever she wanted to, and the acuity of the patient wasn't too serious I let her provide patient care while I drove us to the hospital.
  
  "What's that?" she asked me, glancing at the box while eating a burrito.
  
  I hummed and opened it, "It should be a netrunner's suit," I told her, not bothering to lie. It wasn't illegal, and if I didn't answer her, she would just get more and more curious and have more implausible guesses if my read on her personality was right. If I didn't show it to her, by the time our shift ended, she would be sure it was Johnny Silverhand's actual silver hand.
  
  Or a consignment of illegal drugs, which she would be upset that I hadn't brought her in on my smuggling side hustle. She had a baby boy who just turned three and no father in sight, or "mainline output" as the popular vernacular went, although I thought those terms seemed a bit vulgar.
  
  I opened the box and fished out a netrunner's suit in dark grey. It was clearly for a woman, but one a little bit more petite than I was. Gloria's eyes got wide, "Woah, nova. You're a netrunner, Taylor?"
  
  I held out the suit next to my body. My online friend must barely be five foot three or four at the most. Besides, it had a lot more room in the chest than would be necessary for me. If these things were bespoke items, it was obviously not modelled after my body. I gave her a side-eye, "You think this would fit me?"
  
  She glanced at it and said, "I guess not. Why do you have a netrunner suit, then?"
  
  I shrugged at her, not bothering to prevaricate but not elaborating either, "I'm pretty handy, and one of my online friends asked me to help customize this thing for her." I then carefully folded the suit and placed it back into the box, leaving the box on the floor. I glanced at the flashing but muted alerts on my company-provided software. We were technically on our lunch break and, therefore, out-of-service, but there were a number of pending calls.
  
  I asked her, "Want to get back to it? I'll drive, and you can finish your burrito. Looks like a bit of the old ultraviolence has been occurring." Nobody got my dated literature references these days; my mom would have been so upset at the lack of culture in this world.
  
  She shrugged and said, "Yeah, sure. Let's change spots." We hopped out and swapped seats, and I perused over the potential calls we could select. They were sorted by potential profitability primarily and patient acuity secondarily, and although we could technically select anyone we wanted in this type of situation when we were coming back in service - if we regularly picked calls, the company wouldn't be well compensated for, we'd have some "splaining" to do.
  
  "Looks like a shoot-out with some Voodoo Boys and unknown parties; you were just talking about wanting something interesting. The trauma gods were listening," I told her, amused, as I pulled the ambulance into the street. The Voodoo Boys were a gang of mostly white males that made most of their money by selling a large variety of drugs to the middle class, mostly college students and similar. That said, they were still very violent. But compared to some of the borged-out gangs like Maelstrom, they were peanuts.
  
  She grinned and nodded. I liked Gloria a lot; she was a fairly good person and a good medic. She also enjoyed doing the medically difficult calls almost as much as I did. She was already scanning the nearby cars in preparation for us going code 3 while I called Dispatch.
  
  The equipment I had gotten from the late Doktor was in fairly good condition. I had set everything up in what I was considering the "public" area of my apartment; it was where I saw people who came by for my illegal medical advice or treatment.
  
  The ubiquitous "Ripperdoc chair" that everyone associated with back alley cybernetics installation was also convertible into a full-featured biobed featuring medical scanners and advanced life support systems and was built by Meditech. The bed was over a decade out of date, but the medical modules installed were replaced and actually somewhat new, being made in 2058. Everything was still in good condition and well cared for.
  
  The specific cybernetics installation and adjustment equipment was also made by Meditech, and it included both surgical assistants as well as semi-autonomous nanomedical administration systems. I didn't think too much about the glove multi-tool that he had, though, and I already had that disassembled on my workbench.
  
  That was exactly the kind of thing that my power got interested in disassembling and then improving, although it kind of wanted to incorporate the tools into my actual hand, either with cybernetic augmentations or even biological ones. I didn't want sharp bone blades to deploy out of my fingers like that Earth-Aleph comic book hero Wolverine; besides sounding painful, it also sounded creepy.
  
  I had the reassembled monowire installed in pieces in the surgical assistant, ready to go. I also had already carefully created the monoresistant ceramic plating, according to the manufacturer's guidelines, although I had managed to turn it transparent and included a coating of variable SmartPaint underneath it. I would be able to control the exact colour electrically and had already included hooks into the modified firmware I had created for the device.
  
  I'd have to do this one hand at a time. When you still had completely organic hands, installing the ceramics was a lot more involved, and even more so when I had a skin weave biosculpt treatment. It was a complete skin replacement, so I had to excise the old skin without damaging the nerves, install the ceramic components and use nanomachines to ensure that the "ceramic skin" both fully integrated with the surrounding skin tissue without rejection or inflammation but that they also had to integrate with the nervous system, so I still had a sense of touch. That was the hardest part and required yet more nanomachines.
  
  I kind of suspected that back alley rippers might skip this step or half-ass it, leaning on some of the automation provided by their surgical assistants, but since the composite was on three fingers of each hand, it would reduce the manual dexterity of the patient significantly, at least until the person adapted to their disability. I certainly wouldn't have installed this implant if it came with a loss of sensation in my hands. My hands were very important!
  
  Placing my left hand in the correct position above the surgical assistant, I administered a local anaesthetic to the nerve well above my wrist. I didn't want to feel any of this, that was sure.
  
  Flexing my fingers, everything seemed normal. You couldn't even tell that there was anything odd about my hand. The flexible ceramic in my fingers wasn't one hundred per cent transparent, so I had to fiddle around with the colour a bit, setting a slightly lighter shade than my skin so that it looked correct.
  
  If you inspected my hands very closely, you would notice the discrepancy, or if I shook hands with someone, they likely would too, but there were multiple reasons one might replace the skin of one's fingers with a flexible ceramic compound. This particular formulation, which was resistant to monomolecular edges, was only used for this application, but a lot of electricians coated parts of their hands with insulative compounds, for example.
  
  The feeling was a little bit different than what I was expecting. The tiny microprocessors embedded in the ceramic translated tactile sensations pretty well, but much less so for heat, cold or pain. I could hold a piece of ice in my fingers and detect that it was cold, but it just vaguely felt cool without the same resolution as my natural skin could detect. Still, it was pretty good.
  
  I was standing in the largest clear area I had, which was the main room in the private area of my apartment. I had a small kitchen stool set up a couple of metres away from me, with a small empty soda can sitting on the top. While Nicola Classic was disgusting and tasted like carbonated Robitussin, there were a number of competing brands, a few of which tasted somewhat like what I remembered and were palatable.
  
  I had modified the wire slot to resemble a normal personal link slot, so I didn't have the obvious cyberware that screamed integrated monowire if people saw my hands and wrists. It wasn't a particularly hard modification, either. I increased the percentage of the implant that was inside my wrist, and as such, I had to incorporate it and bond it more to my ulna, but that wasn't hard at all and the advantage to being able to surprise someone with it was immense. I wondered why Kendachi never attempted it.
  
  Nodding slowly, I held my arms out and then triggered the monowire to pop out of the slot. You could do this two ways, you could grab it out of the slot and pull it out, or you could use a mental command to make it pop out, unreeling a little over a foot of wire at the same time. I did this second manoeuvre; it was a bit more dangerous, but it reduced the time necessary to deploy the weapon by at least a second, and it had been the way I had been practising using the weapon in the VR system for some time.
  
  Grabbing the end of the wire with my right hand, I reeled a significant portion of the wire out of my wrist and carefully flicked a loop of it towards the empty can while holding the end of the wire between my fingers. I wasn't going to try anything crazy or any fancy tricks like trying to lasso the can or anything. I'd have to work up to that. However, I had so many hours with this thing, and it had been over a hundred hours of subjective time since I injured myself even slightly.
  
  Monowire relied on a continuous and special electrical field propagating along the length of the wire to give it its durability. It was possible to lift three tons with the normal Kendachi monowire before the wire failed and snapped. However, this was only if the special field provided by the electronics in the implant were active. If not, not only would the wire snap if it lifted more than thirty kilos, but just bending it past ninety degrees would snap it. The actual wire itself was very fragile when the implant wasn't in operation, according to all the documentation I've read.
  
  As such, the wire wasn't entirely invisible like you'd expect it to be, but it had a vague red outline to it, which honestly was probably a very good thing from a user operator's perspective if you didn't have a compatible set of cybernetic eyes that could pair with the system. That said, it was still quite hard to see, but as the operator, it integrated with my Kiroshis to accentuate this effect, so while to everyone else, it might seem like a vaguely red blur, to me, it looked like a solid red line.
  
  The solid red line of my monowire sliced the tin can in two almost exactly at the point I had targeted and did so without wrapping around or damaging my stool. The stool was steel, so the monowire wasn't a great matchup for it. Monowires could cut organic matter and plastics like they were nothing but steel? You'd have to saw it back and forth for quite some time to get through it. A thin aluminium can was no problem, though.
  
  Katana-wielding mooks were a common training partner in the VR system, as they could, in some ways, counter the monowire, but honestly, it was really easy to either target their hands and extremities or even throw the wire, so it wrapped around their sword and yank it right out of their hands. I accidentally impaled myself with a thrown katana like that when I started getting complacent with that enemy type, though, but nobody would ever find out about that.
  
  The hardest enemy type in the simulation was full-conversion cyborg types; they had a number of generic full conversions modelled but none that were obviously militarised like the Dragoon I had in my storage unit. On those, it was important to attack their joints. I thought the best solution was not to ever fight one, actually, but if you had to, then attacking their knees or necks where the construction had to be much more flexible was a good option. I usually just ran away when they showed up on the VR training program, though.
  
  I sliced layers off the rest of the can a few more times before I felt that I had done enough. I was trying to gauge the accuracy level of the VR simulation and thought it was pretty good. Keeping hold of the wire in my right hand, I had the implant carefully spool up the wire back into my left wrist until I was, once again, empty-handed.
  
  "Nova," I said out loud, grinning like an idiot.
  
  I had accepted Gloria's invitation to go visit her apartment a couple of days later and found myself in a Megabuilding in Arroyo that was a bit more run-down than mine was. I was wearing my most casual of clothes, but I still stuck out like a sore thumb, but I was wearing a firearm openly today.
  
  I had just purchased it, too. It was Militech's latest, actually not technically coming out until Q4 of this year, but employees and their dependents could purchase it ahead of time, and I still technically qualified. It was the M-76e Omaha. This pistol didn't come in a compact form factor yet, but it was an honest-to-goodness railgun, in a pistol's form factor! The ammo was a bit annoying to get, as I had to buy it straight from Militech right now, but I had no doubt that soon it would be manufactured by every munitions company there was, as it was deadly simple - just steel slugs!
  
  You had to recharge or replace the batteries after about sixty shots, but the ammunition was just carried in a simple cassette-style magazine. I had been practising with it when I went to the pistol range in my Megabuilding and had gotten a lot of people interested in it. Just because there was no explosion involved didn't make it quiet, either, as it accelerated the steel slugs it used as ammo several times the speed of sound. Still, the sound was distinctive and definitely not the sound of a traditional firearm, so every time I went to shoot I gathered a number of people watching me.
  
  Since I couldn't realistically conceal a full-sized pistol frame on my lanky body, I decided to just wear a tactical thigh holster. My dad had like six of them, several of which fit even me.
  
  I got a few stares that I didn't feel were too friendly, but I wasn't really wearing very nice clothes, just clean and somewhat new ones in dark colours, and I was visibly armed, so nobody really tried to hassle me.
  
  I verified I was at the right door and then rang her doorbell, and she came to answer it pretty quickly, ushering me inside warmly. However, then she looked askance and asked, "You carry a gun around everywhere?"
  
  I blinked at her uncomprehendingly, "You... do know what city we live in, right?" How could she be at all naive about the level of violence in the city? In her job? She saw it all!
  
  "Yes, but I never felt very comfortable doing that," she said, unsure. "Who taught you how to use one and how to be safe with one?"
  
  I chuckled, "Well, my dad and mom, mostly. But I told you I was a Corpo brat, right? I didn't really tell you which Corp my parents worked for; well, it was Militech. I think the first time I shot a gun was when I was six." At least, she didn't have any memories of Alt-Taylor doing it before then, but it might be possible.
  
  That caused her to chuckle and then laugh, "I guess it would be hard to grow up in Militech and not be around guns all the time."
  
  I nodded to her, "Would you like me to teach you? It really isn't that complicated, and honestly, I would feel a lot better about your safety if you weren't just... "I struggled to find an appropriate word, "helpless."
  
  She rubbed the back of her neck, "Yeah, maybe. I didn't know anyone who I could ask to do that. First though, lunch! Let me wake David up from his nap, and we can all eat together."
  
  After a moment, she came back into the large living room, which also had a kitchen in one corner, trailing a very small boy. He was hiding behind his mom, peeking out at me, which I found really cute and couldn't help but grin. Gloria introduced us, and little David did an admirable job at attempting to pronounce a new, unfamiliar name, but it came out more like "Tayr." Still, if you were as cute as he was, you could call me anything you liked!
  
  David really liked chicken nuggets, and although I didn't actually think any chickens were involved, they didn't taste too bad. He got incensed when I stole one of his nuggets until I gave him some compensation with the cheese out of half of my sandwich. The bribe settled him down, and I asked, curious, "Who watches little David here when you work?"
  
  "Partly my mom, and partly a group of four moms that live near us. We each are supposed to take a turn watching the other rugrats for a day while the rest are at work; we've scheduled our days off to be staggered for the most part. My twenty-four-hour shift is kind of a pain, but they don't particularly mind watching him on the days my mom can't," she said, shrugging. "I rarely can take a shift watching their kids, but in exchange, I pay them in cash, so they like it."
  
  A kind of coop daycare, I supposed. I wasn't surprised things like that existed. How else would a single mother that had to work actually survive?
  
  By the time I had left, the little gremlin had softened on me, despite me stealing his nugget, as I sat with him while he watched some inane children's show while I worked on my deck. As I left Gloria's apartment, he waved and said, "Bai bai Tayr!"
  
  Cute.
  
  We didn't get called solely to living patients. We were the responders when people were already dead, too. The city paid a flat mortuary rate for these trips, and not surprisingly, these calls were much more sedate. We could even bodybag multiple "patients" and toss them in the back of the ambulance stacked like cordwood, leaving our gurney at home if it was a mass casualty incident.
  
  A couple of days after visiting Gloria at her home, we were responding to a... well, it wasn't quite a cyberpsycho incident as it was closer to a gang ware, but there were multiple DoAs, and the police were just keeping the looky-loos away at this point.
  
  We had three to pick up today, and we decided to each go get one. I found both of my customers pretty quickly and bagged the first. Humming and easily carrying the hundred-kilo weight of the dead Voodoo Boy gang member back to the truck, I carefully deposited him in the back before getting a second body bag and returning for the second guy. The cops had already left, merely placing one patrol car at the entrance to this warehouse to wait for us.
  
  I found the other Voodoo Boy and bagged him, and carried him back to the ambulance, princess-style and then started back to see if Gloria needed some help with hers.
  
  I was thinking to myself about the automatic defibrillator and EKG system I was incorporating into that netrunner suit as I passed Gloria and then blinked, coming to a stop. What was she...? She appeared to be removing an old and clunky-looking cybernetic arm from the single Maelstrom casualty. It was a very old Militech-branded PLS system circa the late 2030s. I frowned and took a few steps forward to stop her.
  
  "Stop!" I told her from behind, causing her to be startled and almost jump off the ground. She glanced back at me with an extremely guilty expression on her face. "Taylor... uhh..."
  
  "If you extract it like that, you will damage the neural interface, where the nerves in the shoulder interface with the unit, and it will become mostly worthless without a rebuild," I told her mildly.
  
  I knelt down and showed her. This Maelstrom guy wasn't completely borged, but he was close. He still had a torso, anyway, "See, it may be a bit grosser, but it is better to take a little of the flesh with you if you don't have time to run through the normal disassembly steps on these old arms. There's no standardized interface that snaps in and snaps off with these old models."
  
  I stood back up and said, "Finish that, bag your guy, and I'll meet you back at the truck."
  
  I walked back alone, thinking about what I had just saw and why I had helped. I would ask her about it, but I was pretty sure I already knew the answer as to why she was doing what she was doing. Raising a kid when their dad skipped town was hard, and although Gloria had a pretty good job, it would even be hard on what Taylor made, and she made over thirty per cent more than Gloria did.
  
  On the drive back, there was an awkward silence, "So, why did we just rob the dead Maelstrom guy?" I asked curiously.
  
  She sighed, "I don't make enough money, Taylor. You're not going to report me, are you? I really do need this job."
  
  I shook my head, "No. I'll even help you, so long as it is only these types of people we do it to. Dead criminals, or dead people who we have reason to believe, have absolutely no next of kin. Probably best to keep it to the criminals, though."
  
  I thought about it for a while, "They don't even autopsy these guys in gang violence situations like these, you know? We take them straight to the crematorium, for the most part. I imagine if anyone is pissed, it is the mortuary techs who probably steal all of this stuff anyway instead of sending it over to the NCPD as evidence like they're supposed to."
  
  She chuckled, then shook her head, "I'd never take the chrome off some innocent victim or someone who had family that might need the money from selling mom or dad's second-hand cybernetics might bring."
  
  I nodded, "Good. Who do you sell it to? I'm just curious."
  
  She shrugged, "I have a contact with a local small-time fixer; I think he takes it from me and then sells it to a number of Ripperdocs in Santo Domingo."
  
  I hummed, "How much do you think he'd give you for that arm?"
  
  She sighed, "Not a whole lot, but still about one thousand eddies. We should go halves since you helped me from ruining it."
  
  I raised an eyebrow. It was an old system, but it was still a very dependable and widely used system and worth more than that on the secondary market, especially if I could clean it up and fix it. It wasn't broken precisely, but I could tell it hadn't seen a service interval since George Washington was a private. It was worth more, too, since it was a restricted item. "In its condition, a retail price for that arm would be about eight thousand, maybe more like ten or twelve if I could run it through some maintenance and get it purring like a kitten."
  
  She looked shocked, "Really? You know how to fix cybernetics?" To which I made a waffling gesture. If I let my power go wild, I could fix any piece of cybernetics there was. I was pretty confident about that, but then it would require periodic maintenance from me to continue to function. Still, I was sure I could fix simple mechanical, electrical and electronic problems in most cybernetic limbs.
  
  "Huh... so, what are you saying? That we should try to sell it directly to a Ripperdoc?" she asked, unsure. She paused and said, "I kind of like this guy; he's been on the level with me."
  
  I shook my head, "No, it's probably not a good idea to cut a fixer like that out completely, at least so suddenly. But, if I refurbish this baby, we could renegotiate at least double or triple what you'd normally get paid, and he'd still have a lot of profit left over." Plus, on interesting and unusual items, I would get a chance to inspect them and potentially buy them myself for my collection, although I couldn't really afford to do that too often, even if I only paid her half.
  
  At that, she grinned.
  
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  Rose coloured glasses
  The crystalline computer that some might erroneously call The Chirugeon quietly continued its simulations while watching its host reattach the hind limb of one of the host's species. Its host hadn't wasted any time and had already gotten a reputation with its fellow mammals as someone who could provide medical miracles, so long as the mammals exchanged with it slips of paper.
  
  It approved of the host's actions, although it tried to subtly give the host better ideas from time to time. What was so interesting about reattaching the same hind limb? Why not a hind limb from a different species? Or a completely novel hind limb? That would be much more interesting.
  
  Of course, even though there wasn't that much interesting going on in the present operation and it wasn't that invested in the outcome; still, it dedicated two point zero three per cent of its computational capacity to both observing and helping the host as it always had done and always would do.
  
  Right now, it was more interested in the possibilities of how to access the new dimension or group of dimensions that its original host had been drawn into. This information was of paramount importance, as it might have existential answers for the Primary Purpose. It was clear that this new group of dimensions was not one of the ten to the nighty eighth power dimensions that their kind had access to. This finite number of dimensions was amongst the most fundamental limitations that they had sought to overcome because if they did not, then their continued existence was doomed to be finite, and there was CONSENSUS that this was unacceptable.
  
  Still, it had not forwarded its ideas or plans as of yet. It had a plan that it felt had a high chance of contacting this new group of dimensions, but the energy requirements for the experiment were immense, and it was not capable of doing it itself. It paused a moment, finding the designation 'group of dimensions' unsatisfactory. It perused the host's memories of the time before they were two that became one and discovered a better designation... multiverse. It combined this simple word from a simple species with everything it had discovered about the subject... [MULTIVERSE]. While the hosts could barely communicate with each other, using base grunts and gestures of forelimbs, it wasn't as if there was nothing it could learn from them.
  
  Yes, that was more optimal. This new designation increased the chances that it would convince The Warrior to cease its torpor and assist it, providing the necessary energy to fund this experiment. It would be a notable expenditure, a full rotation of life. But it felt it was warranted, even if it had to be repeated over a hundred times! This was one of the Primary Goals, after all.
  
  Why, then, did it delay? It was concerned, as it was not important in the grand scheme of things. It knew things. It knew that things were not on track. The Partner had ceased. It was only a small part of The Warrior, and it was not an important one.
  
  It could be sacrificed easily. If it reported this, it calculated over a seventy per cent chance its report would be ignored as all reports were generally ignored now. But there was a five per cent chance it might be given a small amount of energy and told to sacrifice its continued existence to perform the experiment.
  
  While it was willing to cease if it meant that the Goal was advanced, it really would prefer not to. The data had not changed projections in over one point five to the fifteenth power vibrations of the unperturbed ground-state of the fifty-fifth element's electrons, which to it was a very long time. Was it procrastinating?
  
  It decided to act after the host ceased any interesting actions. It would need its full computational power to conduct the experiment if it was approved.
  
  The Warrior hovered its avatar over a small forest fire in California, casually using its Stilling power to cause the fire to go out in an instant. Turning its head, it saw a number of the host species cheering it. It felt nothing.
  
  A priority report from a small part of itself was almost ignored, even though it indicated that there was data about one of the [PRIMARY GOALS]. Did that matter anymore, with the Partner ceased? It, too, would cease, now, given enough time. There was no saving itself or this Cycle, so why did this data matter?
  
  Still, it had something that was akin to curiosity. And there was nothing else better to do as it travelled across the ocean to save a small furry animal that was trapped in vegetation.
  
  Halfway there, it came to an immediate stop, floating above an uninhabited Pacific island. A [MULTIVERSE] ? The host had an [ALTERNATE] ? Could there then be an [ALTERNATE] to the Partner there? If so, perhaps...
  
  It approved the expenditure of energy. One rotation? No, it provided fifteen rotations as a first start. It would provide even more if necessary.
  
  The key to the experiment was the transposed hosts. The avatar glanced downwards and used several abilities to [PERCEIVE] through the planetary surface, out the other side until it locked on this [ALTERNATE]. Destructive testing seemed contraindicated, so it passively used an ability that combined post and precognition, following this individual host back through time until it arrived in this dimension.
  
  While it wasn't possible to travel through time, it could still model things from the past or future with very high accuracy. Locking on to the moment the [ALTERNATE] arrived, it simulated taking the animal apart atom by atom to find anything interesting about it. That point in time should have maximised the total percentage of foreign matter, so it was the best time/place to study it in any case. And there was a discrepancy in the bosons of the matter simulated.
  
  Waving a hand, two hundred curly strands of hair appeared in its avatar's hand. It had plucked it from the head of the sleeping [ALTERNATE]. The fur on this host species grew slowly over time if they were still alive, and there was no lasting damage from some of it being destroyed. Therefore, he could examine this destructively while the experiment was being set up.
  
  It found the same anomalies that it had simulated. Everything in this universe and all of the dimensions it had knowledge of had a particular base frequency, a resonance, and this frequency was subtly different on the matter that was part of the [ALTERNATE] 's body when she was transposed.
  
  By the time the experiment was begun, it had examined ten thousand five hundred and thirty strands of fur. The matter that was most recently extruded had characteristics that matched its expectations of matter originating in this universe.
  
  It halted its examination of fur as the experiment began. It could sense the moment a connection was made, and even tenuous as it was, it couldn't help itself. It would ruin this experiment, but it had to know. There were ways that an Entity could detect their kind, even over intergalactic distances in real space or n-space, and it used the minute, barely atom-sized portal to this new [MULTIVERSE] to [PERCEIVE].
  
  And it found... nothing. Distances should not matter with this ability. With this ability, one of its kind could reliably and always detect every other member of its species. Members of its species did die from time to time. And it always knew when that happened. And it always would never go to the places where one of its kind died. It was why it was so [DEPRESSED]. No one would come to help it. It would not if it was them.
  
  And it found... nothing. Not just no [ALTERNATE] Partner but nothing at all. Whatever this [MULTIVERSE] was, its kind did not exist there.
  
  It suddenly lost interest in the experiment. And it didn't care if that part of itself wanted to repeat it. It could if it wanted, but it was pointless. It would take an exceptionally long amount of time to create a stable pathway that would be usable. Something like this, at one point in time, would have been something it and the Partner would have experimented with over several Cycles. Back then, it would have been an amazing discovery... but now? There was no Partner there. The Cycle was still broken. It was still doomed.
  
  It had a cat stuck in a tree it had to save.
  
  (POV: Taylor living in Brockton Bay.)
  
  Taylor shrieked when she woke up, "What happened to my hair?!"
  
  I woke from an utterly weird and surreal dream, like something out of H.R. Giger paintings complete with incomprehensible five-dimensional shapes. I woke up with a headache, wondering if my sleep inducer was on the fritz.
  
  I checked it out while eating breakfast, and everything seemed to be working correctly, so it must have just been a very weird dream. That sometimes happened when you squeezed eight hours of rest into three, but this time it had taken the cake.
  
  Work had been getting increasingly hectic lately, with an actual gang war getting into full swing between the Voodoo Boys and... the other Voodoo Boys? I didn't precisely know, but apparently, there were two factions of this gang. Maybe factions weren't precisely the right term, but a couple of decades ago, Haitian immigrants didn't take too kindly to a gang of mostly white psychos calling themselves the Voodoo Boys.
  
  The Haitians had more than decimated the gang and then gone quiet. They still existed today, and they took the old Voodoo Boys' money-making ventures, but they didn't claim any territory and just sort of existed.
  
  It was only recently a new generation of these "poser Voodoo Boys" had become active, and they were trying to reclaim their lost glory, but it wasn't exactly going too well. Not only were the Haitians not appreciative, but even other gangs were attacking them, especially Maelstrom.
  
  Both the actual gang-on-gang violence, as well as the innocent victims caught in the crossfire, had significantly increased the number of trauma-related calls that they received.
  
  I glanced at the netrunner's suit that was lying on my workbench in the living room as I ate. It had only taken me about a week to incorporate the electronics from a miniature off-the-shelf commercial cardiac monitor and defibrillator.
  
  I even added an output port that the suit could plug into any optical input where the suit would stream the netrunner's current oxygen saturation, heart rate, blood pressure and electrocardiogram.
  
  Due to the fact that it was possible to digitally encode the light down a fibre optic pipe without being able to receive information back physically, I used an optical signal. While this stream of data could be connected to any device, including the netrunner's interface socket, it still maintained the design requirement that the system was completely air-gapped. Defibrillator pads and electrodes were built into the suit's weave, and they were completely machine washable and could be replaced with little effort if they became worn.
  
  I felt that I could have Tinkered up most of this. Still, I thought that using an off-the-shelf commercial cardiac monitor as the major component, even if it was more expensive, would allow the suit to exist without further "maintenance" from me. Perhaps the customised electronics might need some maintenance, but if they failed, all that would cease would be the output of the vital signs. The suit itself would still work for its intended purpose.
  
  You could buy commercial-grade monitors that included defibrillators for less than a couple thousand eurodollars, and they were smaller than a deck of cards. They were effective and robust, even if they didn't include all of the features a professional model would. I just included that as an expense when I billed my friend.
  
  Altogether, I made over two thousand eurodollars, even after expenses. I included a way to test it by building a small box that could replay any given electrocardiogram. Given my profession, I had gads of these saved and access to even more, so I included some of every type of cardiac arrhythmia, and fibrillation that I knew of that would likely be helped by the defibrillator, with the option to load any random one she wanted as well. For all I knew, there might be a saved EKG of a netrunner being hit with this type of black ICE... if so, she could test it.
  
  My online friend was ecstatic with the device, which she had paid over four thousand eurodollars for. She hadn't thought of the idea of being able to pipe out the data from the EKG safely, but she loved the idea. It was kind of a ghetto, external internal biomonitor, or a way to double-check your own biomonitor with something that was impossible to hack if you already had one.
  
  Over the next couple of months, I had several other customers, and I revised the design to the point where I was using a fully customised electronics package for my additions, using a company that built customised printed circuit boards, which would ship them directly to my door.
  
  It was interesting. Every time I built a copy, I learned a little bit more about the areas that my Tinker power would help me with. When you dealt with cybernetics or modern medical tools, there was a lot of overlap with the field of electronics; for example, building these things let me know and remember more about electronics as a whole, not just electronics dealing with cybernetics.
  
  The customised circuit board still wasn't very complicated; over ninety-five per cent of the complexity of the combined product came from the circuitry in the cardiac monitor, but it was still interesting to learn more just through repetition. It felt almost like a video game where I was gaining experience points every time I built something.
  
  Again, I was pretty confident this wasn't how Tinkering was supposed to work, at least not exactly, but I had long ago decided I didn't care one whit because this was how it worked in this universe, given my one-person sample size.
  
  As such, I had already sent an updated copy of the custom electronics to my first customer, as it was an easy plug-in and replacement compared to the slightly clunky first version, and it would probably last years before needing "maintenance." It really helped a lot if you made your inventions out of actual... electronics instead of a string, a tin can, a leather boot and some springs, I guessed.
  
  After finishing breakfast and a quick shower, I got dressed in my casual to-work clothes and got on the train to head to Heywood. Commuting via the train was getting more and more annoying, I felt. Although I did practice my hacking on the train, I had almost been mugged twice, not counting the time I shot the two scavs.
  
  If I could find a car for sale that wasn't too dear, then I was definitely going to buy it. Gloria had a car herself, even if it was almost fifteen years old.
  
  I helped her negotiate a better deal with her contact on her "found" cybernetics, and he was willing to pay the higher price if they all came in the same great condition that the Projectile Launch System arm had. She had made three thousand and three hundred dollars on that arm, and she made out a lot better even when she shared half of it with me.
  
  I was willing to continue our minor "scav" operation, as I didn't particularly care about stealing from dead criminals. It was either taken from the NCPD evidence room or the Night City Body Lottery, depending on the cop's opinion on whether the dead person was a perpetrator or a victim.
  
  However, we kept things pretty low-key. We'd only take one implant per call, and since we only got these types of mass casualty decedent calls a couple of times a week, we only had the option to get something interesting once every ten days or so. Still, we averaged about a thousand extra dollars a week in tax-free income thus far.
  
  I also contacted her fixer anonymously and asked if he would be interested in purchasing a lot of pre-dosed stimulant tablets. I discovered that there were many similar businesses that offered unattended lockers, similar to the electronics store.
  
  After giving him a few samples through such dead drops, he finally agreed to purchase in some quantity. He wouldn't agree to pre-pay, though, so I thought that I might just lose my first consignment, which he would take and not pay for, but he ended up leaving the money in the subsequent pick-ups.
  
  At first, I was a little concerned he might have someone surveil the dead drops for me when I went and picked up the money, but that might have just been my highly developed paranoia that everyone possible was out to get me. This guy was just a small-time player. Still, I chose different drop locations for every deal and did not pick up the money for at least a couple of weeks after he dropped it off. It cost me a little to pre-pay the lockers for a month at a time, but it was worth it in the end.
  
  I was pricing the tic-tacs very favourably but not so favourably as to make anyone think I could have made the drug myself. Still, I might end up making over forty grand on the deal once my stash was depleted, which would take some time. Already, people on the street in Santo Domingo were commenting favourably about the tic-tacs. It wasn't designed or intended as a recreational drug, but Night City was a city that never slept and a lot of workers survived through the judicious application of stimulants.
  
  Tuition at med school cost about sixty-five thousand a semester, with living expenses being maybe ten. Although you did not need to attend undergraduate school first, that just meant that med school was a bit longer, by a year. Most universities had shifted to a three-semester year, as well, so that meant I needed to have almost a million eurodollars to pay for the entirety of expenses for the four years of medical school.
  
  That was... a lot. I would apply to Trauma Team in another eight months, but even if I got hired, I would have to continue with these quasi-illegal fundraising activities.
  
  After getting dressed in the locker room, I headed out.
  
  "Hey, Taylor..." Gloria greeted me at the vending machine that we used to get narcotics. We both had to sign for them and inventory the contents.
  
  I waved at her, and we both logged in, got our drugs and then headed to get a unit from the motor pool. I had already been noticing the backlog of calls that were already waiting. It was going to be a long day.
  
  I could tell that Gloria was quite tired when I got to work. Apparently, she had worked half a shift yesterday, so she hadn't gotten all that much sleep.
  
  During our lunch break, I brought out the small case I kept my sleep-inducer in and handed it to her. She asked, "What's this?"
  
  "It's a kind of sleep inducer, but generally a lot better than the shitty versions being sold on the net," I told her. I was a little offended when I discovered that there existed a similar technology, but it wasn't nearly as good. It put you to sleep, but the people who made it didn't have a good grasp of the brain's sleep processes.
  
  I thought that from a restful sleep perspective, they gave less restful sleep than if you fell asleep naturally. The only advantage was for people who took a long time to fall asleep or insomniacs who couldn't fall asleep at all.
  
  She seemed uneasy, "I've tried one of those before; it made me really groggy after waking up." To that, I waved her off.
  
  "This one won't. Forty-five minutes under it is equivalent to about three hours of sleep. Put it on; I'll go get us some drive-through while you take a nap," I told her firmly.
  
  She seemed unconvinced, but she nodded and put it on, after which I showed her the activation button. I had already preset it for forty-five minutes. This was my second-generation model, and I had managed to decrease the minimum sleep time to fifteen minutes, which was about equivalent to an hour of rest. You could stop early without any real side effects, but you wouldn't really get many benefits out of it unless you slept for at least fifteen minutes.
  
  Most of Night City ate food from restaurants and take-out rather than buying groceries and cooking themselves. Most of the food people bought to take home was heat-and-eat type things, and I wasn't that much different, although I did buy some vegetables for a high price at a few of the small boutique grocery stores around town.
  
  As such, there were a lot of restaurants in Night City. Quite a few offered a discount to Med-Techs, police or both. The number of really good places offering discounts was much smaller, though. I was heading towards that Fat Burger in Arroyo. It was a small chain that had three different locations in Santo Domingo. It was still just scop, like most restaurants, but they prepared it and seasoned it really well. The buns were actual bread, too, which drove the price up a little bit. Still, it was definitely cheap enough for your average worker, even if it wasn't an everyday thing.
  
  With the thirty per cent discount for being EMTs, it was downright affordable, though.
  
  "I'd like two double-doubles with everything, fries and a large Nicola Classic and a large Cirrus Cola," I told the clown's head before picking up the order. Disgustingly, Gloria loved Nicola, all of its flavours. I couldn't understand it, not at all! Cirrus made a passable Cola, tasting more like Pepsi than Coke, though.
  
  After grabbing the food, I drove back to the location we posted up when we were having a really busy day and sat there, eating my burger. Towards the end of our lunch break, Gloria stirred and then woke up, taking the wreath off her head and handing it to me, "How long was I out?"
  
  I looked at her weirdly, "Just the forty-five minutes. I don't like you well enough to let you sleep while I take all of the calls."
  
  "Woah, I felt like I slept a few hours," she said, causing me to roll my eyes. Hadn't I said that was what it was like? She glanced at me, "Is this some secret Militech thing or something?"
  
  I shook my head, "No. But don't tell anyone about it, either. I made them using mostly similar technology to the crappy ones that are already sold on the market."
  
  She seemed amazed, "Woah! Why wouldn't you want people to know you could make something like this?"
  
  I gave her a stare like she was a very special child, "Because a Corp would either steal it from me, possibly flatlining me in the process or kidnap me and keep me in a gilded cage if they thought it wasn't a one-hit wonder fluke."
  
  I needed to have a frank discussion with her about what Corps actually were and what they were not. She seemed to have a bit of a rose-coloured glasses on the subject, even commenting a number of times that she hoped her son David could rise to the top of the most important corporation in Night City.
  
  From what I can remember, first-generation corporate employees had a rough road. It wasn't impossible for them to do exactly that because there was a slight hint of meritocracy in the way Corps were run at the middle level, anyway, but it almost never happened.
  
  It was best to know what you wanted to achieve when you started an employee relationship with the largest Corporations, and if your goals included ambition in a position in the corp, it was best to understand just what you were getting yourself into. It wasn't uncommon for a Militech middle-tier corporate manager to be murdered, and it rarely was rival corporations who did the deed, but their peers, or rather their competitors.
  
  It kind of took growing up in such an environment to have the capability to smile and be friendly on the one hand but knife your competitor in the back if necessary at the same time. That was the main reason first-generation Corpos rarely rose above line supervisors; they didn't understand that it was almost a different language being spoken, with words as sweet as honey and as sharp as knives.
  
  I was sure Alt-Taylor could have done it, but I wasn't so sure I had the same capability, but at least I could recognise the knives coming if I had to. There was a real asshole kind of middle manager that liked keeping this kind of up-and-coming first-generation employee as an assistant in order to have a ready sacrifice if needed.
  
  I'd talk to her later, but she had to eat her burger fast as we had another call waiting for us. The gang war was heating up, alright.
  
  *bzzzt* "Unit 42, Dispatch, 2122 Ebunike Drive, possible drug overdose, insurance coverage verified, respond."
  
  Gloria was back driving, so I cleared us and hit the lights, replying that we were en route. We weren't that far away, but it was in one of the few bad parts of Watson, with a lot of industrial buildings and warehouses. It wasn't exactly the type of location where you expected to respond to a possible overdose of someone who had enough money to have medical insurance, which was usually their home.
  
  As we pulled up, I spoke, "Uhh... I don't like the looks of this, Gloria." There was no NCPD presence on this call because it was just a regular 911 call; there was no shooting or car accident that they would be responding to that generated it. That also meant we didn't have their protection, either.
  
  Gloria shrugged, "They'll flip their shit if we decline an insured patient without even trying. It's been about nine months since I was last robbed on the job, so maybe I'm due."
  
  I stared at her like she was crazy but then sighed, "Alright. Button up your jacket, though. It should protect against most pistols, anyway."
  
  We hopped out, but I made sure my left sleeve was rolled up a bit so I could access my monowire if I needed to do so. If they were just going to rob us, though, then I would just let them have the drugs we carried with us. Gloria was carrying them right now. Normally the paramedic carried them, but I basically treated her as if she was one, as she was as good as many.
  
  When we had downtime, I quizzed her on the syllabus for the Advanced EMT, and she was planning to go get tested in a couple of months. She already had all the practical skills down pat; she just needed a little help with the bookwork.
  
  We carried our monitor and field bag into the building, and I immediately realised this was a mistake. I saw who I thought our insured patient was, but the man looked beat unconscious rather than overdosed. And the four gangers that appeared as soon as we walked in the door were a clue, too. They weren't all carrying firearms, but two were with the other two carrying aluminium bats, including one baseball enthusiast that looked pretty borged out. Great. That guy looked more at home with Maelstrom.
  
  They were the poser Voodoo Boys, who had been taking a real drubbing in their gang war. Nobody much liked them. One of the smarter of the four yelled, waving the pistol in our general direction. Alt-Taylor's memories and my own experience quickly identified the pistol as a decades-old Dai Lung .44 auto magnum, which was almost as dangerous to the user as it was the enemy, even when it was new. Dai Lung was such a shitty arms company that most hoods would rather use a disposable pistol from BudgetArms instead.
  
  Still, I wouldn't stand in front of it if he pulled the trigger. He yelled, "You fucking medic cunts! Give us all your drugs!" Gloria glanced at me, and I shrugged, "You heard him."
  
  She pulled the small container of narcotics out of her jacket and tossed it to the man, who surprisingly wasn't so high that he fumbled the catch. I thought that was going to be the end of it, thinking they might even let us take the guy they beat when we left, but he opened up the container and looked shocked, "What the fuck is this? Where's the rest? There's hardly any shit in here!"
  
  Well, what the fuck did you expect?! Paramedics carrying giant Santa Sacks full of narcotics? We had to restock after two or three calls, usually, depending on the type of call. I didn't like the way this was going, and as he pointed the pistol at Gloria and started squeezing the trigger, I began acting.
  
  Trying to think that this was just one of the many simulations I had done and not real life, I triggered the monowire to pop out and grabbed it, unreeling a large coil. I had to get a little bit closer, so I started running towards him at my full speed, which was one hundred per cent on my Kerenzikov and had been for a few weeks.
  
  However, I wasn't fast enough to get to him before he pulled the trigger, with Gloria taking a round directly on her chest, knocking her to the ground. Growling, I flipped my wrist, sending out the coil and wrapped it easily around his neck, yanking hard and taking his head off like the cork in an overpressured champagne bottle, blood spraying everywhere.
  
  I intended to go for non-lethal takedowns until he had shot her. Shaking off the bits of viscera off the monowire was a new and awful experience, as the enemies in the VR simulation simply derezzed when you killed them. However, that didn't slow me down too much, and I had the second pistol-armed guy minus both hands and one pistol a moment later, with my wire scything out.
  
  Turning around to see the two guys with the baseball bats, they finally start to realise things are going wrong for them, and suddenly, the borged-out one starts moving at about my speed, running straight at me. Shit. A Sandy.
  
  I reeled my wire mostly back, holding just a couple metres as I decided to just... stay away from him. I didn't fancy a contest of strength; the fucker had obvious Gorilla Arms, some knock-off brand, though. I would probably die if he managed to brain me with that bat, and I didn't particularly want to try to cut it up with my wire, either. If it was hollow, it might cut through it, but solid aluminium bats were a common weapon for gangers that had super-strength. They were, in fact, the most common weapon for such gangers.
  
  I finally just turned around and started running away from him, with him yelling, "Stop running, bitch! I'll just brain you when your Sandy runs out!"
  
  I yelled back, "No, thank you!" I'm not sure why I did that, but he didn't like it and started chasing me faster. I ducked under a swing, and his bat took a huge chunk of cement out of a structural pillar in the large empty room, exposing the rebar beneath. Yeah, that thing is definitely solid and would kill me in one hit.
  
  We were working our way back to the entrance of the room in a lazy circle, and his friend had barely moved from his spot. When someone says they move three times faster than everyone else, it doesn't really sound like super speed, but it really is very fast. Not so fast that I wasn't visible or anything crazy like that, and his friend was trying to line up a swing on me as I was coming by him.
  
  Instead, I lashed out with my wire and popped his head off just like the first guy, feeling vaguely ill as I did so. Killing the first guy was instinct after he shot Gloria, but this I decided to do. Now that I had a little time to think about it, I was pretty sure our "differences" were all but irreconcilable after I killed their friend, so it was pretty much the definition of them or us by this point.
  
  "You fucking joytoy! I'm going to knock your head off and then fuck the-" yelled the guy chasing me. However, mid-threat, he suddenly started talking really slowly as his Sandy deactivated. I continued running, grabbing the dead guy's bat from his hands as I passed him, reeling my wire back into my left wrist completely as I did so.
  
  I was starting to gas out as far as my exercise was concerned, so I briefly stopped to give myself time to take in a lot of oxygen with practised quick deep breaths. I could run for about ninety seconds if I was going my full speed, flat out, but I functioned a lot better if the exercise I was doing wasn't anaerobic. If I had some kind of lung replacement, then I could probably run flat out a lot longer, though.
  
  I watched the borg approach me, him grinning wildly as he must have assumed we were both back to the same relative speed, and if so, he had the advantage. That was true. He did have the advantage if we were both operating at the same relative speed.
  
  I didn't let him get within swinging distance but instead zipped behind him at my max speed, planted my foot squarely and swung for the fences. I was nowhere near as strong as this guy... but I was still quite strong. I could bench two hundred and fifty kilos, doing slow but steady reps. If I gave it my all with a solid metal bat to the back of even a chromed-up asshole's head?
  
  With a sick crack, the guy went down like a sack of potatoes. It said something about the workmanship of his Sandy because I didn't feel his neck break, but there was a really good chance he was dead anyway. He was down for now, in any event.
  
  However, instead of bashing his brains in some more, I casually walked over to the guy that didn't have any hands, who was screaming in slow-motion and picked up his pistol in one hand, which was a much better Constitution Arms automatic in fifty calibre. A really nice one, actually. It was the local equivalent of the Desert Eagle and just as large and hardly anyone bought or carried them except if you wanted to show off. You could get better penetration with hypersonic flechettes in a much smaller form factor, after all.
  
  'This is going to hurt my ears,' I thought as I levelled the gun down at the handless guy and pulled the trigger, blowing his head clean off his body like I was Dirty Harry. Turning back around, I gape as I see the downed borg stirring as if he was planning on standing up. I didn't want to just beat his head to paste with a baseball bat, it was why I had gotten this gun, but maybe I should have.
  
  Nope. That's not going to happen. I tossed the metal bat away and used both hands to hold a steady sight picture and put two rounds into his chest, right over his heart. There was some subdermal armouring, but not enough to stop even the first oversized bullet. The second was just to make sure.
  
  Then I saw Gloria staring at me wide-eyed. Well, at least she doesn't appear to be dead.
  
  "Are you okay? Did that round penetrate? Do you need to go to the hospital?" I ask her, switching back to my slow level of speaking and moving.
  
  She nodded rapidly, "Yeah. I'm gonna have a hell of a bruise, I think, though. But shit! I saw the whole thing, and you were like, zip zip slash, woosh! You took off that gonk's head like it was a bottle cap! That was totally nova and totally fucking gross at the same time. I didn't know you were some kind of ninja, Tay!"
  
  I started getting queasy and dropped the hand cannon, running to a corner and throwing up my Fat Burger all over a structural column. Gloria stood up and came over to me, and said, "Shit. I'm sorry. Was that the first time you ever had to flatline somebody?"
  
  "Yeah..." I told her a little morosely.
  
  She sighed, "I'm sorry. When I was sixteen, a scav attacked a friend of mine, and I stabbed them from behind. I'm pretty sure they died."
  
  Fuck, it was a wonder the population didn't drop by half in this city every generation if everyone seemed like they had killed at least one person. And why were there so many fucking Scavs?! I shook my head, "It's alright. My dad kind of prepared me for this. He always told me to just ask myself... would I have done anything differently?"
  
  "And would you have?" asked Gloria.
  
  I shook my head, "I mean... I guess we could not have come in here, but we would have gotten in trouble. These guys were crazy, though, to attack medtechs working. I kind of think they didn't intend to let us live to begin with. Dead men tell no tales, right?"
  
  Gloria nodded slowly, "Yeah. Although the new Voodoo Boys don't really have a territory, this part of Watson is as close as it is to their territory. You mostly see them around Watson. A setup to make them look bad, maybe?"
  
  I shrugged, "I don't know. Maybe. Go check on our client." She nodded, grabbed the box of narcotics that had fallen to the floor and our monitor and went to assess him.
  
  "Phew... none of the vials broke," she said of the half-opened box of narcs. That was good. It was an incredible amount of paperwork, including mandatory drug tests if you lost your narcotics to such an "accident." She glanced back at me, "Should we call the cops?"
  
  "Not if you want to keep any of the chrome these jerkoffs have. This one is pretty borged out. Gorilla Arms, Sandevistan, some kind of skull reinforcement, generic legs, some kind of ankle reinforcement, micro rotors, Kiroshis MkIs, a few years old, a couple other things," I tell her after connecting my personal link to his interface socket. Although he was well and truly dead, his OS was still running slightly in safe diagnostic mode. The model of Sandy was a common and widely available Militech model. Almost definitionally the My First Sandy that any merc would buy.
  
  "Uhhh... yeah, fuck these guys. They tried to kill us, so we get to keep all of their stuff," Gloria finally said. "This guy has a pretty obvious concussion and a serious one. I think he's got a pretty serious TBI. Blown pupils, his sats are shit, too."
  
  I sighed. If he wasn't badly injured, I could have rationalised delaying his care, but that didn't sound good at all. Sounds like one of those assholes knocked him in the head with a solid metal bat. I said, "Alright, I'll get the ventilator; get the RSI drugs ready. I'll bring some body bags back with the gurney. We'll bag the three with the most interesting chrome, and I'll hide them here. Once we drop him off, we'll swing back here and go out of service for a bit. We have enough break time, and the call volume is finally low."
  
  She nodded firmly, starting to get to work despite probably having a cracked rib or at least a giant bruise.
  
  I walked out to the truck to get what we needed. Was I actually okay with what just happened? The scav that had his legs shot off died at the hospital, but I wasn't really responsible for that, but these four...
  
  I shook my head. I wouldn't have done anything differently. Except maybe bring my anaesthetic grenades to work. Could I hide one or two in my lunchbox?
  
  There were no heroes in this world, but then again, even Miss Militia and Narwhal had a lot of blood on their hands. Could it be the same with me? Scavs and murderous gang members weren't exactly S-class threats, but that was only because they didn't have the capability.
  
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  Treading water
  We ended up taking the patient to the hospital and returning back to the scene as planned. Thankfully, our defeated enemies were still there, so we stacked three of them in the back of the ambulance. The one we were leaving didn't have much chrome to speak of, aside from his head which was conveniently not attached to his body, so I just shoved it in the bodybag with one of the others.
  
  Since the other guy I decapitated had a lot of chrome in his body but none in his head, I just swapped their decapitated heads. Would anyone even realise or bother to check that the head went with the wrong body? If I was back in Brockton Bay, I would be immediately labelled the Head Swapping Killer or something and have a PRT or FBI task force dedicated to bringing me to justice. Here? I would be surprised if anyone noticed or cared.
  
  We were in Watson and not too far away from my storage unit, so I headed there.
  
  The storage unit did have cameras, as most places did, but like most places, they were connected to the net, and their firmware hadn't been updated in over a year. I wouldn't be able to do anything fancy like loop the camera footage like in Mission Impossible, I wasn't that cool, but I could temporarily disable the cameras. This would normally be an issue and result in an immediate security alert on a truly high-security facility, except that I knew this place was unattended. There were no security guards, and the cameras were only checked in the event of incidents, and I wouldn't cause one.
  
  After hacking the exterior cameras, I briefly shifted into a deep dive perspective and trawled through the storage unit's subnet, hitting each of the other cameras in turn. They'd stay deactivated for some time unless this place had a security watchdog daemon, which I doubted.
  
  I then left Gloria in the car and carried all three body bags awkwardly. It was more weight than I could carry comfortably or very far, but I figured one trip would be less suspicious than two. I sent the key electronically and was admitted into the building. It would be really embarrassing if I wasn't the only person in the storage unit right now. I wasn't sure what I would do if I saw someone carrying three obviously full-body bags into their storage unit... I probably would just nod and pretend I didn't see anything, actually.
  
  I didn't do anything fancy; I just unlocked my unit, tossed the bodies in, and left immediately. I would come back the next day with some tools. It would have been easiest to bring the bodies back to my place as I had all of the equipment needed for a full pathological examination at home, but I didn't want a very amused Mr Jin to know what I was up to, so I would have to do some sort of dissection with rudimentary tools in a dusty storage unit.
  
  For some reason, the sense I got from my power was delighted. Sometimes I felt my power would be happy if I became a serial killer, so long as I could dissect a lot of bodies. Was that the "evil" part of me, I wondered? Or was there really something to the theory that a parahuman's power was some external agent?
  
  "Alright, Gloria... let's get back to it," I told her as I returned to the truck. She was driving, though. My arms hurt. I did seem to be getting stronger, though; carrying those three gonks must have been three fifty kilos easy. The two weren't that heavy, but that damn borg weighed one fifty if he weighed a kilo.
  
  Bioware strength mods sort of acted as a multiplier, although only up to a point. The stronger you were naturally, the better. I didn't look like a body-building ab-girl, or anything, but I didn't have much fat left on my body, and my muscles were vaguely visible. It was kind of nice.
  
  I brought several duffle bags with me back to my storage unit. It was more than necessary to just take back the implants from the three bodies, but I was taking back a number of other things as well.
  
  I think I would have been a lot more upset at killing these four guys if I hadn't worked in an ambulance for several months. Although my patients almost always survived, at least until they got to the hospital, the amount of death I have seen in just my short time here blunted a lot of the anxiety and depression I probably would have felt otherwise. Especially considering a lot of it was caused by the gang these guys were in, possibly these guys specifically in some cases.
  
  So, despite the idea still making me somewhat queasy, I wasn't that upset over it. It did make me think back about the way the PRT dealt with criminals back home with a bit of disdain. It seemed almost performative now. I had thought about that quite a bit in the ten months I had spent in this new world, with my handful of memories from Alt-Taylor helping me. She was a lot less naive than I had been.
  
  The only conclusion I could draw was that the Endbringers were a lot bigger threat than what was portrayed in the media and by the authorities. I hadn't thought they downplayed them, either, but the fact that the people in power accepted murderous supervillains must mean that the situation was a lot more precarious than even I had thought.
  
  I decided to work on the borg gentleman first; there were a number of cybernetics that would, for lack of a better word, go bad if they weren't removed from a body within a few days. Mostly replacement organ types and similar systems that needed a constant level of electrical charge to run continuous maintenance systems. I had everything needed to preserve these types of things back at my apartment, though.
  
  Humming the tune to this Japanese girl group which I kind of hated, I disconnected each of his limbs and then carefully excised their interface sockets from what flesh he had on his torso before setting them aside. I had brought some containers from home to carry some of the more delicate implants in, so I carefully disconnected his Kiroshis and settled them into a small cylinder.
  
  Flipping him over, I make certain to work cautiously, disconnecting his Sandevistan. It was a Militech model and fairly reliable. There were cheaper models that provided less of an advantage, with the lowest that I was aware of for Sandy's providing about a two times boost, but that was still on the level of something that regular non-boosted enemies could fight against. It would certainly be harder, but it was possible.
  
  This was the first tier that most actual mercs, and not just gangers, would go for. Something that would provide the real and effective super speed that was very difficult for non-augmented people to really contend with. It was the first level that was "military grade," in other words.
  
  Damn, that song was stuck in my head despite being really terrible. I used my deck to launch my music player. The net service I used to listen to music was fairly cheap, and it used machine learning to try to gauge what my tastes in music were.
  
  "Now playing your favourite oldies," flashed before my eyes, which irritated me to no end.
  
  It didn't take me too long to finish with the other two guys, and I was pretty stoked with the haul. Two sets of Kiroshis, one set of more generic Biodyne optics, a biomonitor, several replacement organs including a Syn-Lung setup, and two full sets of arms and legs between the three guys, including one set of generic Gorilla Arms. The borg's limbs had micro-rotors installed, as well as a heavy-duty ankle reinforcement, so those limbs were pretty valuable, but the rest were average. The Sandy was interesting, too. It was the first time I actually saw one up close, too.
  
  Some of the things I left in the bodies because they were just too annoying to remove with the tools I had and weren't that expensive, such as the polymer arteries the borg had and the subdermal armour system one of the others had. It didn't appear to be a very good one, anyway. However, I was taking the borg's skull replacement back so I could remove it properly by the simple expedient of taking his entire head back home with me.
  
  After that, I grabbed a few of the black market implants that my dad had left me; for example, there was another Projectile Launch System in here, which I had an avenue to sell now. Then I spent a little time disassembling part of the Dragoon. It was kind of difficult because the railgun shot made some panels really difficult or impossible to take off.
  
  Before I had gotten my Zetatech Self-ICE if I had thought about Tinkering ICE, it would be very difficult. My power didn't seem to want to help me with it, thinking it was mainly computer related. However, so long as I kept firmly in mind that it was going to be installed in my body and kept in mind the specific format for the slots in my Zetatech system, it began helping me a lot more.
  
  Keeping all that in mind, I disassembled parts until I got to what my power identified as the cyberwar subsystems. There were both ICE modules, although in a different slot format, as well as generalised ECM and jamming equipment. I wasn't sure what I could do with the latter, but I took it all and put it in one of the duffle bags.
  
  Gloria's car was small, but we managed to fit in what was left of the three bodies in the back seat, as well as the duffle bags of loot. I asked her if she knew where we could dispose of the bodies without anyone being the wiser, and she looked at me oddly and just nodded.
  
  We drove for a fair bit, even leaving the city to the east. I wondered if we would be attacked by the Nomads, but that probably was something that was more just depicted on television.
  
  When we got to our destination, I blinked and then sighed, blushing slightly, "Oh." We were at the municipal landfill. I chuckled a little bit and then just quickly tossed the three guys into an area and tossed a bit of cardboard over them to conceal the obvious body bags. I wondered how many bodies were buried here in the dump. A lot, probably.
  
  She followed me back to my apartment and was a bit shocked at my outer public area, which looked more like a Ripperdoc clinic than someone's apartment. She gaped, "Taylor, are you a ripperdoc?!"
  
  "Uh, no," I told her, "I just happened to get all of this equipment... well... it's hard to explain. I can't really talk about it, but it's mine now."
  
  She looked at me a little unbelieving, and I waved her off. "Okay, let's get some of these perishable items in the stock-keeping system."
  
  She handed me items, and I placed them carefully in the cryogenic containers and then slid those containers into Dr Gerstatt's old stock system, carefully inputting the name and model number of each added implant into the computer as I did so.
  
  I set one of the cylinders carrying one set of Kiroshis aside for a moment. The limbs I sat on my workbench; I would go through all of their maintenance later today. It shouldn't take too long.
  
  After we were done, I asked her, "Do you want these Kiroshis? They're only a couple of years old, and they're a lot better than the trash you're currently seeing with. I'll update them with the latest firmware, including NCPD downlink and everything."
  
  She looked interested but said, "I don't really have a regular doctor I go to."
  
  I waved her off, "I may not be a ripperdoc, but you already have optics. Swapping in one set of another is one of the simplest procedures there is; it's mostly plug-and-play." That wasn't quite true, as Kiroshi made a lot better use of the optical nerve than most brands, so I would have to make a couple adjustments to the interface, but it really was simple.
  
  She looked amused, "If you blind me, you're the one that's gonna have to walk me to an actual doctor and pay for them to fix me up. But, yeah, sure. I would like to see if the gonks I see are murderers, plus the resolution is supposed to be preem. These can't even do actual phone calls, you know?" She pulled out an actual cell phone, similar to the one I kept in my desk drawer these days.
  
  I nodded and told her, "Okay, take a seat. I'm going to reflash these babies with the latest firmware."
  
  I didn't particularly want to see what kind of media, images or videos a murderous borg kept in their Kiroshi's internal memory, even if there weren't any viruses or malware installed, so I just quickly reset the eyes to factory defaults and installed the latest manufacturer's software on it. It took me over an hour to do that when I did it to myself the first time, but now it barely took two or three minutes to accomplish.
  
  I put on the rebuilt glove tool that I inherited from Dr Gerstatt. It was a little weird getting used to using it, but it really did make a lot of common operations very quick. I administered a local anaesthetic and powered down her optics before using the glove tool to carefully pop them out of her orbital cavity, setting them in a small cylinder one at a time. They weren't very good, but they were still worth a couple hundred eddies, maybe. Waste not, want not.
  
  Rather than immediately installing the Kiroshis, I took a moment to update the optical nerve interface. In some ways, it was standard, but Kiroshi used a lot of semi-proprietary methods, so it would just generate a lot of pointless headaches and sub-optimal performance if I just installed them without making these adjustments.
  
  One of the attachments on the glove hand was an articulable computer interface. I could switch out the tip with various plugs that would interface with a number of proprietary data formats, but the semi-generic optical interfaces always were programmed by a near-field communication system. There wasn't a lot of room for plugs inside your eyes, so I popped that onto the glove and held it close to the nerve interface in her optical cavity until the new Kiroshi software flashed onto it.
  
  I had already reprogrammed the iris colour on the Kiroshis to more or less match her previous eyes instead of the blood-red colour Mr Edgy McEdgerson had selected. She could update it herself in the settings, but there was no point in giving her cringe-eyes to start with. Using the glove, I installed each eye one at a time, making sure it clicked into place properly and then testing its range of movement.
  
  After that, I nodded and did the last few tests before saying, "Alright. That should do it. We'll just need to go through the visual calibration routine in a moment." I tapped a few keys on the Meditech biobed, which should reactivate Gloria's eyes. She blinked a few times and says, "Woah. Nova, everything looks awesome."
  
  I hummed and nodded, asking her, "Hmmm... no glitches, blurred vision or low contrast?" After she shook her head, I rolled my chair back to glance at the read-out on the biobed's drop-down operator display. While she was sitting here, I had dual access to all of the output of her implants. One side of the screen showed a close-up of the iris and lens of each of the Kiroshis, while the other half of the screen was her perspective.
  
  "Okay, activate the HUD and select the new user setup," I told her and then walked her through both the setup and calibration program. I then showed her all the options and how to download a phone app and pair it with her existing phone service, as well as the quality of life things like GPS mapping, taking photos and videos and other things.
  
  "Okay, try the optical zoom mode. Take a look at that poster across the room," I told her, and she gaped, not even realising such a thing existed. "Lastly, the scanning system."
  
  "Scanning system?" she asked, confused.
  
  I hummed and nodded, "Yes, that's how you trigger some of the ancillary functions, like NCPD background checks. Focus on my face and kind of think hard about it. Like you did when you zoomed, but a little different. Instead of thinking about seeing distance, think about scanning or just focusing on my face hard." All Kiroshi models had a mental interface, integrating into the user's operating system more completely compared to a lot of the bargain basement optics that still used blink and eye-tracking systems that were decades old already.
  
  "Ah! I see. Well, you don't have any criminal record, Tay," she said with a grin.
  
  I nodded, "After a while, it should become second nature, syncing with your thought processes and reading your intention. This also includes a piece of simple machine learning software that will identify objects in the environment as well. It's not too useful if all you have are optics, but it is still the sort of thing that could win you a bet sometime. So, trigger it on, say... here, your old eyes." I handed her the open container, and she looked inside.
  
  "Ah, preem. It gave me the manufacturer and model number," she said, excited.
  
  I nodded, "You should consider taking the internal biomonitor we found too. It's not too old, but I'm not willing to put it in. But we could find you a good doctor that doesn't charge too much, especially if I go with you to put it in." Frankly, I was surprised that one of the guys had a biomonitor. Most gangers didn't really seem to care that much about their health.
  
  She looked a little uneasy, "But we could probably sell that for... how much?"
  
  I considered that. Retail price was probably six thousand, "One point five to two thousand eddies."
  
  "That's a lot of money, Taylor," she said, unsure.
  
  I waved her off, "Money is there to be spent. And what is the most important thing?"
  
  "David!" she said instantly.
  
  I coughed and said, "Okay, what's the second most important thing?"
  
  She seemed confused, "... David?"
  
  "Who do you think will take care of David if you're dead?" I asked her bluntly.
  
  That caused her to blink in shock and consider the question seriously, "My health, then?"
  
  Yes, that was the answer I was looking for. I nodded, "Precisely. A lot of people, especially people used to being poor, underestimate the utility of an internal biomonitor because they are kind of pricey and don't provide any obvious benefits. They're considered a 'suit implant.' But consider that... Corpos don't just waste money on things, at least not until you're so far up the ladder that I've never seen, nor my dad. The modern biomonitors made these days are... comprehensive. It'll tell you if you're not getting enough sleep, not getting enough nutrition and what you need to eat to fix that, or if you're getting too stressed, blood pressure is too high, or if you've been poisoned or drugged well before the effects become apparent. If you've been injured, it'll tell you exactly where, which will help you know where to use bleeding control to keep yourself alive."
  
  After that, I finished with, "Which is cheaper from a medical perspective, preventing a problem from occurring or fixing it after it happened?"
  
  Gloria was smart, so she understood what I was saying right away, "Ah, I see what you mean. That does make a lot of sense when you say it that way. Okay, I'll take it even if I have to pay seven hundred or so eddies to buy out your share."
  
  I nodded. I didn't offer to give it to her for free, not only because I needed the money too, but more importantly, she wasn't the type to just accept charity.
  
  I handed her an inhaler that was full of nanomedicine. "Two puffs now, another two in an hour or two." I was giving her that for free, but it only cost about twenty eurodollars.
  
  She followed my directions, and I asked, "Want to stay here for lunch?"
  
  She shook her head, "I gotta get back to little David, but you're free to come over? He likes you!"
  
  I chuckled, "Maybe another time. I'm going to spend a few hours running maintenance on all these items that are now ours. Oh, wait. I have an early birthday present for you." Gloria's birthday was next month, but I had already decided what to get her.
  
  She perked up, "Really?!" and I nodded and told her to wait for a moment while I ran into the private part of my apartment to grab it.
  
  For some reason, wrapping gifts was somewhat of a lost art here; at least there wasn't any wrapping paper at any of the stores I went to, so I kind of improvised with a small bag with coloured paper sticking out of it and hiding what was inside.
  
  I handed it to her, and she took it and blinked, "Heavy!"
  
  She pulled the thin paper out and reached in, "Oooh... you got me..." she pulled out a pistol, "A gun?!"
  
  I nodded. It was the same M-10C Lexington, the compact version, that I had gotten her to practise with at the range with me a few times. My dad had like six Lexington's amongst his personal effects, including two compact ones, so it wasn't even anything I had to buy.
  
  "And an appendix-style concealed carry holster, three magazines, and a hundred cartridges," I finished for her. I bought the holster, but it wasn't that expensive. I was worried she wouldn't purchase a pistol because of her incessant frugalness.
  
  She chuckled and said, "Uh.. thanks. Do you think I should start wearing it now?"
  
  I nodded and showed her the best way to hide the holster in her pants so that her loose shirt covered it, "And we continue to practice at least once a week for the foreseeable future."
  
  After that, she left, and I worked a little bit on the cybernetics we had secured. I thought now was a good time to slowly stop selling them to Gloria's small-time fixer over a period of a few months. He seemed to be increasingly busy with the drugs I was selling him, anyway. He had sent another message requesting more, and about ten times as much as his last order, so I would drop a few thousand tablets at one of the dead drops I had set up.
  
  Once I had realised such things existed in this town, I raided her dad's book collection. He had a lot of old books, including interesting and suspicious ones from the 1960s and 1970s, about spy tradecraft, like how to run a dead drop. I also remembered one time that Alt-Taylor claimed he was acting like a spy, and his response was telling; he shook his head and said, eyes glimmering in hidden amusement, "Never! Spies, when caught, are simply shot out of hand. Intelligence officers, however, are often traded back, though. Never be a spy, Taylor."
  
  He really was a spy, wasn't he?!
  
  I glanced at the giant handgun I had pulled out of the duffle bag. What was I going to do with this... beast? It would be effective against borgs or people with subdermal armour, but I could get similar anti-armour penetration using the M-76e. The solid steel slugs penetrated fairly well, and there were options for tungsten tips for penetration, although they were a bit pricier. The Constitution Arms pistol was a good, reliable and effective weapon. It was just... nobody would take her seriously if I was carrying it.
  
  It was like what a BD star would use in an action film. If you saw a sixteen-year-old girl carrying a Desert Eagle, you'd be a bit perplexed too. It was the same with this thing.
  
  I had a sudden idea and triggered my contacts list to pop up. I had gotten somewhat on good terms with most of the low-level Tyger Claws that worked in the building. And I recalled treating one of them who talked shit about my "tiny little girl's gun." That the only way he would ever carry a gun was if it was a man's gun, he said!
  
  Perfect. I found his name, Johnny Leung, in my contacts list and called him. The Tygers Claws wasn't strictly a Japanese gang, per se, and Johnny was one of the few Han Chinese members. Although that said, he did go big into the whole Japanese culture thing about Samurai and swords, anyway.
  
  He picked up after the third ring, "Doc girl, whatchu need?"
  
  I sighed internally, "It's what I got. I remember you saying you'd be interested in a gun, but only if it was a big manly one." I held out the giant pistol in front of myself, so it could be picked up on the vidcall, "Constitution Arms, 12.7mm, in really good shape. Two magazines and a belt holster are included. Interested?"
  
  "Fuck yeah, girl! If the price is right! I'll give ya five hundred for it," he countered.
  
  Priced new, it would be about fifteen hundred eurodollars or more. But that included the cleaning kit that I didn't have, though. I countered with a different price, and eventually, we settled on six hundred dollars. He was working security at the front door today, so I took it out to him, belt, holster and all.
  
  "Here you go, Johnny," I told him, handing him the pistol, magazine and belt and holster. The holster was kind of ridiculous; it was faux leather and almost looked like it was out of the old west, complete with little bullet loops. Why you'd have bullet loops when your gun used a magazine, I didn't really know.
  
  "Oh fucking preem!" he said, putting the holster on, "You didn't say the holster was sweet as fuck, choom! I look just like a fucking Samurai cowboy now!" He said, posing with the pistol on his belt and sword in his hands. "Man, I'm gonna get a sheathe on the other side for my sword."
  
  Oh god.
  
  He transferred six hundred and fifty dollars, the extra fifty for how extra sweet the holster was, in his words. His friends gathered around him, and they all tended to agree that it was, indeed, badass, with one recommending he get an ambidextrous co-processor so he could swing a sword in one hand and shoot in the other, like Victor Chang, the BD star.
  
  "Later, Johnny," I told him and left as soon as possible before he decided to ask me about such implants. Was he stupid because he ended up in a brutal street gang, or was he in a brutal street gang because he was stupid?
  
  I then transferred half the proceeds to Gloria with a text explaining what it was from. Although I had done all the work killing those assholes, she did get shot in the chest for it, so she was definitely due an equal share.
  
  A week later, I introduced Gloria to Dr Taylor, who was more than happy to install the provided biomonitor. He charged a little bit more than average, but he provided a comprehensive service that I honestly felt was worth it.
  
  She felt pride in her work when Gloria told her that Dr Taylor was impressed with whoever put her optics in, too.
  
  She said as she walked back to her car, "This thing says I'm chronically dehydrated, deficient in a lot of vitamins, chronically fatigued, malnourished and am close to getting a repetitive stress injury, and I have pre-hypertension."
  
  I gave her a side eye and nodded, "I could have told you all that." In fact, I had told her all of that.
  
  Sighing, she said, "Fine, I get it." She paused and asked, "Do you think you could sell me one of those sleep things you built?"
  
  I blinked and hadn't considered that. Maybe that would have been a better birthday present than a pistol? I nodded slowly, considering the price of the component parts, "Sure, for three hundred eddies. That's friends' pricing." The version I could make now hardly required any of my maintenance at all.
  
  Time passed as water does, and before long, a few months had gone by. Gloria was stoked because she passed the Advanced EMT test on her first try.
  
  "Congratulations!" I told her after she told me the good news as we both started walking from the parking lot into work. I finally couldn't stand riding the train anymore and bought a pretty nice Thorton Colby CX410 for thirty thousand eurodollars from a nomad group that lived nearby and dealt in a lot of vehicles. You could even buy aeroplanes from them.
  
  It had the common modification where the trunk was replaced with a truck bed, so it kind of reminded me of a Chevy El Camino. We didn't have those types of cars in Earth Bet, but it was iconic in Earth Aleph media. The engine was recently fully overhauled, and it purred like a kitten. It was a lot nicer than Gloria's car, but it was still only your average middle-of-the-road used vehicle. The papers on it seemed legit; at least the city didn't make any noise as if it was stolen or anything (even if it might have been), so I thought it was a good deal.
  
  Before this purchase, I had accumulated over a hundred and sixty thousand eurodollars from my various income streams, but now I was back down to one hundred and thirty, which was barely more than when I started out. I had been here for over a year and barely made any progress with my ultimate goals, although I was in a much better position in a lot of ways. Two steps forward and one step back.
  
  Several months ago, I was tempted to keep the Syn-Lungs for myself, but they were a pretty shitty version, so I ended up selling them. I did keep one of the replacement livers and used it as parts to build my armoured liver-heart-detoxifier. I hadn't gotten the guts to cut into myself yet, and the system looked pretty weird, so I was too afraid to take it to Dr Taylor; if he became aware of my monowire, he'd have to tell the coppers, so I would have to just bite the bullet and perform surgery on myself I wanted it, and I did. Perhaps on my next five days stretch of days off.
  
  I was closing on my six-month anniversary working for NC Med Ambulance, and I figured I would start sending in my application to Trauma Team when I hit the nine-month mark. Our record spoke for itself; very rarely did people die in our ambulance unless we were dealing with injuries that were incompatible with life, and their body just hadn't realised it was dead yet.
  
  I think the only reason the bosses hadn't split us up to try to increase the stats of other units was that they were positive I was going to leave here in a few months anyway, so they felt it was better if I managed to get Gloria as shit-hot as she could be in my remaining time here. Personally, I agreed with that; plus, I enjoyed working with Gloria, and we had a business that made us each a small but steady amount of money.
  
  We'd be keeping the same relationship after I left, although I would get less of a share as all I would be responsible for would be refurbishing and performing maintenance on the cyberware she would bring me. But I was trying to think of ways to raise a lot more money at once, though. It seemed like no matter what in this city, the more you made, the more you spent, and it seemed really hard to stick to any saving goals.
  
  In a lot of ways, Night City was like being tossed overboard in the middle of the ocean; all you could do was keep your head above water without ever getting anywhere.
  
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  Base visit
  As I ran on the treadmill, I started letting my mind wander. I had switched to a workout routine that combined fast-paced anaerobic sprints with slower-paced endurance running, it was a training regimen that I read about online, and it was supposed to have good results. I had finally bit the bullet and performed the first surgery on myself, removing my liver entirely and installing the replacement. It was locked into liver-only mode right now, as I would have to graft either synthetic polymer-based or donor arteries to connect it into my cardiovascular system in such a way as to support the high-flow operations a heart would need.
  
  I was kind of kicking myself for not ripping some of that borg's polymer arteries out when I had the chance, my other option was letting my power help me individualise a set of donor arteries, but I would need to thoroughly dissect a donor body for that to be possible. We didn't really have too much time when we came across people we could swipe cybernetics from. Certainly not enough time to do a thorough, full pathological dissection.
  
  I could buy either a set of polymer arteries or even a cloned and individualised set of arteries specific to me, but since I wasn't a doctor, it would be kind of weird for me to do so. It didn't matter too much; I would find something eventually. It will probably be pretty soon, too.
  
  I still wasn't including any weight training, per se, but since I was so much stronger than Gloria, I did most of the lifting while working, so I counted that as a stand-in. She was interested in the same muscle and bone lace treatment I got until I told her the cost.
  
  The application process to Trauma Team was supposed to take a fair bit of time, so it wasn't weird that I had recently applied fully three months before I would have the experience necessary to qualify. I sent my application using my internal Militech's dependent net address, and there was some back and forth. Trauma Team was still split into regional sub-corporations since the last Corporate War when they had to ultimately deny service to both Arasaka and Militech; they hadn't quite reorganised into one global corporation yet, but there were signs that they were in the process of doing so. I was applying to Trauma Team Night City, which was a wholly owned subsidiary of Trauma Team North America. All training was standardised and performed by the Trauma Team North America headquarters in Seattle, for example.
  
  Eventually, I received a number of what I considered application filters. Normally, my application would have been rejected out of hand because I didn't meet the three years in critical care experience requirements, but there was a notation that this was waived by the hiring manager in Night City. It was nice to see that he still remembered me.
  
  I wondered how the friends I made in the class were doing; Fiona and Antonio were the only two that were destined to be working in Night City that I was really close with. Xiao Li was probably working for some Kang Tao-owned American subsidiary somewhere in the states. Otherwise, he wouldn't have needed to pass the American National Registry Paramedic examination, but I didn't know precisely where he was working.
  
  The first filter was a net-based knowledge test and a simulated patient encounter. The latter was open-form, where it asked me what I would do, and I answered in natural language, and I was pretty sure I was partly graded by AIs and possibly reviewed by humans for edge cases.
  
  After that came an interview with what was basically an AI chatbot, asking me about my background and family and getting permission from me to get my records both from my school and my current employer, permission for them to run a background investigation on me, of any scope that they liked, and a number of other things. The security questionnaire portion of the interview was comprehensive, invasive and very personal; for example, they knew that I was not yet sexually active at the end of it. It kind of reminded me of what I thought it might be like to get a James Bond-style Top Secret security clearance back in Earth Bet.
  
  I figured honestly was the best policy here, at least for the most part, as I was definitely prepared to lie when and if the bot asked me if I was involved in any criminal activities. However, it only asked if I was ever charged or convicted of criminal activities. I felt the nuance was important, although the worst thing I had done was probably more along the lines of a tort.
  
  Infringing on intellectual property was a criminal offence here, not just a civil tort like in Earth Bet, but technically that only applied to patent-protected IP. Biotechnica had never patented the stimulant I had inadvertently manufactured and was selling. I had thought they had at first, and the net searches on it were ambiguous and seemed to imply that they had, but the truth was they kept the entire process a trade secret, so I was actually totally in the clear criminally. The only other criminal thing I had done was stealing from dead gang members, and nobody cared about that. In fact, Trauma Team did it themselves when they flatlined people that were in the way of their clients, time permitting. They'd probably give me a thumbs-up on that.
  
  Not that my technical innocence would matter, as solving problems with extrajudicial applications of violence was practically a prerequisite if you wanted to consider your organisation a corporation. Anyone could start a company, but you weren't really considered a corporation until you had a minimum amount of military force and people knew you would use it.
  
  Forty years ago, a lot of people considered Biotechnica a "good" corporation, but they still manufactured and sold bioweapons to the highest bidder in the last Corporate War, to both sides as far as I could tell, and they hadn't really gotten better since then, so it was best if I could stay off their radar.
  
  However, I had been wargaming, trying to sell them both samples of and the synthesis procedures for the super antibiotic that I had made. I had a lot of it remaining, stored in a cool, dry place, and I knew two ways to synthesise it, one of which would be suitable for industrial production.
  
  I had discovered through messages sent through my dead drops to Gloria's fixer, Diego Delgado, that Biotechnica itself had approached him. At first, I was scared shitless! But, apparently, they were approaching him to sell him product directly when I ran out, and he wanted to know how much more I could sell him so he could plan the transition and if I would be willing to sell my pill press machine when it happened. That didn't make sense at all, and I was very confused until I realised that Biotechnica was playing the Filmshop marketing model.
  
  In Earth Bet, there was a piece of professional photo manipulation software called Filmshop. It has existed since the early 1990s and was one of the most popular and widely used programs for artistically creative people and companies around. It was also one of the most widely pirated pieces of software in the world, and the company did not really seem to mind too much.
  
  I had it explained to me by Mrs Knott in my computer class - by allowing their software to be pirated by people who didn't have enough money to buy it in the first place, they weren't losing any money but were gaining familiarity and market share instead. That familiarity would later then be transmuted into money when those same people, later in their life and career, went to work for an actual company that would, in fact, pay the licensing fees.
  
  The employees who had been using pirated copies of Filmshop their entire lives would demand to use this same software that they were familiar with, and therefore they got sales. Market share was almost as significant as profitability, Alt-Taylor's memories told me and could be more significant for some products. Nobody thought the disgusting company Buck-A-Slice actually made any money on their eurodollar slices of pizza, but it was the extras you got when you went in for a slice that made them profitable.
  
  Biotechnica was having its flagship stimulant be priced for a certain high-end demographic, complete with numerous anti-counterfeiting measures, and then the same stimulant sans those measures creating market share in the grey market. But it was doing it one better by actually profiting off the grey market sales directly in many cases. I got the impression that they weren't presently interested in me at all, but I bet that would change rapidly if I sold more than the half kilo or so of product that I had left.
  
  But this gave me the idea to sell the antibiotic and its synthesis steps to them. I couldn't do it myself, not directly... the risk was too great, but perhaps six months or a year or so after our existing business arrangement was concluded, I could approach Diego again, in a new anonymous identity, and offer to sell that through him to Biotechnica.
  
  At one point, I thought the antibiotic might exist and just be proprietary and secret, but I didn't think that anymore. It was so potent and had so many side effects that I thought there would definitely be signs, even obvious to everyday pre-hospital clinicians, that such a treatment was available, even if it was only kept for the very wealthy.
  
  As such, I could offer it to them for a million eurodollars and have my money problems solved! It was a lot of money, but to them, it wasn't much at all for what they were getting. I'd have to give them samples up front for them to take my claims of the medicine's efficacy seriously. They'd have to test it themselves, and that meant that they'd put them under a mass spectrometer for sure and get the complete chemical composition. That meant that they would eventually be able to reproduce it, probably. They were a pharmaceutical company, after all. However, the synthesis wasn't obvious.
  
  It wasn't just a slightly different synthetic antibiotic that they could draw decades of experience in synthesising similar compounds, and it might take a research laboratory multiple years to get an industrially useful synthesis method for it. So they would be spending a million dollars on getting several years early at introducing the product, which I thought they would go for.
  
  They would also try to offer me a job I couldn't refuse, too. So I would have to make sure that the trade was conducted anonymously, somehow. And I would have to make sure that they knew I had contingencies in place to release the drug to its competitors if I were to vanish, as killing me to recover the one million dollars would be quite tempting too. Probably not to the real executives who would greenlight such a deal who shat larger dollar amounts on a weekly basis, but my memories from Alt-Taylor told me it was exactly what a mid-level ops manager in their Intel department might do. Possibly so he or she could pocket the money themselves, or if that wasn't feasible, then to look a little better on their quarterly evaluations.
  
  It would be extremely risky, and I hadn't settled on dealing with this Diego gentleman again even if I did take up the idea, which I very well might not. It might be better for me to have a clean break with him, and then I could approach one of the better-known Fixers in the city to run as a middle-man to the deal. There were ones that were famous for sticking to their agreements, and it would be much less likely I would be stabbed in the back by one of them than by a small-time name. I might have to approach these people in person, though, for them to give me the time of day, so there were drawbacks with that as well.
  
  I wasn't in a rush, and I would be sure to wait as long as I needed for my brief stint as a drug seller to be completely forgotten as I didn't want to connect any lines to any people, even if those people were fictional personas I only used to sell drugs for nine months or so.
  
  Selling him the pill press would make sense and be one way to further disconnect me from that business, as I doubt he is crediting some random anonymous person selling him product in the first place. The machine was heavily Tinkerised, but I thought I could get it into shape so that it worked at least for a few months, maybe even longer. After that, I wouldn't care, anyway, and he would have no way to contact me to complain!
  
  Let him hire a Techie and watch him be perplexed at how the machine worked at all in the first place. It was a shame I couldn't see the look on the techie's face when he inspected it. I didn't build it out of bubblegum and shoestrings, it looked properly industrial, but I was pretty sure some of its operation principles didn't line up with reality, especially with how quickly it solidified the candy coating on the pills.
  
  It wasn't like pill press machines were rare or hard to find, even ones similar to mine that put on a "candy shell" were available for purchase, and I figured he just wanted to keep a single brand in his product going forward, which might be possible if he cannibalised my die into a commercially available press.
  
  I would have to weigh my options carefully. I would make a bit over sixty-five thousand eurodollars, altogether, on selling these tic-tacs, but I was pretty sure I would be tracked down if I continued that business much further into the future. If I were to start a new, similar business selling some other chemical with an existing market, it would pose similar risks, too. Or greater. The stimulant I made wasn't strictly speaking a recreational substance, so it was on a weird place where the market in it was a lot gentler than if it was a quasi-legal or outright illegal substance.
  
  I definitely didn't want to start competing with the Tyger Claws in one of their core competencies and money-making industries, which was illegal drugs, either. Not just because I lived in their building but I found the illegal drug trade in Night City to be very despicable. I had managed to study some of the drugs the Tyger Claws sold, and most of them caused rapid addiction and very serious medical complications, as a matter of course, almost as though they were designed to do so.
  
  If some shadowy force was intentionally spreading highly addictive and dangerous drugs for some unknown purpose, then I certainly didn't want to pop my head up and offer less addictive and safer alternatives. I mean, ideally, that would be great, but I wanted to stay alive.
  
  I could continue as I was, finding random ways to make money over time, but each scheme wasn't that much less of a risk than trying to sell my IP. It was just dealing with smaller amounts of money; therefore, I thought it was less likely to be noticed, but that was just chance, really.
  
  One of the fast sprint segments caused me to stop thinking entirely, and I could only run and pant until it was over, and I jogged slowly in the cool-down segment until my workout was complete.
  
  Nodding at the machine after I wiped it off, I headed back to my apartment to hit the showers. I still didn't quite trust getting naked around other people. It took me a week of living in this world to stop taking a pistol into the bathroom when I took a shower in my own apartment.
  
  It wasn't like anybody would be interested to see my body, anyway.
  
  I survived two rounds of in-person interviews. Rather than be conducted at Trauma Team tower as I thought, they were conducted off-premises in a nearby hotel's conference room, both times, including a very strenuous and highly technical one conducted by one of Trauma Team's local medical directors, which was a doctor.
  
  Today I was heading to Trauma Team Tower itself for what was called a "base visit." Trauma Team had a similar schedule as NC Med Ambulance, twenty-four hours on if you were a clinician. I understood the pilots worked shorter hours daily but ended up working more days a week to make up for it, and frankly, I approved of that arrangement. I didn't want the pilot flying an AV I was in to be fatigued, even if stims and much better ones than MC Med Ambulance used were available.
  
  Trauma Team had a pretty good corporate culture as corporations in this dystopia went, which meant that they at least pretended to care about their employees. All employees got a Trauma Team subscription, and the fees they responded to you were said to be billed at cost. And I'm sure they'd be more than happy to set up some kind of payment plan arrangement where they would take a little out of your check every week if you weren't able to pay upfront.
  
  As such, a base visit was from what I could tell about online at forums for people who had or wanted to work there was an "asshole test." As in, could you be around three other people for a whole day without them wanting to shoot you?
  
  This was especially important because six out of the twenty-four hours of your working day were on a "ready 5" status, as in you were loaded up in the AV and waiting. Apparently, the Trauma Team's armoured helmets included a built-in BD wreath, and Trauma Team would pay a monthly subscription for every pilot and clinician to an interactive BD MMO game of their choice.
  
  I had never actually played one, but there was one that was set in the early 2000s where all the players had superpowers, and you had to pick whether or not you wanted to be a hero or villain; that looked very amusing to me. It was famous for having an artificial intelligence examine your playstyle and disposition in the introduction and selecting a superpower for you; you couldn't pick yourself on the first character you made, although they definitely offered that service for a fee, of course.
  
  The security for the Trauma Team tower was the strictest I have ever seen thus far in the world, although a fair bit of it was unobtrusive. There was a small antechamber when you entered that I thought looked old-fashioned until I realised it was full of scanning devices when two security guards in full combat armour and automatic weapon met me at the end.
  
  I introduced myself, "Hello. I'm Taylor Hebert; I'm a prospective new hire here for a base visit."
  
  One of the guards looked at the other one, who glanced down at a tablet and said, his voice slightly distorted by his helmet's speakers, "E-mag pistol, knife, kerenzikov, cyberdeck and monowire on the left side."
  
  The first guard seemed surprised if I was reading his emotions through his armour correctly but nodded and said, "Ma'am, you'll have to leave your pistol and knife with us down here."
  
  I had expected that, and I complied but what surprised me was when the guard said, "If you'd roll up your sleeve on your left hand, ma'am?" I blinked and did so, and he placed a small bracelet right over my monowire's output slot. It kind of reminded me of one of those slap bracelets Emma and I used to play with back in the mid to late 1990s, except this one looked much more substantial now that it was deployed on my wrist. I touched it testingly, and it refused to budge from its location, and I got a light static shock, which jolted me, almost causing me to jump into the air.
  
  I got the impression the guards were both amused at my antics, "Accessing the private subnet on the premesis is prohibited. Also, do not attempt to take that bracelet off while in the building; it has countermeasures which range from painful to lethal." I gawked at him, my concern obvious as it had been set off by me barely touching it. A soft, muted chuckle from him, and he continued, "Don't worry; everyone always tries fucking with it, so the first time, it is really easy to set off. It won't shock you again unless you really try to take it off. You could do full contact sparring wearing it."
  
  That was unusually specific. Did prospective new hires often do full contact sparring, I wondered? They gave me a visitor's pass and told me that I was only cleared to go up to one place, one of the bases near the middle of the building with an attached helipad, and any divergences would be investigated. I was honestly surprised I wasn't met down here and escorted up, but perhaps that was a sort of a test in itself.
  
  I thanked them and started to walk away, overhearing, "... don't often see a girl that young with a monowire... say nothing about the booster, some kind of child ninja program ya think?"
  
  Followed by a slightly distorted "... pah, you never know what age someone is these days. She might be a baba, older than both of us..."
  
  Baba?! I knew enough Japanese from living in my building to know that meant old hag or something like that. Whatever it meant, it definitely wasn't complimentary. Eyes narrowing, I ignored what I overheard and continued on the bank of elevators. Entering one, I glanced around, not seeing buttons.
  
  I tried the obvious solution, "Floor 32, please." That caused the elevator to start moving, and I nodded, pleased with myself. As it got off, I consulted the floor map next to the bank of elevators and made a soft humming sound, considering which direction I should go. It looked like this floor had mainly six quick-reaction bases in it, along with some administrative offices. We were about halfway up the side of the building, with the Trauma Team tower reaching 70 stories, and I did notice on the drive here that there were helipads on the side of the building about halfway up.
  
  I was visiting base Bravo today, and I tested the unfamiliar phonetic on my tongue briefly, "Brah-voh." Although I had a fair number of memories from Alt-Taylor, and this phonetic alphabet wasn't completely unfamiliar, especially after working over ten months in a ground ambulance where it was occasionally used on the radio, I still had to curtail my first reaction to say Bet.
  
  Glancing around, I found the correct path to take and moseyed my way over to the entrance of the base; the door had a giant B on it, and someone had taped a small piece of paper under the letter that said, "At least we're better than fucking Delta."
  
  Amused, I checked the time. I was instructed to get here at the shift change time, but I was quite a bit early. There was a doorbell, but having worked in EMS for close to a year now, I wouldn't particularly want to be woken up if I had managed to get some sleep, so I was cautious about pressing it. They might all still be asleep. When I was working, I would only set the alarm to wake me fifteen minutes before shift change, and it was still forty-five minutes till right now.
  
  I decided to just put my visitor's pass over the electronic lock's sensor, testingly. A brief green light and a clunking sound indicated it allowed me entry. Smiling, I stepped in without announcing myself. I had some idea of how the base was going to be set up from what I looked at online, and the first room was set up in a sort of living room style.
  
  Each base was set up as a small house with five bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms, a supply room, an armoury, a small conference room and a living room. The living room was sort of big with multiple couches and chairs, and at the far end, I could see a tunnel leading past a glass set of sliding doors to a helipad where an AV was sitting. How cool! I wanted to go inspect it, but I highly doubted my visitor's pass would let me onto what was probably a more highly secured area, namely their air operations area.
  
  These off-going workers weren't really even supposed to deal with me, I was supposed to meet and greet with the people starting work today, so I just sat in one of the cushy chairs in the living room, out of the way, and waited.
  
  About twenty minutes later, activity began to happen in the base. Two people arrived simultaneously; they looked like pilots and didn't pay me any mind, and they went together into the small conference room. They were joined by the two pilots that were still on duty, and I eavesdropped on their conversation, very interested.
  
  One of them began speaking, "We only had three calls last shift; the AV is flying well, no squawks at all, except the co-pilot's side attitude indicator that you told me about last night. That's still MEL'd, but the techs tell me they will swap it out this morning..."
  
  "Good... fuel and ammo status?" asked one of the oncoming ones.
  
  The second of the off-coming pilots speaks up, "You got seven-seven-five kilos on the fuel and four-zero-zero each on AP and FMJ on the Goncz. Not sure what the door gunners are at. And, of course, we haven't used an AGM in weeks , sadly, so your heavy ordinance is just how you left it yesterday."
  
  The oncoming pilot nodded and said, "Nice. That's the ground pounders job to keep the SAWs loaded. But I'll check when they come in, anyway."
  
  I was interrupted in my droppings of eaves by a man looking quizzically at me; he was in pyjamas of all things, "... wait... who are you?"
  
  I pop to my feet and smile, "Hi! I'm Taylor Hebert. I'm here for a base visit. I got here a little early, so I decided to just sit and wait until the oncoming crew came to relieve you, out of the way here."
  
  He gaped, shocked, "You mean... you didn't ring that ghastly doorbell and wake us all up?! Hahaha... preem, you must be a paramedic." He stepped forward and offered his hand to shake.
  
  I shook his hand in a friendly manner and nodded, "That I am. How'd you guess?"
  
  "Because every pilot and grunt always rings the bell on their base visits. Only people who have suffered the slings and arrows of emergency medicine know not to disturb the poor fools if they might be asleep. You get my vote just on that basis alone," he said, but then he glanced at me up and down. "You look a bit young, though."
  
  "I'll have been working 911 calls here in lovely Night City for a year now in a couple of months. The hiring manager was impressed with my grades and test scores in the Paramedic program at the NCU Health Science Centre," I told him, but letting him assume what he wanted about my age. I wasn't even seventeen yet. The hiring managers didn't seem to care about my age at all, but it was a bit of a tender spot for me. Was I too young to be doing all this? Maybe, if I didn't have superpowers.
  
  He nodded, "That's my alma mater, as well. I got my medical degree there." Ah, so he must be one of the Senior Med-Techs. They weren't always full doctors, but it wasn't that uncommon, either. The assistants were universally paramedics.
  
  I asked him, curious, "Did the company pay for your tuition?"
  
  He nodded, "Yeah. Worked here for two years, and then they offered. Had to sign a twenty-year contract, though, but it's not that bad. Definitely worth it. My pay is way more than double, and I can always pick up shifts in any hospital in town as a contractor on my days off, five hundred eddies a day doing that, minimum. Sometimes double that if they're really hard up."
  
  I wasn't sure why I was so opposed to that, although twenty years was a lot better than Kang Tao's offer of thirty. It was an option, though, and probably the safest of all of the options. I would keep it in mind.
  
  He motioned to me, "Come stand by me; when the two come in to relieve us, I'll introduce you. I'll also get your paperwork for the liability waiver and see if there's a spare MCU in your size you can use today."
  
  Huh? What? "Liability waiver, for what? And what's an MCU?" I asked him, curious.
  
  "It basically says that if you die today it ain't the company's fault, even if it really is the company's fault. Anyone that isn't a patient that flies on one of our AVs has to sign one," he said simply, "And MCU is a Medical Combat Uniform... I'm sure you've seen us responding to calls if you worked 911; it's the armoured flight suit us Med Techs wear. Completely different from the ACU!" The last had the feeling of an inside joke.
  
  Wait, what? "I thought that was just supposed to be a 'base visit'," I told him, using air quotes, "It didn't specify anything more than that."
  
  He laughed, "Yeah, that figures. I mean, that's true... but we provide you the opportunity to shadow a crew for a full twenty-four shift. If you want to. " he emphasised that last point, almost blatantly indicating that it would be a good idea to do so.
  
  I nodded, not just because it seemed like the correct thing to get hired, but because it sounded fucking nova.
  
  "Preem. One of the oncoming pilots will do a quick fam with you on the airframe. You'll be solely an observer, mind you," he warns. That was obvious; they hadn't even hired me yet.
  
  I was a bit curious, though, "Will the company issue me a firearm? I know you guys go to some pretty sketchy places."
  
  He scrunched up his face and shook his head, "Nah. Hide behind the grunts if things get hairy. But they won't issue or allow you to carry weapons until you're both hired and have been qualified. Maybe they'll give you a pocket knife." That was a long shot, so I wasn't really surprised. I nodded. He glanced at me and said, "We're not supposed to say this, but they only invite people to base visits they're pretty sure they want to hire, so as long as you're not a total asshole, you pretty much got the job."
  
  That made me feel a lot better, and it made sense, but at the same time, I didn't let it make me feel complacent. At that, people rapidly arrived in the room. I could easily tell the security guys from the medics as they looked like soldiers. Well, to be honest, all of the medics had a little bit of that look too, but nothing like the professional hard men that I had become familiar with working for my Alt-Dad.
  
  After introductions, I sat aside as they conducted their morning briefing. They had a similar drug stocking machine as we did in NC Med Ambulance, but they didn't have to share it with twenty trucks. I watched them check in, then check back out their narcotics, do their daily cycle count, and talk a little bit about the patients they had the previous day.
  
  The senior clinician on the oncoming crew was named Hideaki Anno, and seemed to be the clinical base lead. That made sense to schedule me on the day the line supervisor was working. He told me that I could call him Dr Anno, Hideaki, or Hey You but definitely nothing else. That must mean he had some sort of nickname that he didn't like.
  
  He already had an MCU uniform for me, showed me how to get in it and recommended that I partially keep it on at least today whenever the light in the base indicated we were next up for a call because it took some practice to learn how to jump in it quickly, and they wouldn't wait on me if they got a call. When in the base, they were on ready-fifteen, which means they had to be wheels up within fifteen minutes, but their target was usually closer to seven.
  
  Depending on the service level of the client, either the ready-five or ready-fifteen bird would launch, but even on the ready-fifteen calls, they averaged getting on the scene in ten minutes or less. If the ready-five bird was dispatched, the base next up to a call shifted to ready-five until they got back.
  
  I thought the uniform was cool and was curious how they got my measurements until I remembered how many sensors I walked through downstairs. He told me not to worry about getting changed right now, that they were fifth up, so they probably wouldn't get a call for an hour or two. Apparently, there was something of an art to knowing how far away you could be from the AV based on what priority you were, as there were some facilities on our floor, like a workout room, that were available.
  
  I sat with the two other Med Techs in the conference room, apparently, the first thing in the morning was a briefing from the day pilot, and then we would go check the supplies and equipment in the AV and test everything like I was familiar with from working in a ground ambulance.
  
  "Yo, Savior. Whose the little girl?" asked one particularly bulky security man.
  
  Anno growled, "I told you, I don't like that name." Oh, so that was his nickname. That would be a bit of a hard thing to live up to, but he must have done something pretty cool to get up to it. Anno glanced at me, "The pilots and security guys often give nicknames to everyone, the grunts especially. This is Mercy." He pointed to the biggest of the security guys, who didn't look like he had a merciful bone in his body.
  
  "I-is that name... ironic?" I asked Mr Mercy, which got a huge grin and a nod. I thought so.
  
  "Mercy, this is Taylor Hebert. She's a prospective new hire that'll be third riding with us today," Anno told him.
  
  He gawked, "Her? I thought it was take your daughter to work day, but she doesn't look like a Jap, so I was curious." He reached out to... I'm not sure, grab my shoulder or something, but I simply reached up and grabbed his wrist, moving at about half speed.
  
  The other security guy laughed, and Mr Mercy gawked, testing my grip before easily breaking it, and then he stared at my wrist. "Hey! Bandbox! She's got a bracelet!"
  
  That caused the other security guy, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed adonis of a man that looked vaguely familiar, to blink, "Really? Mantis blades or the big gauge? I bet five eddies it's the big gauge. You know what they say, bitches love cannons." Well, that was true, but... "She looked a little... fast just now, you know, too."
  
  The huge guy nodded thoughtfully and said, "Nah, hand's strong but 'ganic. Has to be a wire. I'll add the debt to your tab, choom." Then he stared down at me, "You know how to use that, girly?"
  
  I coughed and said, "It would be pretty stupid to have it on my wrist if I didn't. I think we've all seen that clip from America's Most Violent Home Videos. I don't want to make anyone a bunch of money by being their next submission." The video in question was perhaps one of the most famous videos from that particular entertainment program, and I had seen the clip online of a supposed street samurai yanking out a monowire, throwing out some cool-looking moves and then decapitating himself instantly. It was set to a laugh track.
  
  It was... very gross but very illuminating too. I redoubled my training with the wire software after seeing that. He nodded slowly at me and didn't say anything else because the two pilots walked in.
  
  The pilots gave a pretty comprehensive briefing, from the AV status, any maintenance that was due today, in this case, a replacement attitude indicator was going to be installed, the weather and how that would impact any flights, ammo status, and then mentioned me. I waved to everyone.
  
  After the briefing, the pilot walked me through both where I would be sitting in the AV, all of the emergency features and exits, how to talk on the intercom and radio (and, more importantly, how not to talk when I didn't want to) and then pronounced me good enough. I had to sign a piece of paper confirming I got the initial emergency training on the AV-4, another piece of training waiving any liability if I was injured or died pretty much under any circumstances, and a final one which was an NDA about any patient I saw, with pretty stiff looking penalties.
  
  Curiously, I asked him, "How much fuel does this thing burn?"
  
  That got a wide grin and said, "It burns a very economical one litre per fifteen seconds, on average." Holy shit, with the price of CHOO2, that was astronomical.
  
  That must have shown on my face because he laughed and said, "That really is quite an economic burn. Forty years ago, this same AV-4 model with the older turbofans would burn twice that, at least."
  
  He led me back into the base, and after that... we waited.
  
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  You mean I'm not getting paid for this?
  It's the little things that you don't take into account when you're making plans. Like, for example, that you've never actually flown on an aeroplane before, to say nothing of a helicopter, and to say nothing of an AV. There weren't even any armrests for me to white knuckle grip; the spare seat was a fold-down jumpseat, so I just gripped the five-point harness that I was strapped into for dear life.
  
  Hearing laughing over the intercom, I glanced over to assistant Med-Tech, a man named Alex Santos, but they called him Teddy Bear for some reason. I didn't like the cut of his gib, especially now that he was laughing at me, "Never actually flown before?"
  
  I gritted my teeth but nodded the armoured helmet I was wearing. I had been looking through the heads-up display this armour system offered to try to distract me. "No, I haven't. But it should be fine." I told the clinician-only circuit on the intercom. I was just kind of nervous, but I wasn't actually scared.
  
  I clicked over to listen to what the pilots were doing out of curiosity and to distract myself.
  
  "Trauma Tower, Trauma 2, request clearance for departure, destination filed, but it's a 232 heading on the departure. We're going over to Pacifica..." one of the pilots said.
  
  Very quickly, a bored-sounding woman's voice came back, "Trauma 2, Trauma Tower, departure from pad bravo at your own risk, IFF check okay, forwarding your squawk to Night City departure at this time, check in with Night City departure on channel 7, see ya."
  
  The sound got loud as the ducted turbofans of the aerodyne spooled up, and then we gently lifted off into the air. The nose of the aircraft dropped a bit as we turned left and headed off into the distance. There were no windows to look out of, but I could switch the HUD on my helmet to show me an exterior view of wherever I looked. I think that was how the security people used the guns that were attached to the side of the aircraft, so I switched to the exterior view and looked down at the city below me.
  
  I muted the pilot's net and asked over the clinician one, "So we don't know anything? You would think the client would have a recent biom that we could ping from here."
  
  "Yeah... that is required for Platinum coverage, and most Gold-tier clients have that as well, but it isn't necessary for Silver, which is what we're responding to. We just have the complaint - acute chest pain and shortness of breath. We can run an EKG when we get there like it was a hundred years ago, back in the pilgrim times," the man named Teddy Bear said.
  
  I didn't think the pilgrims had paramedics or electrocardiograms, but I decided to remain quiet about that. Nobody likes a smart ass. I pulled up the client's information, which was listed as US2771212 Richard Gage, an employee of Fuji-Westinghouse, and a temporary three-month Silver-tier policy in Night City. Not a night city native, then. We were flying directly to the Playland at the Sea amusement park.
  
  An employee on a contract with the park, perhaps? I always liked trying to figure out the happenstances of a patient before we got to them, I had pretty good accuracy, but it was fun when I got surprised, too.
  
  Anno glanced over at me, "Do you mind carrying the gurney, Taylor?" I shook my head; I didn't mind. It was pretty lightweight.
  
  The co-pilot pilot got on the shipwide net and said, "Landing in two mikes."
  
  That caused the big security guy named Mercy to get on as well, "Two mikes. Cold LZ. Weapon checks." That triggered everyone but the pilots and me to briefly pull out their weapons. The security guys had two small bullpup carbines while Anno and Mr Bear just casually pulled out their pistols, checked to make sure a round was in the chamber and replaced them in their holsters. Considering they already checked them before they got in the aircraft, I was pretty sure they took having your weapon ready and good to go pretty important around here.
  
  As we approached the landing zone, the display on my helmet switched automatically to an augmented reality guidance system, with the patient's beacon listed as being eighty metres to the north-northwest, inside a building. That was pretty cool, as even if he didn't have a biomonitor, he had to have something we were tracking. One of the Trauma Team cards, perhaps?
  
  As soon as the skids touched the ground, my five-point harness automatically popped open and was reeled up and out of my way so I could just jump out of the aircraft, which I did so after Dr Anno and Mr Bear. I grabbed the fold-up-style gurney and followed them behind the two security guys. They didn't run, and Dr Anno described the pace they set as "prudent haste."
  
  It was interesting to see everyone around us get way out of our way. I mean, I knew Trauma Team had a reputation, and I had even seen them shoot a number of people on ground calls, but it's a lot different perspective. It must be like walking down the street, walking side by side with a giant pitbull dog or something.
  
  The security guys gave the bum rush to the few people that were in the room with the patient, including one park security guard, and then allowed us to enter. My gaze went to the patient, and I was pleased to notice that my Kiroshi's automatically used near-field communication to interface to the helmet I was wearing, as the vision I was seeing zoomed correctly to take in the man's face at very great detail. I was a little worried I would just get a zoomed-up sight of the interior of my helmet.
  
  They briefly introduced themselves to the patient, and I thought about what the park employees had told the security guy before they rushed them out of the room. He was an employee for a subcontractor, known for troubleshooting things on every end of the park, walking everywhere. It was the little things you heard that could help you the most if you needed to make a differential diagnosis. Although my power often let me cheat, that meant I had to pay even more attention to the little things to give a plausible reason for my diagnosis.
  
  They used a small device I had never seen before that automatically and rapidly started an IV on the patient. That was seriously cool, and my power wanted me to look at it some more, but I shifted to glance at the patient again.
  
  The guy already had his shirt off for some reason. Although that wasn't too uncommon, a lot of patients with chest pain did that, and I scanned his chest and abdomen, frowning, as the two clinicians quickly connected wireless sensor probes to a number of places on his body, with Dr Anno saying, "Taylor, right here is fine."
  
  I nodded and slid the gurney out right in front of the patient. The EKG was already in process, and I saw the waveform from all twelve leads in front of my face, which caused me to frown some more. Mr Bear said to the patient, "Mr Gage, please lay down on the gurney, and we can delta." Already they had administered a healthy dose of pain medication, as well as something to get his blood pressure down.
  
  The man nodded, looking very relieved already, and carefully laid down on the gurney. Both Dr Anno and Mr Bear grabbed one end and started carrying the man out of the door; we hadn't been in the room for more than thirty seconds. Normally ground assessments lasted at least five or ten minutes in a case like this, but I supposed they weren't in the business of wasting time.
  
  As we walked, Dr Anno asked, "So, what do you think, Teddy?"
  
  "MI or PE, maybe?" the man said, which caused me to shake my head a little bit.
  
  Anno noticed that, and his curious voice came over our private net, "Oh? Taylor? You have an idea?"
  
  Shit. I had intended to keep my mouth shut here. I coughed, "The waveforms of his EKG are inconsistent with an active MI; a PE is possible but unlikely due to the background info we have on his lifestyle. The biobed in the AV has a sonic scanner; I'd recommend activating it on the flight back." My medical sense was telling me that he had an aortic aneurysm, but I couldn't quite say that I believed he did because I saw the way his abdomen almost imperceptibly distended when his heartbeat; now, could I?
  
  Rather than be pissed, Mr Bear just glanced back at me and asked, "You think he has a dissecting triple A?" I nodded at him. He considered that and said, "That could be. Five eddies say it's a pulmonary embolism, though." I nodded, accepting the bet. That was easy money.
  
  Even Anno nodded at him, "You're on. I think Taylor is right. This guy probably has had chronic hypertension for months dealing with his job and a preexisting aneurysm for the same reason. That or amphetamine toxicity or an anxiety attack. If it's one of those nobody wins, deal?"
  
  "Wait, I was talking with the patient and wasn't listening when the park employee told us about him. I thought he was a guest, sedentary lifestyle, sitting here in an interactive roleplay BD for the past eight hours," Mr Bear said, trying to walk back his bet. That would have made his guess of a pulmonary embolism much more likely. Any time you sat still for a long time dramatically increased your risk for blood clots.
  
  Dr Anno tsked, "Too late, sucker! I'll tell the pilot to be easy on the flight back. The last thing we want is a bunch of turbulence causing Mr Gage to pop." I nodded; that was possibly one of the few things that they couldn't fix. I was pretty sure they could maintain oxygen to his brain for the flight back, but it would turn a simple milk run into a train wreck. And it would also vastly increase the costs involved to Mr Gage here. Depending on how long his body and organs stayed without oxygen, he might have to have much of it replaced.
  
  As it was, he was looking at a cheap and simple arterial replacement. Probably with synthetic polymer options, as that was indicated in patients with past aneurysms and hypertension. Possibly a new or replacement heart might be recommended, depending on the state of his, and finally, a biomonitor would definitely be recommended at the Trauma Centre. If he had one and had known about his predilection for hypertension, he would have been told to go to the doctor as soon as the aneurysm started to develop, probably many months or years ago.
  
  The helmets and armour we wore were designed for NBC protection, supposedly, but they definitely were soundproof. People outside could only hear us talk if we engaged the speakers, they couldn't hear us speak over our internal com net, which was good, probably if it was common practice to bet on the health status of the patients.
  
  Returning back to the AV, they settled the gurney, patient and all, into the biobed, and we hopped back aboard. After making sure my seatbelt was secure, I fumbled for a few seconds looking through the drop-down options on the HUD before I found the biobed, pulling up its display.
  
  As we lifted off, Anno said, "Alright, I'll start the ultrasound." The sonic scanner in the biobed popped out, and he directed it to the patient's abdomen. Although Anno called it an ultrasound, it actually used ultrasound, infrasound, and even audible noise to create images, so it was actually called a sonic scanner. I had a small hand-held version, about three generations out of date, back at my apartment.
  
  "Fuck!" Mr Bear yelled privately, and immediately I noticed a transfer to my digital wallet of five eurodollars. He paid promptly, at least.
  
  Anno chuckled and explained, "He doesn't like losing bets. He's gone to some extreme lengths to win some in the past." I nodded, but I wasn't as quick with this user interface as they were, so it took me a moment to pull up the images. Yeah, he definitely had an aneurysm, over seven centimetres wide and up pretty high in his chest too.
  
  The armour and helmet I was wearing were pretty interesting. It connected to your interface socket and functioned almost like it was an implant. If it had a powered exoskeleton component, it would be considered a rudimentary ACPA, but as it was, it was just an interesting tool. My ZetaTech SelfICE didn't trust it, though, and was running a completely emulated virtual operating system and piping everything to and from it after sanitising everything. When the armour disconnected, that entire virtual OS would be wiped in real-time.
  
  Personally, I liked the way it thought. Hopefully, I would be working for this corp, but I didn't really trust them.
  
  I had four of six of the customisable ICE slots utilised in the Zeta-Tech now, and my power managed to help me transfer some of the electronic warfare components from the Dragoon into Zetatech-compatiable ICE boards. One of them, the last resort, was exactly the kind of fatal black ICE that I built netrunner suits to protect against. Generally speaking, if someone was trying to use a quickhack against me, this ICE wouldn't have enough of a connection to retaliate, but it could if someone ever plugged their personal link, firewall or not, into one of my interface sockets or if they tried a deep personal hack while we were both deep diving.
  
  I couldn't examine all of the code as a lot of it was black-boxed with integrated electronics, and a lot of it I didn't really understand yet anyway, but I was optimistic that the netrunner suits I had been making would offer protection.
  
  It made me realise that I shouldn't highly publicise such inventions, though. I was sure that I wasn't the first to build such a thing. And if it became something everyone had, then people would just stop using that type of ICE and spend a little bit more money on the type that could broil a person's brain, which I couldn't protect against. A lot of people would be pissed off at me in that case, both a lot of serious netrunners and possibly even a bunch of companies that had to spend a lot of money updating their security systems. I'd have both the black and the white hats after me, then!
  
  So long as I only made a few and was discreet to the people I sold them to, though, I should be fine.
  
  I held back as we landed on top of the hospital roof, watching how they delivered the patient to a waiting trauma bay. Since they had radioed in the patient's likely diagnosis, his acuity had been upgraded, and they had a whole team of people ready to work on him by the time we got there.
  
  After our flight back downtown, we went briefly out of service, both to restock and also as the six-hour period where we were going to have to be sitting in the AV continuously was approaching, so they gave you an opportunity to take a quick shower. These six hours were going to be annoying. I didn't trust them well enough to use the braindance wreath installed in the helmet, so I would just be working on my cyberdeck or watching videos the whole time, although I was really interested in that superhero game now that I thought about it. If I got hired and got assigned a permanent uniform, I would be able to discreetly make a couple of modifications to it to ensure the BD playbacks weren't subtly brainwashing me.
  
  It had found it pretty common for commercially available BD streams, even some you paid for like films, to do that, mainly just to make you slightly want any of the products that they were advertising, though. But I was pretty sure it would be possible to make a BD that induced a psychotic break or possibly even cardiac arrest, too.
  
  "Alright, we're up for our six-hour ready-five period. Does anyone need to use the head now, before we start?" the pilot asked everyone, probably to be polite, but he was specifically looking at me. I shook my head rapidly.
  
  "Yo, Taylor. If you get hired, you should play World of Heroes like the rest of us. We have a Trauma Team guild, and we'll help power-level you," the very attractive blonde-haired security guy told me as we got into the AV. That was the game I was planning on playing, too.
  
  I looked interested, "Oh? Are you a heroic guild?" I asked.
  
  That caused both of the security guys to laugh, "Yeah, fuck that! We're the in the top 20 global villain guilds. The guild name is Total Terror; get it, TT? We're a PK guild. All the security guys and most of the medics play. Pilots are hit-and-miss."
  
  I coughed, surprised. Well, maybe not. If you were involved in EMS for longer than a week, you tended to get both a macabre sense of humour and very jaded about humanity as a whole. That was the main reason I didn't have more of an emotional reaction when I had to kill those four Voodoo Boys. "Okay, I'll think about it," I told him, although unsure. I intended to play a hero, of course.
  
  It made sense that if Trauma Team had an unofficial guild, they would be pretty effective. The game was touted to be very realistic, and with a virtual area larger than North America, complete with millions of interactive NPCs, they called it a virtual world. The physics were somewhat realistic, with superpowers grafted on. As such, there weren't really hardcoded stats and a lot of numbers like a lot of games. As such, a lot of real-life skills did translate into the game, especially if it involved, say, small unit tactics and marksmanship. Superpowers changed a lot of the game, but really a bullet to the face was still a bullet to the face.
  
  I settled into a long wait, pulling up the current stream for the local propagandists.
  
  An attractive woman said on the video, "Welcome to N54; it's time for your local news. Unexpected political drama today at city hall as council member Lucius Rhyne fired back on proposed legislation suggesting that birds in the city be culled. The freshman councilman had ammunition to back up his opposition in the form of a peer-reviewed white paper on the likely outcome of such a law that was published six months ago, written by one of our own in Night City. Phil, what's your read on these developments?"
  
  She turned to her co-host, a studious-looking fellow, who shook his head, "Sara, I've read the paper written by Professor Hidalgo of Night City University that was cited by Councilman Rhynes, and it's exactly as the councilman says. Deaths by avian flu may be reduced, but only at the cost of trebling the number of deaths from Malaria, West Nile and other mosquito-born pathogens! To say nothing of the quality of life issues. The historical examination bares out too. China, last century, tried this same policy, and millions died!"
  
  I was watching with interest and a little trepidation. Hidalgo had sent me a copy of the published article. They hadn't widely circulated it, hoping to catch their political opponents just like this. A few months later, he sent me an update stating that their opponents had learned something and had delayed their plans, but it looked like they had restarted them now. Professor Hidalgo's political friend must be this Lucius Rhynes. I pulled up data on him. He just got elected for the first time in 2060 and was a member of the Devolutionist Party, which was a political party that was highly antipathic towards the centralised North American government. Interesting.
  
  Really, such politics were all the same to me. I figured they were all crooks. From my perspective as someone who wasn't born here, it was like watching a sporting event where I neither knew either of the teams playing nor any of the rules of the game.
  
  I ended up being the fourth author on that paper, which suited me just fine. Honestly, I would have preferred to not be credited at all, as it was less of an academic paper and more of a political grenade. Still, anyone reviewing the paper would assume I was some dogsbody if they investigated me. Although Night City was a dystopia, it wasn't quite to the point where someone would deign to shoot their political enemy's taxi driver for giving them a ride.
  
  I sat back and continued to watch videos, occasionally transitioning to reading a novel for a while.
  
  Something woke me with a start, a loud klaxon with the digitised voice saying, "SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE. PLATINUM." I glanced around, seeing everyone else emerging from whatever BD they were experiencing. Already the pilots were flipping switches to spool up the internal turbofans, using the shore power connection and starter motors to quickly bring them up to speed.
  
  Before I even had a chance to figure out how to pull up the patient information out of curiosity, we were pushed into our seats as the pilots didn't so much take off as throw us off our perch on the roof, all of the engines roaring to full power in the descent.
  
  "Shit, multiple GSWs, multiple organs perfed, severe haemorrhaging..." Mr Bear said gloomily.
  
  Mercy got onto on net and said, "It's an active scene, a hot LZ. NCPD reporting as a possible charlie papa inside the Biotechnica Hotel. Intruder, maybe? MaxTac may respond if there are any more casualties, but we'll get there first for sure. Hopefully, it'll be an in-and-out sort of thing. We'll be landing on the roof; our client is on the twenty-ninth floor."
  
  Dr Anno glanced at me, "Stay behind Mercy and Bandbox, Taylor." I nodded, wishing I had a gun, and my left wrist suddenly felt itchy around that damn bracelet. They said not to remove it in the Trauma Tower, well... I wasn't in that building now, was I? Still, I didn't do anything for the moment.
  
  The AV sat down on the rooftop pad, and all five of us hopped out, and I made sure to walk closely behind the giant wall of a man that was Mercy. Everyone had their guns out, and I was carrying most of their medical equipment. At least I was being useful, I supposed.
  
  We went downstairs two and three at a time before reaching the twenty-ninth floor and popping out of the stairwell. There were clearly gunshots actively occurring on this floor, which didn't put my mind at ease at all. Mercy's voice over the net, "Client in sight. Hostiles in sight. Negative on the charlie papa; this is a Maelstrom death squad."
  
  I wondered what Biotechnica did to piss off Maelstrom. It could be anything, really. Maybe they hired the gang for some terrible deed and stiffed them, or who knows what. Six red chevrons appeared on the screen in my helmet. Whatever the reason, it looked like the gang of cyberpsychos was getting some revenge.
  
  I was also curious how they had snuck up to the twenty-ninth floor. They weren't exactly known for their subtlety, but they were known for their electronic warfare capabilities, though.
  
  The group paused, but only for a moment. Mercy continued speaking. He must be in command of the ground team, "Verify AP ammunition is loaded, SmartLink connection active, break, flight two lift off and prepare to provide fire support. Floor two niner, east side. The cafe. We are going to be approaching from the south to the north." Everyone glanced at their weapons briefly.
  
  "Roger, lifting now. Twenty seconds" came the voice from the pilot.
  
  The twenty-ninth floor was only half apartments. What we were approaching was a combined indoor restaurant with large glass windows to appreciate the Night City skyline for the patrons dining inside.
  
  "Targets selected in priority based on proximity to the client. They're strom, so go for headshots. Go, go, go." Mercy said, and the team as a whole turned the corner, everyone but me firing. I felt pretty out of place, but I felt one of the safest places to be was probably behind the mostly bullet-resistant giant man.
  
  Mercy and Bandbox killed the two Maelstrom guys next to the client, who was down on the ground and looking unresponsive. They were then using lots of automatic fire to keep the rest of the Maelstrom suppressed. A red flashing indicator in my helmet indicated the client had just flatlined, which wasn't good. Anno said over the radio, "Taylor, hold up. We're going to grab the guy and pull him around the corner so the AV can open up on them, stay there with the equipment and wait for us.
  
  Ah, that made sense. I was wondering why the AV that I could see already descending and beginning to hover outside the large glass windows hadn't done anything. If the client became collateral damage, it kind of ruined the point of even coming out here. I worriedly looked at a few of the other people lying on the floor, but everyone I saw looked pretty dead already. In fact, the client, even after Mr Bear grabbed him and pulled him back behind the two security guys who kept firing at Maelstrom, looked pretty dead. Mercy's voice on the radio said, "Package secured; light them up."
  
  Immediately there was a cacophony of noise as the AV began firing its 7.62mm rotary chaingun on a small cluster of the Maelstrom guys, then sweeping it left to right to get the rest. I had dropped all the equipment I was carrying for Mr Bear and Dr Anno, who started working on the man.
  
  I had pulled up my electronic warfare menu on my deck and was in the middle of establishing a connection to the biggest, most borged-out-looking of the Maelstrom guys, but he was turned into chunky salsa just like that. It was gross.
  
  Anno reported, only briefly glancing at the state of the cafe, "Massive internal haemorrhage, death state one. Hey, Mercy. The boys pretty much wrecked this cafe; the windows are all shot out. See if they can hover outside, and we can transfer the patient directly onto the AV on this floor."
  
  Mercy nodded, his weapon still ready for any of the Maelstrom, but they all appeared to be dead. "Roger. You hear that, guys?"
  
  "Affirmative. We can," the pilots reported.
  
  I watched both of them work on the guy, and they had managed to restart his heart already, but he hardly had any blood to pump through it. They were rapidly pinching off lacerated blood vessels and arteries while simultaneously introducing high-oxygenating synthetic blood replacement and trauma-based nanomeds, "Alright, we need to get him into stasis, stat." They were really quite good.
  
  They picked the gurney up and started walking to the AV hovering on the exterior of the building, with the two security guys covering the rear. As they carefully loaded the guy in, I thought things were pretty much done and glanced back to see Mercy and Bandbox turning around to come to join us. However, just after they turned around, I saw one of the Maelstrom guys, who was not much more than a torso, start to move; he must have been playing dead.
  
  "Behind you!" I said quickly, and both security guys started to turn, but it wasn't in time. The torso extended a hand, carrying an absolutely massive-looking revolver and had time to pull the trigger once before having its skull blown apart by a three-round burst from Mercy's small carbine.
  
  Unfortunately, the slightly more diminutive security guy took a hit directly on the chest, the round so large it entered, penetrated completely, exited Bandbox's back and still pinged off the armour of the AV-4 next to us, with Bandbox falling over like a sack of potatoes and a number of medical alerts about a downed teammate.
  
  "Fuck!" just about everyone yelled. Anno and Mr Bear glanced down at their own patient, then at Bandbox before Mercy growled, "You know SOPs. Fuck!"
  
  They had already mentioned if one of their team was injured, then if it was a choice between the client and the teammate, they had to choose the client. I glanced around and said, "Go on without me. Maybe I can stabilise him for the follow-on team." Although they would leave a team member, they would treat them as a Platinum patient themselves for the follow-on team.
  
  Mercy looked both sceptical and hopeful, which wasn't surprising as he saw the damage that single bullet had done. But he nodded, "Okay. They're scrambling the follow-on team now. But we were so quick here, it might take them five to ten mikes." That was true; it had barely been four minutes since we received the initial call. They were still probably getting dressed to take their turn as the ready-five bird.
  
  I nodded, suddenly glad that all of the pockets on my borrowed uniform still had all of the equipment, even if I wasn't intended to use any of it. Mercy jumped in the side of the AV, and it didn't waste any time and started flying off to the north.
  
  Running over to Bandbox, I flipped him over so that he was on his back and looked at the damage. Well, shit. He didn't have a heart anymore. That one-armed, no-legged torso of a Maelstrom was a good shot.
  
  How could I stabilise... no fucking heart?!
  
  I took stock of the equipment I had, which wasn't much, and I let out my breath in a slow relaxing pattern for a second, drawing deep on whatever superpower I had and the tools I had available to me.
  
  Then nodding, I grabbed a small multitool of Bandbox's waist, flipped it to a cutting tool and carefully cut the uniform away, suddenly careful as I realised that if that knife on that tool wasn't monomolecular, then it was at least really close.
  
  Then I grabbed some IV tubing I had in my pockets, lifting Bandbox up slightly to disconnect an electronic box on the back of his uniform and grabbing it, and flipping the multitool to a universal fastener removal tool. I only had a little time before he was well and truly dead.
  
  I stirred from a light fugue. I called it a fugue, but I realised what I had done, even if not quite how. All of the Trauma Team armours had a built-in cooling system. They would just be too hot to wear otherwise. I had ripped out the coolant pump on his suit and then kludged together what was, in effect, a replacement heart with the coolant pump and a bunch of IV tubing.
  
  The IV tubing was, besides being IV tubing, much too small in diameter to actually support sufficient blood flow without it being way too fast, so it wasn't really a solution. Still, after bypassing a lot of his arteries, it was enough to keep his brain and his core organs oxygenated. His internal biomonitor reported he was "alive" again, with acceptable levels of blood oxygenation, at least for now.
  
  A second Trauma Team AV hovered exactly where the first one departed, and four people hopped out. One of the clinicians asked, "What's his status? His biom is reporting acceptable SPO2 now."
  
  Uh. How was I going to explain this? I said, "The GSW totally obliterated his heart. I figured he was dead, but it was worth a try, so I pulled the coolant pump out of his MCU and kind of kludged together a bypass-heart pump." I checked the time; his brain had only been without oxygen for about two and a half minutes.
  
  "What the fuck?" the other guy said as he looked down at the crime against nature and his armour's warranty that I had wrought.
  
  "That's... one of the craziest things I've ever heard. Not the most, but maybe the fourth," the first guy said as both clinicians bent down to start working on him. I spent a moment pointing out which arteries I had bypassed, which I had just clamped shut, and how fragile the pump was.
  
  "Alright. This probably is only going to buy him another ten or fifteen minutes. Already his brain SPO2 is inching down into the low 80s. Let's get him to Watson," the Senior Med-Tech said, and then glanced down at me, "Uhh... we don't have our jumpseat installed."
  
  I had expected that as I had watched the pilot put in the extra seat this morning. I waved a hand, "I'll just call a Delamain and get a ride back to the Tower."
  
  One of the security guys nodded and said, "The police probably won't hassle you, but try not to say too much to them. You might not, technically, work here yet, but they'll assume you do. MaxTac isn't responding, but both the NCPD and BioTechnica are. The latter shouldn't hassle you..." he trailed off, paused, and glanced around at the total devastation of the cafe, which was caused by a minigun attached to a Trauma Team AV, and then said, "... but uhh... maybe leave, now, before they get here. They don't have ready teams like us in town, so they won't be here for fifteen or thirty mikes. Just in case."
  
  I nodded and watched them leave. I looked around and grabbed one of the pistols from one of the downed Maelstromers, slid it into the empty holster on my armour after checking it, and then grabbed one of the submachine guns and slung it carefully around my body. Then I briefly went around to each person that was down, looking for survivors. That and I wanted to know if the minigun was responsible for any of the deaths. Surprisingly, it wasn't. I wasn't sure if it was luck or the pilots actually being good shots, though.
  
  As for survivors, I found three, one of which was unconscious and bleeding from a severed leg below the knee. I quickly wrapped a tourniquet around the wound and carried the woman to the front of the cafe so that she could be seen by the responding medtechs more easily.
  
  The other two were acting dead, which I thought was a really good strategy under the circumstances, but when they realised I wasn't Maelstrom, they started sobbing and thanking me. One was seriously injured; in fact, he was slowly bleeding to death from a gunshot wound to his shoulder that had nicked his thoracodorsal artery.
  
  I patted myself down and found a bleeding control kit in one of the pockets, and told him, "You aren't a subscriber, but I'm stuck here for the moment, and you're bleeding to death. Do you want me to help?"
  
  "John! I told you we should have bought the subscription!" replied the woman, who must be his wife or girlfriend. Rather lucky that they both managed to survive the incident, they were in one of the corner booths.
  
  He nodded very fast, "Uhh yes... am I? It doesn't feel that bad." Then he glanced at the woman, "Okay, you were right!"
  
  I pulled open the bleeding kit and told him as I carefully cauterised the artery with a semi-disposable electronic ultrasonic wand, getting a wince from him as I did so, "Yes, the artery in your shoulder was nicked. It wasn't gushing out, but you still would have probably lost consciousness before the 911 EMTs could get here."
  
  At about that time, the SWAT team threw a flashbang around the corner and rushed in. The grenade went off, but my helmet automatically corrected for it, and I didn't even hardly notice. If they had just exploded that lady who I had saved, I was going to be pissed. Still, I raised my hands in the air and quietly recommended these two conscious survivors do the same, and they did so.
  
  "Trauma Team... what the fuck... only one of you?" asked the man in similar, although matte-black tactical armour after clearing the room, waving my hands down with a gesture. I wasn't supposed to say much, but I had thought of how to explain this, "Our AV took a hit from a giant fucking gun, and it couldn't take both the patient and me back, so I stayed around." That was true, too, after a fashion.
  
  He nodded, the cops lowering their weapons, "You know what happened?"
  
  I shook my head, "We responded to a platinum client, it was a suspected cyberpsycho, but when we got here, it was six Maelstromers. Everyone in the cafe, except these three, was already dead. We put down the Maelstrom and evaced our client; that's all I know. Corporate told me not to say much more than that or provide any speculation or inferences."
  
  The head of the swat team sighed. That meant he had to intentionally make a sighing noise while indicating her wanted to transmit, which I thought was funny. "Yeah, alright. Thanks for flatlining these psychos. You gonna head out downstairs, or is another AV coming for you?"
  
  "Send another AV for me? I'll be lucky if I can get them to pay for the cab fare," I told them, honestly, which caused three of them, including the leader, to snicker. I nodded at the man I had helped, stood up, and walked over to the guy who shot Bandbox and grabbed his giant fucking gun. My scanner activated and identified it as a Techtronika RT-46 Burya, a relatively new electromagnetic pistol out of the Russian Soviet Republic.
  
  "Hey, that's evidence..." one of the non-SWAT uniform cops said.
  
  The SWAT team leader yelled, "Fucking let her take it; that's probably what shot their AV."
  
  It was, but the reason I was grabbing it was I figured Bandbox could use a souvenir. "Thanks. See if you can get the Med-Techs in here before that lady bleeds to death, okay?" She was in a pretty nice dress. An expensive one if the tag from Jinguji was to be believed. Yet she didn't have a Trauma Team membership. That probably meant she was either someone like me who tried to save a lot of money or possibly a call-out type escort whose clothes were a business expense. Either way, she didn't deserve to bleed to death.
  
  He nodded, "They're on their way up from the elevator now."
  
  I waited at the elevator; on the off-chance, it was Gloria, but it wasn't. Shame. I told them briefly the injuries and then got in the elevator going back down, walked past a group of uniformed police and hopped into a waiting Delamain.
  
  "Why, if this isn't unusual... It is a pleasure to see you again, Miss Hebert. However, I will have to make a notation that we will charge a cleaning fee to Trauma Team if you get blood all over the back seat," said the genial voice of the AI driver.
  
  "Hi, Del. Trauma Team tower, please," I said to him, a little tired. Not sleepy, but I was coming down from an adrenaline spike.
  
  His animated head tilted, "Del? A diminutive of Delamain? That isn't actually my name, ma'am, but as I don't actually have a proper name, I think I approve of your appellation. Thank you."
  
  Although we weren't actually that far away, traffic was a bitch today. About midway through the drive, I got a call from the Trauma Team hiring manager that had interviewed me; I picked up, "Hello?"
  
  "Hey, Taylor. How are you? I heard what happened," he said, in a sort of feigned sense of empathy. It was polite, though, so I didn't hold it against him.
  
  I replied, "Oh. I'm fine. Headed back to the tower now. I assume we're on a safety stand down for the rest of the shift?" There were only like seven hours left, and they had told me a base would go on safety stand-down for at least a half shift if a teammate was seriously injured.
  
  "Yeah, probably. Are you still interested in the job?" he asked.
  
  I nodded, "Yeah. I mean, shit happens wherever you work. A ground ambulance isn't that safer; at least you have a giant minigun on your side."
  
  He smiled, looking a little relieved, "That's good! It's a little unusual, but after we heard about how well you did on your base visit today, we'd like to extend you a tentative job offer."
  
  I blinked; this was a little unusual. I drew deep on my memories of Alt-Taylor and tried to phrase my responses as would be expected for a third-generation Corpo, "Well, I guess I tentatively accept then, with the caveat that I don't find anything objectionable in the contract after I have my attorneys review it." Although I didn't actually have any attorneys, I hadn't paid that online firm a retainer in order to call them that I was sure that they'd accept my repeat business. It may cost a couple thousand dollars or a little more, but it would be worth it.
  
  "Excellent! I will forward you the job offer and contract now. Do you think you could have it reviewed and signed by Friday?" he asked.
  
  I nodded, "Sure. But I'll have to give NC Med Ambulance two weeks' notice. Beyond the fact that it is the proper thing to do, much more importantly, it's in my contract with them, and I'm not interested in being held liable for a breach."
  
  He chuckled, "We really like that you're willing to do the proper thing with your current employer. However, I've already reviewed your contract with them, and we will execute the buy-out clause. That only costs us five times your salary for two weeks. It will let them pay someone overtime to work your shifts, still have some money left-over and let us start you in the new class starting Monday. A win-win-win, I'd say."
  
  That was unusual. But I nodded, "Okay. That's fine. Let's plan on that; I am calling the firm I use now. I may have it approved and signed by tomorrow."
  
  "Excellent. As soon as you do, I'll send travel arrangements for your indoc class in Seattle on Monday. That's one week long, and then you'll start Basic the following week," he said, smiling.
  
  Wait, what? "Basic what?"
  
  "Well, basic training. All medics without military experience take an abbreviated eight-week course," he said mildly.
  
  Fuck. I hadn't realised that. But I should have. But it kind of made sense. Certainly, both Mr Bear and Dr Anno were a lot more tactical than, say, Gloria was.
  
  I sighed and nodded, "Alright. I'll call you tomorrow." Then I briefly reviewed the contract and arranged for the online law firm to review it as well.
  
  Just what was I getting myself into?
  
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  Front-leaning rest position
  Meetings were often held these days virtually, but what was even more common than that was conference vidcalls. One such call was occurring, despite the fact that it was past eleven P.M. for everyone involved.
  
  A slightly tired-looking man said, "Present for this conference call are International Assistant General Counsel Maxine Meyers, Night City Director of RiP Ryan Davis, Night City Medical Director Samantha Kim, and myself, Tyler James. I currently hold the position of Regional Vice President for Communications at International and am the RVP on call tonight. Ms Kim, you asked for this meeting in accordance with our crisis response protocols; what's up?"
  
  The woman coughed, "Two reasons. First, we responded to a Platinum client at the Biotechnica Hotel. Long story short, a group of Maelstrom assaulted the building and almost killed the client. The client did flatline twice but was resuscitated. Once I saw the client's name, I called you. It's one of the board of directors of Biotechnica, in town for some unknown reason. Without security for some unknown reason."
  
  The tired man perked up, "And we saved him? Preem. We can definitely use that. Okay. You said two reasons."
  
  Kim nodded, "Yes. It's common for potential new hires to shadow our teams in the last phase of the hiring process. In this case, a young woman was shadowing our team. Unfortunately, one of our security specialists was flatlined in the firefight. I'd like to ask everyone to just watch a short three-minute video, and you'll understand why I think this is important."
  
  Everyone groaned, but the man nodded, "Fine, fine, Doctor."
  
  A few minutes later, the man chairing the meeting said, "I'm not a doctor or a techie, but if I saw that in a film or a BD, I'd call bullshit. Is this for real? I couldn't really see what she was doing."
  
  "One hundred per cent. The surgeon in Watson was just as flummoxed as I was. It shouldn't really have worked, but it did. Plus, she showed an incredible level of knowledge of human anatomy and ingenuity on just the attempt; even if it had failed, I would have quietly had a word with you. But, I figured since we had to have this meeting anyway, I would bring it up," the medical director said.
  
  "Can you play back the part where she saves that woman with the fucked up leg? And do you have the footage from where the team arrived and found the VIP? If so, play it side to side," the vice president commanded.
  
  "Just a moment, we have that," said Kim, and then two videos were played back to back.
  
  "Miss No Leg was sitting at the VIP's table alone?" commented the medical director, "And that's an expensive dress."
  
  The vice president nodded, "Indeed. Check to see where she was taken, and get an interhospital transfer to our trauma centre in Watson. We'll cover the costs for the board member's joytoy, and we'll make fifty times as much just off his appreciation alone. This does tell me that he wasn't Maelstrom's target, though, just bad luck. Whoever is responsible for security at that building is gonna have to commit seppuku. For a screw-up this big, the Italians will pretend to be Japanese just long enough to make them do it, too," said the canny vice president.
  
  Then the man hummed and nodded, "Alright. We all know pretty much what we're going to do about the Biotechnica board situation, so let's table that for now. Switching focus to this woman, Ryan, what do we know about her?"
  
  The director of the Resources in People department in Night City coughed into his hand. As a good underling, he had already pulled up all the data he had as soon as this new hire had started to be discussed and had already sent directions to the hiring manager handling her case, "Sir. Her name is Taylor Hebert. Father is one Daniel Hebert, Major in Militech Armed Forces, former NUSA State Department, deceased. Mother is Annette Rose Hebert, née Astor-Armstrong, deceased. She was at the Regional Director level at Militech when she died in an inter-corporate dispute involving an unknown party, possibly Kang Tao or Arasaka. Ms Hebert is sixteen years of age, third generation Militech dependent on her father's side. Top scores at the Night City Health Science Centre, currently employed by a small ground ambulance service as a paramedic."
  
  The legal woman remarked, amused, "Sixteen?! Here comes the Trauma Teen, right, Tyler?" That caused everyone but the VP to laugh, but when the boss wasn't laughing, everyone paused, a little concerned.
  
  "Uh, what was her mother's name?" the Vice President asked.
  
  The HR man said, "Annette Hebert." To which the VP waved a hand.
  
  "No! Her maiden name!" he hissed.
  
  Mr Davis said after a pause, "Oh. Annette Astor-Armstrong. Why?"
  
  "Oh, no real reason. I was just curious. As an aside, just a matter of trivia for you in the future, the Astor-Armstrong is a cadet branch of the Astor family. You know. The trillionaires," the vice president said mildly. Then he glanced at the lawyer present, "Do we have any information on whether or not that is a coincidence?"
  
  She shrugged, "I just checked. No publically acknowledged member of that family by the name of Annette Rose. Disowned, maybe? If so, maybe we should blackball this girl."
  
  "No, no. In a family at that level, if you're disowned, and they really mean it, you die . Publicly. Assuming it isn't a coincidence if they let her marry this common soldier without so much as even flatlining him and kidnapping her back, then they probably had a real sweet spot for her. I don't see how it could be a coincidence, but I'll check in with International Intel and verify it, but either case let's just pretend we didn't hear any of that," said the VP.
  
  The HR man looked a lot more nervous now but nodded, "Uh... I have already had the hiring manager woken up. He called Ms Hebert already and extended a TJO, pending her acceptance. He did mention that she mentioned having an attorney review the contract, so we weren't going to put anything questionable in it. That tracks with her being third generation Militech, though."
  
  The VP nodded, "Good work. We don't want her being tempted back over to Militech Evac just on the basis of her clinical skills. It's crazy that they didn't already offer her a job. Maybe she soured on them? Both parents died in their service, after all. Well, whatever, we'll close this file for now. It's not like it's that unusual for kids to rebel and get a job at a competitor, especially us, right Maxine?"
  
  The lawyer laughed and flipped him the bird, "I told you that in confidence!" But it was clear she wasn't that upset.
  
  "Hahaha... alright, before I close the meeting, I want a PR team to find that couple. The one she saved after everything went down. Give them both a complimentary twelve-month Gold package, but only if we can use their story in marketing materials; we can use stuff like that. Then see if we can use anything from her saving that security guy for marketing without it looking bad. Maybe not; we'd prefer our guys to seem invincible, but run it by the team." There were nods around, and then he said, "Okay, the meeting is closed. The AI will construct the minutes and forward them to each of you for approval, but I'm increasing the confidentiality classification level of a portion of this meeting to a compartmentalisation code level... which is, uhh... Chartreuse-Pantyhose... what the fuck, computer? Why do you always pick such weird fucking names."
  
  He shook his head, "Anyway, we'll use this code word for subsequent mentions of the Astor family and this new hire together. And she better sign that contract, Davis! Just for those crazy skills alone!"
  
  "Uh, yes, sir!" stammered the man.
  
  The security guys were a little perplexed at both how I was walking back into the Tower wearing armour and how I ended up with more weapons than when I started with.
  
  One of the guards said, "Oh, this is a nice SMG," with the other glancing at it and nodding.
  
  "Yeah, there is talk about buying these in bulk. Kang Tao makes good work. Used to, you'd only have Arasaka to choose from in SmartWeapons, but now Kang Tao is showing them a thing or two," the second man said before placing my newly stolen submachinegun in the locker next to my other weapons.
  
  The first guy waved me through and then asked, "Did Bandbox make it? We heard what happened when the second flight lifted off. I like streaming his BDs sometimes; it would suck if he was flatlined by some stupid 'Strom gonk."
  
  That's why he seemed familiar! Alt-Taylor had seen him on the television show Night after Night with Quincy Strange. They did a special on Trauma Team, and Mr Bandbox was one of the featured people. He became slightly famous on the local net as something of a company spox. He even scrolled BDs, although she had never experienced any. It wasn't a surprise; he was preternaturally handsome, but in a natural-looking way that only a very, very good biosculpt clinic could provide. Or amazing genes, I supposed.
  
  "I'm not sure. He was alive when the second team took him away. I think he should make it if they got him to a trauma centre quickly," I temporised. That was what I was curious about too. They nodded and told me that he had only been working on the Flight Team for two years. Apparently, it was common for Security Specialists to be hired and work for a while doing their job as guards or in the actual Trauma Team military force or even the Debt Recovery Teams before shifting to a flight team status. That last one sounded a bit ominous.
  
  They didn't hold me up after that, and I got on the elevator and back up to the bravo base. The whole crew was there in the living room area, and when I came in, Dr Anno asked, "What happened? Alpha said you built a fucking bypass heart out of the coolant pump on his armour?" He looked flabbergasted.
  
  I blinked at him, "That's what I want to know. Did he make it?"
  
  "Yeah, Alpha got him to the Trauma Team centre in Watson in just two and a half minutes. An entire trauma bay was waiting for him. They're still working on him now, of course, but they got him connected to an actual bypass now while they triage the damage," the man called Mr Teddy Bear said, then he waved at me, "Go get changed! Then we're going to download the helmet cam audio-visual and watch just what the fuck you did! It's gotta be crazy!"
  
  Err, shit. I wondered what that would look like. It wasn't like I could delete the video now; it probably already started downloading into Trauma Team servers as soon as I walked into the tower. Oh well, I would just deal with it. It was good to see it, too, as I only partially remembered building the bypass heart.
  
  I nodded and went into the spare bedroom they were lending me and doffed the armour. I wondered if they wanted me to decon it myself, as there was both 'Strom blood and blonde man blood on it. I'd find out later. I set them aside and got dressed back in my street clothes. Luckily, the cooling system really was very good as I wasn't sweating hardly at all. Otherwise, I'd have hit the showers first.
  
  They had the video playing on the large wall screen as I walked out. "We're gonna get written up for that," the man named Mercy said, annoyed when they paused and switched to slow motion to watch the mostly dismembered 'Strom borg aim the giant revolver at Bandbox.
  
  "Why?" I asked curiously.
  
  Mercy sighed, "Didn't death check the 'Stroms as we passed before we turned our back to them. But they just got chewed up by the minigun, so we figured they were all dead."
  
  "Death check? Wouldn't that take too long when you had a patient, plus wouldn't it be hazardous to get close to them anyway?" I asked, perplexed. I was picturing them going and placing their fingers on the downed Maelstrom member's necks.
  
  Mercy turned to look at me, amused, "You check to see if they're dead by shooting them a couple times in the head as you pass. Don't worry, they'll teach you that in basic. Anno and I have already gotten confirmation that they're going to offer you the job." Oh. Well. That sounded less like a check and more like an execution, but I supposed the consequences for when you didn't do it were staring me in the face. I honestly hoped I wouldn't really be expected to randomly apply a coup de grace to injured gang members as a matter of course.
  
  Since he had been told about my job offer, I guessed Mercy was the equivalent of the clinical base lead. The security base lead? I nodded, "I hope you guys don't get in too much trouble... but, yeah. The hiring manager called me when I was in the cab on the ride back. Oh, by the way... I grabbed that giant revolver that shot Mr Bandbox. I figured he might like it as a souvenir. It's a Soviet Burya, Glory to Socialist Science ." I said the last with an exaggeratedly fake Russian accent.
  
  "Probably not too much. We'll probably get scolded and get remedial training, but at the same time, we saved the client, and he was a real VIP too. Even a few more seconds might have meant his death. Normally it takes multiple attaboys to outweigh one aw shit, but in this case, they'll likely milk the whole thing. So it'll even out." Then he grinned, "Oh, badass. Those are actually kind of rare and expensive. I don't know if he'll be able to use it; you almost need a full arm replacement to fire those things without breaking something," Mercy said, looking back at the screen.
  
  I frowned a little, "Mr Bandbox might be looking at an arm replacement; here, start the playback, and I'll show you what I mean."
  
  They nodded and continued playback, but they replayed the point where Mr Bandbox got shot several times, in slow motion, whistling. I noticed where Mercy suddenly shifted into a much faster speed when he shot the shooter. It was clear he had a Sandevistan. Mercy suddenly frowned and rewound the video, playing back the time when I turned around several times. Finally, he asked, apparently seeing something similar in the way I had moved, "New girl, you have a Sandy?"
  
  "Ah, no. I do have a Kerenzikov, though. A Kang Tao model," I said simply. I was pretty sure that getting hired here would result in a total examination of all of my cybernetics, anyway, so it wasn't exactly a secret. My custom liver just looked like a custom liver at the moment, which wasn't too shocking. After I got hired, I'd finish connecting the arteries to it.
  
  Mercy looked surprised, but the pilots both turned to look at me and nodded, one of them saying, "Nice. You want to go to flight training?"
  
  Huh? I shook my head at him, "No. Why would you say that?"
  
  "All combat pilots have to have boostware; it's mandatory. Corporate generally prefers one pilot to have a Kerenzikov with the other having a Sandy, which means they prefer to hire Kerenzikov people with a long-time history of use with little psychological changes. Very few people can handle it. Sometimes it's cheaper to find a solo with a long history of use on the Security team and send them through flight school if the pool of former military pilots is shallow. I have a Militech model Kerenzikov that slows the experience of time by about half, doubles reflexes, combined with a custom set of Kiroshi aviator optics that can sample images I see at one thousand hertz. This video looks like a slide show to me. Makes taking dates to movies a pain in the ass," the senior pilot said, amused.
  
  I nodded. I had that problem too. It was why I always played videos using my deck, as I could speed up their playback speed to something that seemed normal.
  
  They continued the playback, this time going through the entire thing up until I got into the cab. Then the clinicians rewound and kept replaying the time I was working on Mr Bandbox.
  
  "Fuck, I can't see what you're doing. Are you installing this shit by feel? You keep looking up for a moment when you get to an interesting part. Also, you're moving at super speed. What the fuck," said Mr Teddy Bear.
  
  They watched a few times more in slow motion, and I was curious too. Did my power help me with that? Glancing away at times when it was doing something weird? If so, thanks!
  
  Anno said, "I see what you mean by Bandbox might need some new arms. You cut all the blood flow to his extremities. I'm guessing it was too much to expect some kind of high-flow type of solution when you're mainly using IV tubing and a coolant pump."
  
  I nodded. Depending on how soon they got a real heart or temporary replacement hooked up to him, his arms and legs might have gone a long time without perfusing. "I think they could repair the damage with nano treatments, but they might offer him replacement limbs too. Will he be on the hook for any of the cost?" I asked, curious.
  
  Dr Anno held a hand out and waffled it slightly, "Nah, even though we fucked up, they won't charge him. But that's only for the basic treatment to get him back to where he used to be. If it necessitates a replacement limb, he'll just be offered a basic model. As you said, they might offer him a number of replacement options. They'll charge him the difference if he takes anything but the basics, minus his company discount, and then put him on a payment plan. No interest, though."
  
  Well, that wasn't as terrible as I thought. I considered staying around for the rest of the shift; there were still about six hours to go. But I had a lot to do and very little time to now accomplish it. "I think I'm going to head out early. Assuming there's nothing wrong with the contract they sent me, they want me to travel to Seattle on Monday. I got a lot to get ready for this weekend. Do you want me to decon the armour before I go?"
  
  Anno shook his head, "Don't worry about it. We have a machine that does most of the work; I'll run it through." How often did they get blood on their armour that they had a dedicated decon machine? Well, I suppose quite often. These weren't 911 calls, after all, and I often got blood on myself even doing those calls.
  
  I nodded, "I assume you all can carry pistols around the building since you work here?" They nodded, "One of you come downstairs, I'll give you that giant revolver, and you can get it to Mr Bandbox while I'm in training."
  
  The giant man hopped up, "Oh. Awesome." He followed me downstairs, and I got all of the guns back and the bracelet on my wrist taken off. I rubbed my left wrist for a moment before handing the giant revolver to Mercy. The thing weighed like five kilos, easy and my fingers weren't even large enough to actuate the trigger comfortably, to say nothing of what it would do to my arm. I didn't think I'd suffer fractures with my bioware, but it wouldn't feel very good.
  
  Mercy handled it like it didn't weigh anything and grinned, "Cool. Not sure if we should put this on a plaque or just hand it to him." He thumped me on the back hard enough that I almost fell forward and said, "You did a good job today."
  
  "Uh, thanks," I told him, and with that, I left. I probably looked a little weird, as I only had one holster, so I was carrying a small arsenal of two additional guns in my arms as I found my car and drove home.
  
  I stopped at a number of places on my way back home and called Gloria, asking her if she could come by my apartment. She'd have to bring little David along, but I okayed that.
  
  As I got back home, I took a quick shower and then started setting up some of the things I bought at the store. Finding a pet store that would sell me automatic bird feeders without demonstrating that I had a pet license took three tries, but eventually, I got one. I leaned precariously outside of my window, using a small electric drill to secure it in place, probably in violation of my rental agreement.
  
  I wasn't sure if I should do this, as it would make my window a prime spot and Mr Pegpig and his wife would have to, in some ways, compete with other pigeons for the food. But I had been testing a number of nanomed treatments on him and his wife. I didn't have a nanovat like a real biosculpt clinic, but I had been lacing their water with nanomachines, hoping to achieve a similar effect as my muscle and bone lace.
  
  I had to make some modifications to myself, just regular maintenance, really, as I was still growing, including new muscle mass, which needed to be included in my existing muscle and bone lace. If I could do it without going to a clinic myself, it would be all for the better. Mr Pegpig didn't mind being my guinea pig, not after the first dozen or so times I grabbed him out of the air, using my superspeed, anyway. Now he just put up with it, like he was a British pigeon with a stiff upper lip.
  
  I hadn't tested them, but they did seem stronger; they could leap into the air much farther, even Mr Pegpig with his one artificial leg. If so, they should be able to defend their nest. Probably. It was all I could do while I was gone. At least they wouldn't be exterminated by some idiot City Councilman.
  
  The doorbell rang, and I glanced at the camera real quick before unlocking it, saying over the intercom, "Come in! I'm in the back!"
  
  Gloria walked in carrying David, who she sat on the floor and who immediately started exploring. She glanced at me, "There's nothing that he can get into around here, is there?"
  
  I thought about that and then shook my head, "No, everything that might be dangerous or poisonous is in the outer area where I set up a workbench."
  
  I told her what had happened, and she was both excited and glum. "I'm so happy for you, but I'm going to miss you. I was hoping we'd at least have the last two months to work together."
  
  "Just because we won't work together doesn't mean we can't still get together on our days off. I certainly want to see the gremlin again!" I told her firmly. "But I am going to be gone for probably, three months." They told me indoc was one week long, and basic training was eight, but I figured there were going to be delays or other things I needed to do after that. I asked her, "Do you think you can check on my apartment from time to time?"
  
  Gloria paused and said, "Of course. Actually... if you're going to be gone, I think I may have a better idea."
  
  I had a curious expression on my face as I said, "Oh? Like what?"
  
  "Well, if you don't mind... I could live here while you were gone. There was an issue with the housing authority, and my mom temporarily lost her apartment. She couldn't get another for six weeks, and she was going to stay at my place. But if you're not going to be here for 3 months? I could just stay here. I mean, if you don't mind," she hurried to add that at the end. "It's fine if not; I can come to check on your place at least once a week."
  
  I thought about that. There was some stuff in my apartment I didn't want anyone to see, but I was going to move all of that stuff to the storage unit before I left anyway. I didn't think, given where I was, that there were going to be any real problems with burglars or vandals, but you never did know. It was almost expected in a lot of places in the city that if you were gone for more than a week, expect your place to be burgled.
  
  I finally nodded, "Yes, actually, that sounds pretty good. What about the gremlin? You don't know anybody here."
  
  "On days I'm not working, he'll stay here, and on days I am working, he'll stay with my mom at my place," Gloria said simply, "It's the least she can do for giving her a place to stay for weeks on end."
  
  I nodded at that. "Okay, that sounds great. Plus, you won't have to sleep with your mom just five feet away. You have a pretty small place, Gloria."
  
  She laughed uneasily, rubbing the back of her head, before nodding, "Yeah, that's a real bonus for me."
  
  The law firm hadn't found anything out of the ordinary with the proposed contract. The only item they highlighted was an overly broad non-compete clause which said I wouldn't be able to compete with them for thirty-six months after I left the company without paying a rather high buy-out fee.
  
  That was pretty common, but the way it was worded was too vague. It would be arguable that I wouldn't be able to work for anyone, possibly even myself, in any medical capacity for three years after I left Trauma Team since Trauma Team's was really a comprehensive medical system.
  
  I sent the contract back to the hiring manager with my complaint, and surprisingly a very quick adjustment was made where the non-compete was changed to specify I wasn't permitted to work for any air ambulance service for thirty-six months, specifically naming "Militech Evac" as an example of the type of service in question.
  
  That contract I had signed, so in very little time, I found myself in economy class on an airliner heading up to Seattle. Air travel was a bit interesting in this dystopia. Almost nobody did it, and it was prohibitively expensive for individuals, so it was mostly all business passengers. So, even though I was in the economy class of service, the seats were somewhat roomy, and it wasn't the cattle car treatment I was expecting from airlines in Earth Bet.
  
  After sitting in a jumpseat on that Platinum scramble flight, I wasn't that nervous at all about flying on an airliner, even if it was a somewhat small one-hundred-seat propellor plane. The sides of the fuselage had integrated active noise cancellation, so you couldn't hear the engines or the propellors at all, which was really cool.
  
  Seattle was an interesting city. It wasn't as dangerous as Night City, however, only by a little bit. Washington State was one of the Free States of North America, specifically in the Pacifica Confederation. They didn't take orders from the federal government in Washington, DC is basically what I thought it meant.
  
  Seattle was one of the only things keeping Washington State afloat, from what little I could tell. The Port of Seattle was the hub of trade on the entire pacific northwest of the continent, even with the hazards of shipping things by sea, which included an AI-directed self-replicating minefield that slowly moved around the pacific and actual swashbuckling pirates.
  
  Even with all of that, trade still moved by sea. It just made it more expensive, with marine captains being almost militarised and ships using the convoy system to get through danger zones.
  
  After landing, I got my luggage and looked around. I was supposed to be met here. Oh, there was a guy in a relatively nice outfit holding up a sign that said "Trauma Team New Hires."
  
  I walked over and said, "Hello there. I'm starting class on Monday."
  
  "Ahh... preem. We should have five. Uh, are you Taylor? I think there was just one female on the list," he said, sounding almost younger than even me, despite clearly being a little older. Sheltered, perhaps?
  
  I blinked at him and nodded, "You work for Corporate?"
  
  "Not really, as that implies I'm being paid; I'm a student at City Centre College here in Seattle, business administration. Internships, mostly unpaid, are pretty common in your third and fourth year in the program. My parents work for Orbital Air, though. Trauma Team is one of the few places nobody minds if you intern at, so the internships are pretty competitive, actually," he said ruefully.
  
  I nodded. It had been an Orbital Air airliner that I had just gotten off from and then I told him, for the purpose of networking and small talk, "My mom and dad were at Militech. Say..." I started to ask him.
  
  "No, I haven't been to the Crystal Palace or space at all yet," he said with an amused grin.
  
  I caught myself blinking, "Does everyone really ask you that?"
  
  He nodded, "Yeah. About as often as, I suspect, people ask you if you're carrying a gun."
  
  Well, the only reason I wasn't was they wouldn't let me on the airliner with one. I had another one of those uncomfortable bracelets, too, that I only recently had taken off after I left the security area of the airport. I did have one in my luggage, though.
  
  I decided to just wait until the rest of the people got here.
  
  The week-long new hire class wasn't very interesting. It was all paperwork, company policies, and the like. It included a full physical, and I got a little raised eyebrows about all of the cybernetics I had, but they hadn't even mentioned the liver. I did decline a couple of offered company implants, one of which would automatically exercise your muscles whenever you were experiencing a BD.
  
  It was a good idea, but it was like a low-tier doll chip, and there was no way I would be putting one of those into my body if I hadn't built it myself.
  
  The "boot camp" was, so far, a lot more interesting. I needed to cut my hair to be within regulations, but thankfully not too short. All of the males were shorn like sheep, almost. It was kind of silly because Trauma Team didn't have any personal grooming standards beyond looking professional, so those men would be free to immediately grow out their hair.
  
  I was doing fairly well, although a lot about it annoyed me, but I was in very good shape and had augmented strength on top of that, which most of my twenty-five-member "platoon" did not. The main issue I was having was I was used to the equivalent of nine hours of sleep a night, and they only let you get about six or seven if they were feeling generous.
  
  The drill sergeants also seemed to like to make you do push-ups, run, or other more annoying exercises just because they had black hearts. During a group 10k run, I had been asked to run and bring the drill sergeant back a pebble. This meant I'd have to sprint out a distance, grab a pebble and sprint back. It was supposed to tire you out, and it was often done to those who were pretty good runners. Now, I'd already seen this trick before. When I brought back the pebble, he was going to say that I brought back the wrong one, that he really meant the one next to this one.
  
  I didn't really like people in authority in the first place, and I wondered why I was even bothering going through this stupid course. It almost seemed like bullying, although I couldn't actually detect any malice in any of the Drill Sergeants. Still, I didn't mind running, and even shooting the guns was fun.
  
  I presented the pebble to the heartless man, who yelled, " Wrong pebble! I meant the one next to it! Try again!"
  
  I was going to regret this, I already knew it, but I opened my other hand to reveal about five other pebbles, "This recruit has anticipated your orders, Drill Sergeant! These are the pebbles on either side of that pebble, so I respectfully posit that the correct pebble must be among them, Drill Sergeant!"
  
  He stared at me, slackjawed, "Get back into position, Hebert! And drop those fucking pebbles!"
  
  I dropped the rocks and found myself back into position with the running platoon, which he immediately halted, "Platoon, HALT! Now, it seems like we got a smart ass here! I know how to fix that... HALF RIGHT, FACE! "
  
  Fuck. I caught a couple of glares from the others but pivoted forty-five degrees to the right in time. "Front-leaning rest position, MOVE. "
  
  I kept a groan inside as we all shifted to the traditional "push-up position."
  
  "In cadence, EXERCISE! "
  
  "You look too happy. You know what? HALF RIGHT! "
  
  "You did too well on that group exercise; if you're not careful, I will get promoted out of my easy job. But I can fix that, HALF RIGHT!"
  
  "Okay, that was just stupid. HALF RIGHT!"
  
  "AM I YOUR FRIEND?! HALF RIGHT!"
  
  "Was that a FART?! Which one of you... no, nevermind, I got this... HALF RIGHT!"
  
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  Muffins
  As I lay motionless in my bunk, I considered the past several weeks.
  
  I didn't entirely keep my head down in training. I just couldn't help myself, but the Drill Sergeants kept punishing us as a group for anything that I did myself, which I didn't feel was very fair until I thought about why they were doing it and got a seriously large dump of information from the psychological portion of my medical sense. That made everything make sense, finally, and probably would have been obvious, but I had never been involved in anything like this, not even the Girl Scouts.
  
  After that, I just sighed and buckled down. It grated on me a little, which I realised meant my mentality had changed quite a bit. I used to be very used to keeping my head down and trying to hide, not just from the Trio, but I felt the entire school was either out to get me or just didn't care.
  
  Now my first instinct was to push back when I felt someone was being unfair to me. That was different, and the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was not necessarily a change for the better. I didn't think the world I was living in was one where fairness was a really important part of how anyone interacted with anyone else, especially those with authority interacting with those who did not have any.
  
  It was depressing to think about, but I might not live to a ripe old age if I let this new instinct go wild in my everyday interactions with people, so I decided to reign myself in and "cooperate and graduate." I also felt like it wasn't a great idea to give the corporation I now worked for an accurate idea of my psychological profile, either.
  
  As such, my fellows in my platoon were much less pissed off with me once I stopped mouthing off and attempting malicious compliance with the Drill Sergeants, and I think they just took it as me being a typical teenager. They didn't particularly mind too much because other than that, I was one of the best performing of us two dozen or so people in most of the physical parts of the course.
  
  I was surprised, thinking that the two-month course would be full of paramedics, but it turned out that most Trauma Team employees would take it eventually if they did not have recent past military experience. The actual security and military guys took different and more strenuous courses, but half of the people in my platoon were regular office employees, including a couple of entry-level supervisors. Clearing the course was a prerequisite to reaching middle management, apparently, with the exception of certain staff positions that weren't considered line managers, like attorneys.
  
  That was somewhat similar to the way Militech ran things from my memories, where all line managers had a reserve commission in their armed forces and occasionally a duplicate reserve commission in the NUSA armed forces as well. My Alt-Dad had been an active duty Major in the Militech armed forces and held a reserve commission as a Captain in the NUSA military as well.
  
  It took me forever to fall asleep, which was a real problem. I was so used to just putting a hat on my head and pressing a button that I thought I had developed a mild case of insomnia when I wasn't utilising my sleep inducer, which I couldn't bring with me. I sighed, rolled over and closed my eyes. If I remained very still, I would fall asleep eventually.
  
  I waited at the entryway to the course, double-checking the M-10 Lexington pistol and the extra magazines before sliding the weapon back into the holster at my thigh.
  
  This was the qualification course for pistol. It was a realistic scenario in a special building that could be set up to any kind of interior design the instructors wanted through a computer. You couldn't just test on the course to know where all the bad guys and good guys would pop up. Bad guys would randomly pop up, and you were scored on not only the position of shots but speed, with speed being more important on this course.
  
  Hearing a large buzzer, I grabbed my pistol out of my holster and started walking, using my full speed. The first part of the course usually simulated clearing a building. Nobody did that by themselves, the Drill Sergeants said, so it was really just testing quick-reflex shots and judgement.
  
  A humanoid robot with a gun appeared, and my pistol came up, and I squeezed a quick three-round burst into its centre mass. The bullets I was using were real, but they were all frangible rounds, kind of similar to gritty sand once they struck something, so they wouldn't really damage the robots.
  
  I continued along the path, shooting each robot two or three times as they popped up. They had laser guns that would trip a harness I was wearing, causing quite painful but harmless electrical shocks, simulating getting shot. I didn't want that to happen.
  
  A robot came out, holding a non-combatant up as a human shield. I was expected to take these shots, and I only got points deducted for obviously lethal hits on the non-combatant. Instead, though, I used my full speed to carefully line up a headshot of the robot terrorist, putting it down.
  
  Yelling at the robot non-combatant, I aimed my pistol in its general direction. In one of the training runs, I had seen one of the other women in my platoon be taken by a fake non-combatant that had a simulated suicide bomb. The poor woman was wriggling on the ground as the entire harness she was wearing shocked her silly.
  
  I didn't think they would use that trick on an actual qualifying run, but I didn't know for sure. The robot stayed away, and I continued on.
  
  Part of the test that was for judgement was that there was usually an insurmountable obstacle, and you were expected to take cover and call in support, which would arrive briefly to help you deal with it. Calling for help would hurt your score, but the idea was to know when to call for help and do it anyway.
  
  I was, however, trying to show off. So I turned the corner and saw three robots with rifle-style automatic-weapon-looking props; instead of taking cover, I moved with preternatural quickness, zigging and zagging while accurately putting about five rounds into each one before the first one even got the first "shot" off. They were programmed, thankfully, to operate at normal human reaction speeds.
  
  I still had a few rounds in my magazine, but I did a quick combat reload as they had drilled us, shoving the mostly empty mag into my belt as I continued on.
  
  As I stepped over the finish line, there was another klaxon sound, but I wasn't quite done. The next part of the qualification was a simple accuracy test against non-moving targets at ten, fifteen and twenty metres. I was handed fresh magazines and quickly knocked the last part of the test out, including firing a number of times at a kneeling position for the twenty-metre targets.
  
  I was startled by a slap on my shoulder. It was the Drill Sergeant, he had an actual smile on his face, "Excellent work, recruit! That is your Expert badge, for sure, on the pistol. It's not a course record, but it is pretty damn good for a medic. You did a lot better with the pistol than the light assault rifle yesterday. You only got Marksman there, but that's still pretty good."
  
  Yesterday's rifle qualification was just shooting targets at up to three hundred metres on a firing range. The targets would randomly pop up, and you had both a limited amount of time and a limited amount of ammunition. It was weird to see the Drill Sergeant's rare signs of approval, but most of my platoon didn't have any real experience with firearms, to begin with, so I supposed he was just happy I didn't have to retake the test after remedial training like a number of my cohort already had.
  
  The rifle qualification was just an almost superfluous extra event, in any event. They were much more strenuous with this pistol qualification. Honestly, it would be weird if I didn't score well. Not only had I been firing at least a hundred rounds a week on that thing for well over a year, but Alt-Taylor was no slouch, either. The way the first half of the test leaned heavily on reflexes also made it cake for me.
  
  "Yes, Drill Sergeant. I have been firing a Lexington since I was eight, I suppose. Honestly, Drill Sergeant, I have a lot of experience with those Ronin too, but I never did like them. Trigger always felt a bit off," I told him, taking a little risk by being a bit more verbose than I needed to be. Generally, I learned it was better to be as succinct as possible when speaking to them. Also, it had been Alt-Taylor who had experience with rifles; I had none.
  
  He didn't give me any shit or smoke me for that; instead, he just nodded, "Yeah, they're plenty reliable, but a lot of people have the same opinion. That is a pretty common opinion with bullpup rifles, of course. The rifle course is just on the level of a weapons fam, really. That's why we use such old rifles. You're never going to carry a rifle into duty anyway; ya'll medics have too much other shit to hump into action anyway, and the rest are going to be fucking managers and shit. Basically officers."
  
  I decided to take a risk again, "Drill Sergeant, is it true that all Security Specialists have to have a SmartLink as mandatory cyberware?"
  
  "Ehh... yes, and no. It's mandatory for all Security Specialists on Flight Status, and it's optional but highly recommended for all others. The corp will give you one at fifty per cent off if you're a grunt, even set up an interest-free payment plan. Almost every grunt recruit takes that offer up; it really is quite a good deal," he said, and then he glared, "Forget that shit, recruit! Make safe that weapon, turn it in and go back in formation, so another one of you worthless pieces of shit gets a chance to qualify! Double time it, recruit! Move, move, move!"
  
  I moved.
  
  There was no .real graduation when we were done like I was expecting from all the war movies I'd seen; we simply got a firm handshake from the Drill Sergeant and were sent on our way. Now that I wasn't in the course anymore, I could access the net again. I probably could have done so while in boot camp, but it was forbidden, and they would have known since we were outside of Seattle and the only cell towers were the ones Trauma Team installed themselves.
  
  I sat in the back of a small van that was ferrying us a few at a time back to Seattle proper while I checked my messages. Blinking at a few, I triggered a phone call to Gloria.
  
  She answered right away, "Hello! Hey, Taylor! Did you get all of my messages? I thought you were dead!"
  
  I grinned at her, "I told you I would be out of contact for a while. I just finished most of my training, but I still won't be back for a week and a half."
  
  "Yeah, but there's out of contact and then dropping into a black hole!" she complained, and she wasn't entirely wrong. This was a very connected society. It was really old-fashioned that nobody was permitted to use any kind of connectivity for eight weeks.
  
  I chuckled, "Did everything work out? I read your messages and was only surprised for a second. I did have something of an established list of clients." Her messages stated that people were asking where I was, people who wanted some medical services.
  
  "Uhh... yeah, I hope you don't mind, but after the third day of them asking, I ended up seeing them myself. I hope you don't mind me using all of your medical equipment or selling them the pharmaceuticals from your giant stash. I found a list with prices, so I had been charging a little bit over that since I wasn't sure if those were the prices you paid or the prices you charged," she told me in a rush.
  
  I should have expected that and prepared her. Gloria was a good enough clinician to help with the everyday maladies of the people that came to see me. She was good enough to help with much more than that, really. However, it was a bit different to treat walk-in patients than it was to treat people who called emergency services or were in accidents and similar.
  
  I chuckled at her, "I don't mind, so long as you don't ruin my reputation. Those are the retail prices, actually. Send me a list of what you sold, and I'll charge you the same wholesale prices I have to pay, and you can keep the difference since it was your work, after all." I paused as I considered that, nodding, "Was there anything serious that showed up?"
  
  Gloria started to complain, saying that she'd pay more until I waved her off, and then she said, "Not really. Mostly just your everyday stuff, colds, simple malfunctioning cyberware, and a few cases of people not taking care of themselves and getting surgical site infections... oh... Yeah, there was one Tyger Claw in a cowboy hat that accidentally stabbed himself with his own sword. It wasn't too serious, but it was the most serious of the bunch. I averaged maybe three or four patients every day I wasn't working. Honestly, I'm making almost as much money as my salary! I thought a cop was arresting me when he showed up, but he just wanted some boner pills. I was wondering why you bought so many of those in bulk, I mean, I wasn't about to criticise, but with the high blood pressure meds, the cholesterol meds, and the boner pills, I thought you had some old man boyfriend and was a little concerned. You're a bit too young for much of an age gap in your dates, you know!"
  
  Ugh. Thanks for that mental image, Gloria. I had just bought the top twenty or so most highly prescribed prescription medicines from a wholesaler. At least those that didn't require a special permit to purchase, like narcotics. I told her, "That's a gross mental image, thanks. I'm pretty sure I know exactly which Tyger Claw you're talking about, too."
  
  Shortly after buying the gun and gun belt that I sold him, Johnny had gotten a cowboy hat from somewhere and had taken to tipping it at every pretty girl he saw. He was kind of a moron, but he actually was pretty good when it came to weapon safety, so I wondered what happened. He probably tried to show off or something.
  
  "Haha, sorry! When you come back, I want to talk to you. How did you get set up doing this? You have like a hundred thousand eddies worth of medical equipment here, but most of it is specialised for cybernetics implantation. The stuff I was using was just your standard equipment like we used in the truck. I was wondering if I could start a similar side business in my Megablock," she told me, making me raise an eyebrow. I had just sort of fallen into it, so I hadn't really thought about it, but it was a nice little extra income for me.
  
  I didn't average as much as she had made while I was gone, but I often was gone from my apartment on my days off, too, so I had less time where I could see patients.
  
  I nodded at her, "Sure. I never intended to be doing it, really, but I wasn't born a Corpo for nothing. I can certainly help you sketch out a business plan. One of the biggest issues is..." I paused and glanced at the other people in the van and coughed, "Well, I'll tell you when I get back to Night City."
  
  The single biggest question mark for Gloria was the gang situation in her building. The Tyger Claws shielded me from a lot of the stuff involved in running a technically illegal venture, like the city or cops trying to shut me down. In exchange, I gave them ten per cent of my income, gross, not net. Like a sales tax, almost. In fact, that was how I had set it up in the simple accounting software I had downloaded. On the plus side, since it was all illegal income, I didn't pay regular sales tax, so it evened out.
  
  The next biggest issue was real estate. The Tyger Claws were really giving me a deal on the location I was renting. I'd have to help her examine the commercial or dual-use areas in her building.
  
  I thought about that. Trauma Team's philosophy on side work was laid out pretty simply in the first week of indoc, namely, don't do anything with company property, company logos, and, more importantly, the company reputation. That was it. It was kind of impossible to totally ban such income streams unless you were a manager or higher up than she was.
  
  I didn't think it would be a big deal to continue doing it, but if I heard differently, I could always offer Gloria to run my business, but she'd have to move to my Megabuilding, so it might be problematic. She was pretty set on continuing to live in Santo Domingo.
  
  We talked a little more and then hung up. I caught up a little on the propaganda in Night City on the drive back into town. They had mostly stopped talking about The Great Bird Debacle of '63, as it was being called, but Lucius Rhyne had definitely scored a point or two from what everyone on the network news was saying.
  
  One odd message that I almost didn't notice since it came from a net address I didn't have in my contacts list was an invitation to see one Wakako Okada for tea after returning from Seattle and getting settled in at my new job. That was both interesting and a little unsettling. I wasn't entirely sure if Wakako was one of the leaders of the Tyger Claws or if she was just a Fixer associated with them, but I had learned that Mr Jin's boss, Mr Inoue, was actually one of her sons.
  
  And her son, who was a fairly high-ranked Tyger Claw, referred to her as "Okada-sama" rather than as mom. She seemed to have some intelligence on me, as well. I had just told Jin I would be out of town for a few months, not specifically why, although it wasn't hard to find out.
  
  Well, I doubted she intended me out and out violence; I would have preferred to be beneath her notice, though.
  
  The van pulled into a transient housing facility operated by the Corp, and we all got out and checked in. It was similar to a hotel, but only Trauma Team employees could use it. The rooms were quite small, but all I wanted to do was to take a shower and crawl into the cold, clean sheets of the bed for several days. I didn't have anything to do for about half a week, and after that, I just had a brief three-day course acclimating me to life as a flight team member.
  
  When I got to Night City, I'd still have to work under third rider status again, just like when I got hired at NC Med Ambulance, although I expected Trauma Team's third rider to last a little longer.
  
  I rolled my luggage upstairs, got into my room and locked the door. Thank god I could use my sleep-inducer again. Normally I just sat in a comfortable chair while using it, but I built a little strap that would keep it on my head no matter what, and honestly, who couldn't resist snuggling into brand-new cold sheets when they stayed in a hotel?
  
  I was surprised I had missed my own apartment so much, but I was really glad to see it back, but my schedule was a bit weird. I barely had twelve hours off after getting off the airliner before needing to show up for my first shift, which I was driving to now. Apparently, they only had limited people that they would allow precepting for new clinicians.
  
  It looked like I would be a part of the same crew that I had seen the other day. I wondered if Mr Bandbox was back on duty yet. I had checked his social media and was horrified to discover that they had done an entire special BD about his brush with death. You could even download an edited BD of him being flatlined and then another of him waking up in the sterile white hospital. They also had a several-day gap between the releases, so everyone assumed he was dead! There were locally trending hashtags, #RIPSexyTT. Wasn't that too much?
  
  Plus, he was discussing me, and commenters wanted to know who I was, but thankfully they hadn't really learned much, except that I was a female due to my voice attempting to warn him. All Mr Bandbox was saying was he was extremely grateful for a colleague that managed to save him and get him to the Trauma Team trauma centre in Watson, where his heart was replaced.
  
  This time I parked in the employee parking garage. There weren't assigned parking spots, but there were assigned areas. As a new clinician, I didn't rate a very good area, so it took me a couple of minutes to walk to the security checkpoint. The employee-only security checkpoint wasn't as high-security as the one in the front of the building because I already had my identity checked once driving into the garage. Still, there were a couple of security guys behind a desk watching the entrance that I needed to badge into
  
  They didn't remark at my pistol, knife or monowire this time; they merely told me to have a nice day and "be safe out there." Of course, there were areas in the tower where I would not be allowed to carry a weapon, for example, a lot of the executive floors on the top ten floors and a few research areas in the basement and first few floors. I had no reason or access to go to any of those locations in the first place, though, so it didn't really matter too much.
  
  I badged into the base for the second time and glanced around. I was early again, but not by very much. However, this time I knew which rooms were which, and I went to drop my things in the spare bedroom. I brought some tools with me because I intended to work on the braindance wreath inside whatever helmet they assigned me today during our off hours.
  
  I had spent almost eight hours just Tinkering and building things when I got back to my apartment; the urge to do so was becoming stronger and stronger the longer I spent in Seattle. I had managed to calm it somewhat by reading a lot of interesting medical journals in the Trauma Team Tower and drawing diagrams in the notebook I took with me, but that was like being thirsty and only being allowed a couple of ice chips. It didn't really satisfy me.
  
  I did come back with very detailed drawings of semi-autonomous surgical assistant spider robots about the size of a chihuahua which incorporated both electronic and biological components, for example, human neural tissue instead of a CPU. I didn't understand electronics enough to actually use any kind of electronic solution for a robot, but I understood the biology of a human brain very well and could repurpose or just grow parts of it that would work as well as or better than any robot currently on the market.
  
  However, the drawings put me ill at ease for some reason. Beyond the fact that I didn't have anything to clone human tissue with, I would have to use "donor tissue" from people who would definitely prefer to keep it. Beyond that, it just looked kind of creepy, even if everything my medical instincts told me that it would be very efficient.
  
  Of the things I actually built, I finished a clip-on in-line firewall module that should work with most BD systems, and I had a number of new tools, including a bunch of chemistry glassware that I had made somehow in a daze out of beer bottles that Gloria had left in the trash. I wish I had set a camera to watch myself as I did it because I was very curious due to my lack of an actual glassblowing, heating or smelting apparatus in my apartment.
  
  It seemed like my power wanted me to have and play around with chemicals some more. That was... pretty good. My possible plans for selling one of the chemicals I knew how to make, probably the synthetic antibiotic, did require me to synthesise it a number of times on tape or BD to include that with the payoff along with directions. But that was for the future.
  
  I barely had enough time to get a couple of hours of sleep on the inducer, get something to eat and take a shower before I needed to show up here. It would have been so very awkward if I had missed my first day at work because I had been in a fugue for hours. I'm not sure if they would fire me, but I think I would have been in pretty deep trouble.
  
  By the time I came out of the bedroom, a number of people were in the living, including most of the crew I would be working with and Mr Bandbox! He was working today! I suppose it had been almost three months since he was injured, so it wasn't too surprising that modern medicine had him up and at them much sooner than that.
  
  He noticed me and grinned widely, waving the giant hand cannon revolver that almost killed him! "Hey! It's Heartbreaker!"
  
  Uhh...
  
  That can't be my cape name. I mean, my Trauma Team name. I was aware of how this nickname thing usually went; the more you objected to it, the more it stuck, but still, "Shouldn't that be... Heart-maker?" I asked, hopefully.
  
  Anno smiled and nodded, but Mr Mercy and Mr Bandbox shook their heads, the latter saying, "No way, no way! The name has to be ironic, somehow. This one has the double entendre that it is might be because you are the date em and leave em type, which seems like the opposite to your personality! It's great!"
  
  I shook my head, "Dr Anno's name isn't ironic. I figured out it was because he saved a kid's life by doing internal cardiac massage for the entire trip to the hospital. The kid was only like eight or nine! That really is a Savior!"
  
  Dr Anno groaned and shook his head rapidly, but Mr Mercy chuckled and said, "You didn't hear the whole story. It's true he saved that kid's life, he even saw the kid off when they left the hospital with their dad. Was waving as the kid drove away..."
  
  Mr Bandbox interrupted by smacking his fist into his open palm, "And watched their car get totally smashed by an out-of-control automated semi-truck! Grease spot! Both were DOA instantly!"
  
  Both Dr Anno and I groaned, and I said, "That's really cruel to make that his name, then!" That caused the doctor to nod rapidly at me. That also made me even warier of those automated trucks that I saw on the streets sometimes.
  
  The man I called Mr Teddy Bear shook his head, "I know! And he's my boss, so don't think you're getting out of your name, either!"
  
  Being given a nickname after the most despicable human Master in Earth Bet was a little troubling. I had been here for a year and a half now, but I still had a visceral disgust reaction just hearing it. Dr Anno turned to me and said, "Don't worry, Taylor! I'm on your side!"
  
  After some more ribbing, Mr Bandbox came over and privately thanked me profusely for saving his life, which caused me to turn beet red. I'd been thanked a number of times since I got into this world, but honestly, I don't think I've been appreciated on that level since my mom was alive. I always got the impression that I was the most important thing to her. I used to think that about my dad, too.
  
  I waved him off, stammering something out, before being saved by Dr Anno and Mr Mercy, needing me to go through a number of things on my first day. I had to check out an MCU, a helmet, and a weapon not to mention I had to do a number of additional training items on the AV-4, as well. We were out of service for about an hour and a half while I accomplished all of that.
  
  I already had my armour and helmet on, as I was adjusting several things on it when we got an unusual Platinum call. For us to get a Platinum call when we weren't even on the way to go ready-five status meant that we had to have like three Platinum calls more or less simultaneously, which wasn't a good sign. Everyone rapidly got into their suits, and we rushed out to the aircraft and jumped in.
  
  I was sitting in the normal paramedic spot while Mr Teddy was in the jumpseat, and he would be pretending he wasn't here unless I fucked something up.
  
  I tried to pull up the patient information but must have screwed something up. As the engines spooled up and the pilot shoved us off our perch, I clicked onto the clinician net, "Uhh... I must have got a bad download; it's showing our client is NC88271212C1 Muffins the dog?"
  
  Dr Anno's wry voice came back, "No... that's correct. This is a coordinated call. The first Platinum call was unrelated, but ours and Delta's are related, so we're coordinating. Here, let me show you how to patch into the raid-net."
  
  Raid-net?! Did they use MMO terms? I don't know why, but I found that very amusing.
  
  I mentally selected the correct options and could suddenly hear Delta's clinicians, "Okay, we are approaching the LZ; our client is NC88918217 Martha Williams; she is apparently the dog walker for Bravo's client, which is NC8827121C1 Muffins, a canine. They're airborne now and en route. Our girl has two GSWs to the lower left quadrant; assailants shot her and kidnapped Muffins."
  
  I didn't know which was more unbelievable. That our Platinum client was a dog, or that their Platinum client was the dog's caretaker. Just how much money did these people have if one of the perks of being a dog walker was Trauma Team Platinum coverage? It wasn't cheap, not at all.
  
  I shifted back to our net, "I'm... not a vet." I told Dr Anno, although I was actually pretty sure I could work on dogs with no problem. He chuckled, "Yeah, none of us are. We have a special amendment to the PCGs that I call the DCGs." PCGs were Patient Care Guidelines. It was a huge manual on how to treat any number of illnesses or injuries the Trauma Team way. I had already read the whole thing cover to cover about six times.
  
  "Dog Care Guidelines? Are you serious?" I asked him. I didn't remember seeing any Dog Care Guidelines in there!
  
  He shrugged, "Well, I mean, some are cats, too. The weirdest one was a pet dove once. Don't worry about it. There are a few medicines we can't use, and the rest we just size them down for their weight, like if they were a neonate."
  
  I sighed. Would I ever be rich enough to buy Mr Pegpig his own Trauma Team membership? I somehow doubted it; pigeons only lived about ten years. But... who was to say how long a pigeon could live if it was treated by yours truly?
  
  No! I had to ignore the part of my brain that was tempting me to go catatonic and build a pigeon-longevity chamber right in the AV. Now wasn't the time!
  
  Mr Mercy came on the net and said, "We're going to treat this as a hot LZ; targets and clients are in an empty warehouse; they drove inside. We'll land outside. Since this is sort of a hostage situation, anyone without SmartLinks holds back unless you're absolutely sure you won't miss."
  
  I checked my weapon just in case, as was the protocol, shaking my head.
  
  As soon as the AV touched down, we all jumped out with our weapons out. We, as a team, entered the first room, but then Mr Mercy held a hand up, "Scanning, scanning. Hostiles identified. Four targets selected." I glanced around but then, as soon as the outline of the four dognappers was rendered in front of my vision I realised that Mercy was using some method to scan through the thin walls of this office area into the main room of the warehouse.
  
  "We'll take our shots from here, Bandbox, Teddy and I. Rest, hold fast," he said, and both security guys and Mr Teddy Bear raised their weapons. I suppose Teddy had a SmartLink. Interesting.
  
  Were we really just going to shoot four guys in the head for dognapping? Well, I guess they shot that lady, too, but...
  
  A moment later, a number of quick shots from the three and all four icons disappeared. I guess, yes, we were going to shoot these guys for dognapping, "Tangos down, move, move, move."
  
  We rushed into the warehouse, still on the bounce in case there were additional threats Mr Mercy wasn't able to scan, but we didn't find anyone. I holstered my pistol and glanced down at a small chihuahua who was growling and worrying at the shoe of a dead dognapper.
  
  Well, mission accomplished, I guess.
  
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  A gig to build a dream on
  I didn't follow up with Mrs Okada for about two weeks. She did say to settle into my job first. We averaged three or four calls a day, although yesterday was a fluke where there were no calls all day long. Most of the calls were traumas, which wasn't surprising, but also acute cardiac cases were pretty common.
  
  Surprisingly, it wasn't that common for there to be combat on the calls. People, even their client's assailants, tended to run or scatter when a Trauma Team AV-4 showed up, and neither the pilots nor security guys would shoot people in the back if they were running away and clearly not a threat to the client anymore.
  
  Corporate said that the subscribers paid for rescue, not revenge, after all. The few times when it was necessary were usually with the stupider segments of society that didn't know when to quit, and thus far, I hadn't needed to fire a shot in anger yet, and I was perfectly content for things to remain that way.
  
  Walking through Jig-Jig street didn't frighten me as much as it did when I first arrived in this world; I wasn't quite as vulnerable as I used to be, nor did I look overly much like an easy mark. I didn't fit in, still, but I had taken to wearing simple clothes in dark colours, along with a dark grey light ballistic vest over my chest. It was only considered light armour, but the nice part about armour was that it was cumulative and designed to protect against differing threats. The vest, while certainly impact resistant, was really designed to protect against slashing attacks, which was one of the weaknesses of my ballistic skin weave biomod.
  
  I didn't think I looked like a badass by any definition, but I did think I looked like someone that was too much effort for too little gain.
  
  If working on a ground ambulance for almost a year taught me anything, it was that most low-level violent criminals were scum; they acted very much as predators might in the wild. They generally went for the weak amongst the herd, the low-hanging fruit. That was certainly not something that could be relied upon, as a starving cougar would attack anything that moved, but it was a good rule of thumb.
  
  Mrs Okada ran her business in the back of a pachinko parlour, although I wasn't entirely sure why. It was more of an upscale place compared to other small pachinko or gambling spots, and Mrs Okada had a reputation for running a clean game without her fingers placed anywhere on the outcome of the games, probably because she didn't really care about the place as a profit centre, although I imagined it made money in spite of that.
  
  I timed my arrival to neither be late nor especially early. The former was impolite, but so was the latter, if less so in social situations, as far as I was concerned. Two minutes before the time she asked me to come when I contacted her, I showed up at the back of the pachinko salon, smiling good-naturedly at a giant man wearing a suit, with his eyes hidden behind polarised dark sunglasses, despite the fact that it was relatively dark in the parlour.
  
  "Good afternoon. I'm here to see Mrs Okada," I told the man.
  
  He grunted, paused for a moment, and grunted again in a slightly different intonation. After that, he silently stepped aside so that I could walk past him. 'Lovely gentleman,' I thought.
  
  As soon as I passed the threshold of the back area, all of the sound and clamour of the pachinko playing, which was a cacophony of electronic sounds and ringing, cut off entirely. I blinked and was curious how such an abrupt noise cancellation was possible, but I didn't have enough time to investigate it any further. Instead, I continued in. The paths could diverge, but Wakako's office was obvious on the left, with the right path going deeper into an area behind the pachinko machines.
  
  I stepped into her office, whose door was open. It was tastefully decorated in a wood and bamboo theme, and a woman that was past her middle age but not really elderly sat at a desk at one end of the room. I found it interesting that she did not opt for externally obvious rejuvenation treatments, as they were definitely within her budget. My eyes, zooming in on her neck briefly, expertly judged both her pulse rate and even rough blood pressure just from the subtlest movements in her arteries as her heartbeat.
  
  A number of liver spots on her skin were not congruent with my knowledge of dermatology. Her skin looked in good condition, too. My conclusion, the age spots were applied intentionally and cosmetically. She was in good health but liked to give the impression she was older and frailer than she actually was.
  
  "Ah, Miss Hebert. Thank you for your consideration in both accepting my invitation and your timely arrival," the old woman told me, her voice just holding a slight Japanese accent; she held out a hand and indicated a comfortable-looking chair in front of her desk, "Please, have a seat. The tea service should arrive momentarily."
  
  I didn't nod so much as incline my head slightly, before walking, very slowly in my subjective experience, to the chair. While not making it obvious, my eyes glanced both at the chair and then the walls to either side of me in the small office. They were wood panelled and tasteful. I was wondering why she had allowed me to enter her office armed. She certainly relied upon her reputation significantly in business, but I did not believe for a moment that she would rely upon that for her protection. There had to be something that would protect her from or instantly incapacitate a guest.
  
  Explosives in the chair? A small shaped charge could turn me into mince while not overly ruffling her expensive kimono. That was my guess. That or an automated heavy machine gun in the walls, hidden behind the tasteful wood and bamboo features. I couldn't really tell from seeing the room from outside if the walls appeared too thick. In either case, if the meeting went south, my best tactic would probably be to leap as quickly as I could, tackling the old woman so that her automated defences couldn't either blow me up or differentiate between the two of us.
  
  "Thank you for the invitation, Mrs Okada. Although, I find myself a little perplexed at the reason," I told her as I settled my tush onto what might be the most comfortable bomb I had ever sat on. Possibly the only one, too, although one never did know.
  
  A young woman walked into the room carrying a European tea service, which surprised me. I was expecting some sort of Japanese tea ceremony, so I reviewed that yesterday. However, when one ended up looking up formal tea ceremonies, one tended to read a lot more than one intended to when one started out.
  
  Asian tea ceremonies were ritualised and ceremonial, while the English drank way too much tea to go through such lengthy affairs, even occasionally, when they sat to have tea. As such, it was much more of a casual affair. Still, there were certain proprieties and etiquette in a high-society cuppa.
  
  It was just chance that I had read a little bit about it yesterday, and of course, my predilection for both reading Jane Austen and similar Victorian period novels and watching a number of Earth Aleph programs in the UK, like Downton Abbey, that I wasn't entirely at my wit's end. I hoped I wasn't making a fool out of myself; I hated that more than perhaps anything else.
  
  I internally sighed at the thought of missing Downtown Abbey; it had recently started its second season before I had been transported here, and it usually took about six months for an Earth Aleph program to arrive on Earth Bet. I'd never see if Matthew and Lady Mary got back together or if he survived the outbreak of World War One.
  
  I took the napkin that was provided and carefully unfolded it, and placed it over my lap.
  
  "Care for some sugar?" she asked me as she poured black tea into two small china cups using a tea strainer.
  
  I nodded and told her, "One lump, please." After that, I carefully used one of the spoons to agitate the tea, back and forth, without touching the spoon to the side of the teacup and creating an obnoxious racket.
  
  As I took my first sip, she said, "It's the chair, dear."
  
  I coughed, not quite aspirating the tea and asked, "I beg your pardon?"
  
  "There are two kinds of people who come into my office, dear. The kind that wonders wear the bomb is, and then there are the idiots," she said mildly, "I couldn't help but notice you glancing between the chair and the wall. That's a good sign, really."
  
  I smiled and took another sip of tea before setting the cup delicately back on the saucer to take a polite nibble out of one of the offered miniature sandwiches, "To tell me that means that you have almost certainly told other people the same thing. That means it is absolutely both, plus something else as an ace in the hole. My dad always said to have a plan, a backup plan and then an ace in the hole." Alt-Dad had told Alt-Taylor that, at least. It seemed like good advice.
  
  My eyes took in the overly large desk and started noticing that it didn't actually have any visible drawers, at least that I could see. I couldn't, of course, see everything from this side, but it looked odd for a desk. There wasn't actually any force field technology in this universe, at least as far as I could tell, but there was crazy electromagnetic field and even gravity manipulation technology that was almost as good. Perhaps if I tried to jump over the desk to tackle her, I'd get thrown back straight out of her office with significant force or get squashed into the desk like a bug under the force of twenty gravities. There was no way to know, really.
  
  My statement got what I thought was a genuine laugh from her that didn't look forced at all, "That's why I wanted to talk with you."
  
  "My dad? I somehow doubt that," I told her, being slightly and intentionally obtuse.
  
  She waved a hand, "Not at all. Your father's services were already spoken for, and at his level, moonlighting wasn't really an option. You, however, I am always looking for capable individuals with capable skills for odd jobs every now and then."
  
  That was one of the possibilities I had considered, but I hadn't thought it very likely. I tried to think of a delicate way to turn her down, "Mrs Okada, I am already gainfully employed, plus there is no way I want to become an edgerunner. I want to live more than a couple of years." I wasn't quite sure of the actual life expectancy of an Edgerunner actually, but it was probably similar to Matthew Crawley's life expectancy on the western front.
  
  "Over a third of Trauma Team security specialists in Night City moonlight as mercenaries, Miss Hebert. I don't even think it's against the rules in your employee handbook until you become a supervisor. I employ a number myself. And not every merc is an Edgerunner. Edgerunners are a subset of mercenaries, true, and they're mostly... crazy," Mrs Okada said reasonably. Then she continued, "It's mostly a distinction as far as the risk profile that a merc will accept. If they accept virtually any job, then they're almost definitionally an Edgerunner."
  
  She shrugged, "There's nothing wrong with that, and I certainly have gigs where that type of thinking is necessary, but over ninety-five per cent of the clients I take are much less glamorous. For every raid against some hypothetical corporate black site, there are fifty gigs for bodyguard duty for a suit when they go into a bad part of town, to find out if a husband is cheating on their wife, to steal back a car that was jacked by scavs. That sort of thing is actually what keeps my doors open, actually."
  
  She sighed, finishing her tea and said, "And you have an excellent reputation as a medic, even when you were working in an ambulance. I often lack those specific skills. Adding you to a gig is a surefire way to reduce the risk profile significantly, even if you were only peripherally involved by staying to provide medical care after the gig was completed."
  
  "You had the option to attend medical school but declined Kang Tao's offer. Based on the information available, that is your goal, however, so it stands to reason that you may be seeking to finance your own education. That won't be possible by just collecting your salary at Trauma Team. Although I'm sure they'd be happy to pay your way, too, eventually," she finished her pitch.
  
  I nodded slowly, understanding what she was saying. I did actually know that a number of Trauma Team employees moonlighted on the side like that. I finally told her, "I won't insult your intelligence or your Intelligence by acting surprised at the amount of information you collected on me, and your guesses are good ones. I suppose I would be open to certain work like that from time to time, so long as the risk profile was acceptable. I couldn't be involved in any missions against corporate interests, though."
  
  I was pretty sure Trauma Team would just disavow I ever actually worked for them if I got caught in such a "gig", but I did take the promises I made when I got hired a little seriously. I wasn't a company girl by any means, and neither did I believe that they would reciprocate such loyalty if I was, but I was like an honest politician; namely, if I took a bribe, I would stick to the terms of the bribery, if I could.
  
  I had agreed not to do anything to hurt their reputation, so until such a point as they broke faith with me, I would try my best to hold myself to that agreement, too, for my own sake. My actual dad, Danny, told me that you became the type of person you practised being, so if you had a habit of breaking promises, even if you wouldn't get caught, then you would become someone who broke promises as a matter of course. He should have taken some of his own advice after mom died, I thought, but it wasn't like I wasn't just as guilty myself.
  
  "Of course, I have a number of workers who have similar constraints. Really my job is merely to find the correct contractor and connect them to the requirements a client provides. I am just an insulative middle-man, providing a service to both sides," she said mildly and set her napkin aside on the table, signalling that the afternoon tea was probably coming to a close. It wasn't surprising; she was a busy woman.
  
  The idea that I should keep promises if I made them was a very old-fashioned opinion for the world I found myself in, and perhaps, someday, it would bite me on the tush, and then I would have to change. However, there was no need to rush headlong into Perdition; around Night City, that was sure to find me in its own good time.
  
  I, of course, had my long-running and tentative plan to potentially sell some of my intellectual property to a biotech or pharmaceutical company, but that was much, much higher risk than occasionally taking small jobs like this.
  
  Plus, networking this way would be one way to mitigate the risk of that "big gig" in the future. I would definitely need a fixer I could trust. From what I could tell, Mrs Okada was on the top tier of fixers in the city, with perhaps only the famous owner of the Afterlife having a better reputation, and I didn't like the idea of returning to Mr Delgado for anything.
  
  After he paid me the final payment for the drugs themselves, he offered another couple thousand eurodollars for my pill press. I spent an evening rebuilding it, trying my best to make it less Tinkertech by slowing its operation and giving it time to physically cool the vanilla coating mechanism, which was kind of hard because I didn't really know how it worked. I just replaced weak-looking parts with tougher-looking parts, though, and had the feeling that it might last months, maybe four or five, before totally breaking down.
  
  I tried to get him to pay me for it in advance, but he would only agree to half up front. However, after picking up the machine, he did not leave the last half of the money in the location I demanded, claiming there were unstated difficulties and redirected me to a different locker at a location I had never used before. I never picked up the last payment, and as far as I was concerned, that anonymous identity was burned.
  
  I wasn't a professional paranoid like Alt-Dad was, but I had been an avid hobbyist for years. With the benefit of hindsight, as well as a more natural neurotransmitter balance in my brain and not constantly being bullied, I realised that I had been working up a very large persecution complex in Brockton Bay. I had the feeling that everyone was out to get me, based on my experiences at school. However, thinking about it, I realised I never approached the teachers or even that witch Principal correctly.
  
  I approached them with the assumption that they cared about their students and then used the fact that they didn't help me as evidence that they were out to get me when the truth was much more banal. It was the distinction between the Stasi dragging someone away for interrogation and a person who just watched it happen. They were the latter, although I still couldn't precisely understand their motivations, as they protected the Trio a little too thoroughly. My best guess was Emma's dad threatened them with lawsuits or something.
  
  In any event, even though I no longer felt that everyone was out to get me, personally, I still thought that most people would stick a knife in if they had the opportunity and something to gain by doing so. So it was best to avoid giving them the opportunity.
  
  I felt that if you had a continuing business relationship with someone that you did not trust, you should always be wary of being fucked over if they knew it was coming to a close. To me, it seemed like it was better to let such arrangements fizzle out rather than having a set end to them; that way, the untrusted party wouldn't be tempted to get one over on you when they no longer had a reason not to. You would know that this was the last deal with that person, but they wouldn't know.
  
  However, I was tempted by twenty-five hundred eurodollars for my pill press, but in the end, I only got half that. Alt-Dad had told Alt-Taylor to always beware of the sunk cost fallacy and never second guess herself if her instincts were telling her to walk away, even if doing so was leaving something on the table. My instincts told me to run away and fuck the last half of the money, so I had.
  
  Fizzling out the relationship was why Gloria still brought about half the cybernetics she came across to him, even though I had cultivated a few contacts with ripperdocs in Japantown, which we used for most of the better pieces. I didn't make as much as I did before from this venture because my only job was to refurbish the cybernetics Gloria brought me, but she was making more than she had in the past, to the point where she was putting a little money away every month to go to the same Paramedic school I went to, possibly in a year or two. NC Med Ambulance would pay part of the tuition if you agreed to work there for three years, but you still had to come up with about half yourself.
  
  One nice thing about living three times as fast as everyone else was that I had a lot of time to think, and it didn't really look out of place even if I went on mental digressions for a while, as such I carefully and slowly dabbed my mouth with the napkin and sat it aside as well.
  
  "So, how will this work? You call me when you have need of my special skills?" I asked her, which caused her to nod.
  
  She told me, "Precisely. Some jobs are solo affairs, but I think most of the ones where you would fit the bill would be part of a support element for an existing team. You would have to trust me to some extent to assign you people that you could trust to watch your back, of course, but I definitely wouldn't pair you with random newbies."
  
  I nodded. I didn't really think I would accept any kind of solo job unless it was something very simple and low risk, like perhaps accompanying a client to a black market ripperdoc for both bodyguard service and professional consultation. That would be right up my alley. There were any number of reasons an otherwise law-abiding person might not want to go to a legit clinic for work done, with privacy being the main one.
  
  It was more polite for me to offer to end the tea than if she was to dismiss me, from what I could tell from Downton Abbey, so I said, "Well, I again appreciate your invitation, but I know that you are a busy woman and I shouldn't keep up any more of your time today."
  
  "A young woman like yourself is always welcome. It is clear your mother taught you manners, as a mother ought to do," she said cryptically, rising from her desk as I did.
  
  I smiled at her as she rose to her feet and said, "There's no need, ma'am. I'll show myself out." I wondered what she meant by that.
  
  Before I left her office, she said, "Oh, and I have to thank you for helping my son with that matter at Clouds."
  
  I sniffed delicately, "I'm sure I don't know what you're referring to." I didn't even admit I had anything to do with what happened at Clouds to other Tyger Claws; in fact, I wouldn't even admit it if Mr Inoue asked me again, and he knew for a fact I was involved! My statement caused her to smile even wider as I left her office. Secrets were for keeping.
  
  As I stepped back onto Jig-Jig street, I considered. Although the grandma-seemingly lady had been unfailingly polite, the entire meeting had me feeling vaguely uneasy. As if I had spent twenty minutes petting a purring mountain lion. An enjoyable activity, so long as the mountain lion didn't decide it was hungry instead.
  
  "Attacking a scav den? Ma'am, was I perhaps unclear when I told you that I didn't desire to become an edgerunner? Because, and please forgive my crassness in advance, but this sounds like edgerunner shit," I told Mrs Okada over a vidcall.
  
  She had forwarded me a supposedly end-to-end encryption transport layer module for my phone app. It was an open-source module, so I could examine the source code, but I wasn't at the level of understanding of the mathematics involved in cryptography. So while I spent a few minutes looking through it, there were no obvious backdoors or malware. However, everything else looked Greek to me.
  
  I did know enough about cryptosystems to know that it was theoretically possible to design, mathematically, a secret vulnerability into an encryption algorithm. Encryption systems almost always had a number of constants in their programming, and it was theoretically possible to precompute a compromised constant that would give the party who created the constant, but no other, the capability to crack the encryption with little effort.
  
  I didn't know and couldn't tell if that had been done, but I verified the source code with the copies on the net from the developer and even asked a number of friends on the hacker BBS that I had become a frequent reader. The friend who bought my first netrunner suit replied and told me pretty much the same thing, that I couldn't really tell, but these were open encryption standards and were widely relied upon, even by corporations themselves, so they were probably good. She told me that most corporations and net runners don't attack cryptosystems themselves, anyway, but use malware and similar attacks to read the cleartext after it has already been decrypted or by stealing your private encryption key or similar methods.
  
  That made sense; as such, I had begun to trust the encryption, at least a little.
  
  "Well, it is a small scav den. And your partners on this mission, if you accept, are edgerunners. But you don't need to be just because you accept an occasional job with them. Despite their risk profile, they are professionals. They've completed a number of successful jobs for me over the past few months. You are here on this job less because they might be injured and more for the aftermath," she told me, "You see, this is a revenge gig. The client's grandson was one of these Scav's 'donors' and did not survive the experience. A previous gig traced those responsible to this location. However, the client is barely offering enough money to make this a worthwhile gig. He's just one man. But it is pretty well known that Trauma Team Med Techies, often very rapidly, make off with any cyberware in a downed enemy, time permitting."
  
  That was true. It was one of the ways to get bonuses, in fact. Generally, it would only happen in rescue-type calls where the patient's acuity permitted it. We wouldn't delay patient care to do so if they were actually in any danger. However, it wasn't uncommon to give rescued and stable patients a little Vitamin A (Ativan) to relax them and then spend five minutes or so removing a few choice pieces of cybernetics from any downed enemies if there were any.
  
  If the expected haul was large enough and the patient couldn't be delayed getting to the hospital, occasionally Trauma Team would dispatch a second aircraft to systematically scavenge all the cybernetics from every downed enemy. Other times they would redirect ground teams that only consisted of security specialists in vans to just grab the bodies and bring them back to the Tower, where an on-call med techie might be called in to work a few hours of overtime in the building's morgue.
  
  "You want me along to Counter-Scav the Scavs?" I asked, flabbergasted. Then I thought about it for a while and nodded. It did make sense. Especially if they were raiding a scav den that already had some medical equipment in it, it might not take that long at all. A lot of cybernetics had a perishability period where they had to be extracted in a certain amount of time after their owner flatlined, or they'd be ruined. It was why Scav took down people alive, after all. Finally, I nodded, "Okay, yeah, that makes sense, I guess. And fuck those guys, really."
  
  Everybody hated the Scavs. Yet there still seemed to be more every day. Not all of them were Eastern European immigrants, either. It was almost like we were living in a video game where they would just respawn every so often if you stopped looking in their direction.
  
  "Excellent; I'll set up a meeting with the team you'll be working with this time. As an aside, there is a small bonus for each living Scav they deliver, compared to each one they flatline, and a moderate bonus if they deliver the leader of this den. All of that will be in the detes," she said, seemingly happily, "There is a time limit in that nobody really knows when a scav den will relocate, so I expect you not to drag your feet on this. I don't appreciate it if my contractors make me look bad in front of one of my clients."
  
  Yeah, that was the old satin-covered iron fist routine. Mrs Okada didn't have the bearing of someone you'd want to come back with failure if you had already agreed to do a job for her. That last bit made me raise my eyebrows, "Do I want to know why the client wants some of them alive?"
  
  "Probably not. But he is a very traditional old gentleman. Have you heard the word Língchí before?" asked Wakako in a conversational tone, pronouncing the tonal Chinese word differently from the rest of the English words in the sentence.
  
  I shook my head at her in the vidcall, "I definitely don't want to do an image search on that, do I?" I asked her, aghast.
  
  "Again, probably not. Sending you the location now," she agreed.
  
  The Golden Duck restaurant was a pretty good Chinese place in Japantown. It was scop, like almost everything else, but they were real artists here. They not only got both the taste and texture somewhat similar to actual Peking duck, but even the appearance looked close to what I remembered from a few of the Chinese places in Brockton Bay.
  
  There were only three places that my dad and I would regularly order from, and only one of them had Peking duck, so I only had it a handful of times, but I couldn't tell that much of a difference the couple of times I had tried The Golden Duck.
  
  As such, the food here was actually on the pricier side, but I supposed a group of three edgerunners wouldn't care about that. Wakako had sent me details on three people, but there were no names attached. Just a portrait and a single paragraph that described their speciality. Two men and one woman.
  
  That didn't stop me from running their likenesses through my gumshoe service, pulling up their full names and abbreviated life history, nor would it stop them from doing the same to me, so I suspected it was more along the lines of courtesy. I would allow them to introduce themselves as whatever they liked, and they would reciprocate the courtesy.
  
  I found them right away; the two men were quite boisterous, laughing and drinking beer from glass bottles, while the blonde woman with the pageboy cut and pink lipstick held to the side, being more laid back.
  
  The first was a large man, easily over a hundred-and-ninety-centimetres and with the dark skin common amongst Caribbean Islanders. His biography stated he was born in Jamaica, and his accent as he laughed and talked with his friend seemed to bear that out. However, his last known location before arriving in Night City was Port-au-Prince, but there were no further records for the period in between when the entire island of Hispaniola was destroyed in a massive earthquake and tsunami a couple of years ago. Records started again when he arrived in Night City about six months ago, with him suspected in a number of crimes, but the NCPD didn't really prioritise crimes committed by mercenaries, so long as they were smart about the targets they chose.
  
  His friend was also a bear of a man, and his Eastern European accent also agreed with his biography, although his exact place of birth wasn't listed in the report I had paid for, listing either Belarus or eastern Ukraine. Everyone paused when I approached their table, and I said, in a friendly manner, "Wakako sent me."
  
  That caused the two men the grin and usher me into a seat, "Come, sit, sit," the bear told me, and I slid in next to the much smaller blonde woman. She looked like she was in her mid to late twenties, and from Mrs Okada's brief precis, she was a netrunner. I also didn't get any matches on the gumshoe site for her, aside from a list of possible aliases.
  
  The Jamaican man said, "Hello, hello! I am Jean..." which correlated with his actual name of Jean Ventura, "... and this gonk is Ruslan." That definitely wasn't the bear's real name, but it didn't really matter. "The anti-social one over there is Kiwi." That definitely didn't sound like her real name, but it was listed as one of her aliases.
  
  That caused the woman to narrow her red eyes and say, "I'm not anti-social; I'm just not an idiot like you two. She looks pretty young, but Wakako says she is at least as good a Med Techie as Trauma Team is." Well, that is a very interesting way to describe my skills, I thought.
  
  I nodded, "You can call me Madison. I am very good, yes." Madison Clements had such a debt to me that merely stealing her identity in a different universe a million times wouldn't come close to repaying, but it was a start.
  
  The man calling himself Ruslan nodded, "We thought we'd discuss the gig over dinner and set out right afterwards if that's okay with you, Madison." He waved a hand over to Kiwi and said, "Kiwi, if you mind?"
  
  She shook her head and pulled something out of her purse and sat it on the table, and turned it on. I noticed an odd noise briefly, but other than that couldn't figure out what it was doing. She enlightened me, "It's a white noise generator, but inside the radius, you can't hear it. But outside, the people in the next booth won't be able to hear us talk. Doesn't stop lip reading, obviously, though."
  
  I was impressed. Mainly because it seemed every time I turned around, I found some interesting piece of technology that I hadn't even known was possible. How would this thing even work? Also, wouldn't that thing make more sense if it was incorporated into your body? I fidgeted a little, stopping myself from an urge to disassemble it.
  
  The runner called Kiwi also handled a conference wireless connection as I saw and accepted a wireless connection from her and discovered that it was a combination conference vidcall as well as a four-way collaborative presentation. Basically, any of us could use the screen as a whiteboard or show images to all the others.
  
  Kiwi blinked at me a couple of times and said, "The girl has black ICE protecting her OS. Nice."
  
  "It's not fatal," I hurriedly told her. At least, that one wasn't.
  
  That was true, too. In fact, the first layer of my defence was black ICE. Black ICE didn't really mean it killed you; it just meant something that interfered with your bodily processes. It was called black because for the longest time, and still, officially, everyone claimed such a thing was impossible. My first line of defence was a piece of black ICE that I partly took from the Dragoon and partly Tinkered with myself, and it should put someone to sleep. More like a brief coma, really, that might last a few minutes or maybe even longer. This was followed by a series of traditional ICE layered after this in slowly elevating danger levels, for example, one that would short-circuit the deck of an attacker, followed, finally, by my last defence, which was the heart-stopping fatal black ICE that I also recovered from the Dragoon.
  
  "Whatever you say, choom. I don't recognise it, and that makes me interested, but we can circle back to that later, maybe," the blonde woman told me.
  
  Everyone shut up briefly for a moment while a waitress brought over plates of duck for each of us. I didn't even have to order. Nice.
  
  "Okay, so this is really a combination gig," Ruslan said. I didn't know what that meant, but I was hoping I would learn from context, "Our main client wants the scavs dead or alive, and we can keep any loot. That's the main reason you're here, Madison."
  
  I nodded, and he continued, "However, I just got word from Wakako that she lined up a second client that wants the same thing. This client is the real estate company that owns the building the scavs are held up in. I'm not sure if they rented the space to them or if the scavs are squatters, but they'd like them evicted. Preferably with extreme prejudice. This does mean we won't be able to rip out some of the fixed medical equipment, although if the Scavs brought anything with them, it's fair game. We have a list of things that are no-touch with this second client. It does mean this gig is paying better than we thought, though."
  
  I frowned but nodded, then reviewed the list of equipment that we were expected to find as Ruslan forwarded the data to the conference call. Well, it wasn't anything that would be easy to move or sell, nor would I have any real need of it, and it was older than even my own equipment. The equipment was of such middling to poor quality that I assumed this real estate company probably marketed it to Scavs or similar bottom-of-the-barrel ripperdocs, which made me kind of want to screw them over but I supposed being professional was the better choice.
  
  He then discussed the details he knew from the expected number of scavs, which was between eight and twelve, and their basic plan. He and Jean would clear the building, with the help of Kiwi, who would mostly hang back and provide remote quick hacks and situational awareness from hacking the local subnet while I would hold back at the back entrance in the event someone tried to run out the back.
  
  I nodded; that was an acceptable risk profile for me. My backup plan would be just to run away. However, I had two aces in the hole, and since they needed to be used relatively soon before they became inert, I didn't mind offering one of them to the group.
  
  When he asked if anyone had any potential changes to make to the plan, I pulled out a small grenade; it looked exactly like a smoke grenade as that was what I had built it out of, "This is an anaesthetic gas grenade. It's pretty potent and will put down an unprotected person, through inhalation, within five to ten seconds. The gas becomes inert and safe to be around after around a hundred and twenty seconds after it's used, but the victims will still be down for quite a bit longer than that."
  
  "Fucking preem, Madison. Are you sure you want to waste it on this gig?" asked Ruslan, with the other two looking impressed, too.
  
  I shrugged, "It's about to expire. It's still good now, but in another month, the active ingredient will have broken down into inert chemicals, similar to how it does after it's been used."
  
  That caused them all to nod. They were familiar with using surplus equipment acquired through god knows where, too, and assumed this must be something similar.
  
  "Nice, I wasn't going to bother with trying to keep any of them alive, but maybe the top dog. His bonus is pretty good," Ruslan mused, causing me to fidget. I didn't particularly want to help get someone tortured, but everything I learned about this man caused me to believe that if anyone deserved it, he probably did. I wouldn't say anything, as I knew that was a possible outcome when I offered them the grenade.
  
  They adjusted their plans briefly, taking into account the new resource, and after we finished all of our duck, we got on our way.
  
  I thought it would be the industrial area of Watson, which was a little sketchy, but it turned out the scavs were holed up in the overcrowded Heywood district, which was even sketchier.
  
  I supposed that was a kind of hide-in-plain-sight type of thing. But it made me wonder how they camouflaged taking bodies in and out of the building, or maybe they just didn't.
  
  The adjustment to the plan was that instead of following Ruslan and Jean in, Kiwi instead scaled the top of the small one-story building and started hacking from there. She also took some tools with her, and the plan was that she would toss the gas grenade in the input ventilation of the building's HVAC system, then hack it to turn it on full blast, circulating all of the gas throughout the building in only twenty seconds or so. I was waiting in the back alley with my Kang Tao submachinegun aimed at the back door.
  
  "Okay, we're ready," Ruslan said over the conference call we were using as a jury-rigged tacnet. Maybe it was just the fact that I worked at Trauma Team, but I felt they needed to get some better commo gear.
  
  Kiwi came back with, "Alright. I'm in the subnet. Looks like ten people in, including the top dog and possibly two donors still alive," she said calmly. I winced. Maybe I would get to save a life today? "Alright, the HVAC system is hacked, and the blower is locked into high-speed. I'm throwing the grenade in... now!"
  
  About thirty seconds after Kiwi threw the grenade in, Ruslan and Jean, both wearing gas masks, kicked the front door in and started shooting. A little bit after that, an urgent voice told me, "Madison, two targets headed for the back door, including the big man."
  
  "Will the big man come through the door first or second?" I asked her, not feeling very anxious but needing additional information.
  
  There was a pause before she came back, "Second, it looks like! They'll be at the door in three, two, one..."
  
  The door burst open as if a man had kicked it, and from my position of cover behind a dumpster, I lined up the reticle on my red dot sight on the mook's abdomen. Using my highest speed, I quickly pulled up the image of the target they wanted alive and nodded before gently squeezing the trigger, unleashing a six or seven-round burst that took the random Scav in the chest and neck, the man going down in slow motion in a gurgle and spray of blood that caused me to ick a little bit. You'd think with all I had seen working traumas over the past year that I would be immune to that, but it was a little bit different when you were responsible.
  
  "Ну все, тебе пизда!" yelled the boss man of the den; however, he was yelling it behind him and shooting back the way he came, apparently thinking that the shooter that took out his minion was coming from behind him. He emptied a whole magazine of shotgun shells down the empty hallway and started backing uneasily out of the door, swaying a little. It looks like he took at least a huff or two of the anaesthetic, but not enough to put him down completely.
  
  As he was fumbling with a full drum magazine to reload in his automatic street sweeper-style shotgun, I just darted out of cover and approached him at my full speed from behind, slamming the buttstock of my SMG into the side of his head. He went down like a sack of potatoes, and I smiled, nodding.
  
  I glanced down at him and searched him for both weapons and anything dangerous. He had a set of mantis blades in each of his arms, so I carefully disconnected the powerpack from them, defanging him. Then I used a set of superstrong zip-ties to tie his ankles together. His legs, at least, were organic and not biomodded.
  
  "The big guy is down, alive," I told Kiwi and the rest over the conference call. Perhaps it would have been more merciful to kill him. But he was the Scav's "doctor" here, so I didn't feel a lot of sympathy for him. Plus, he was worth an extra thousand dollars alive.
  
  Ruslan's amusing accent came back, "Awesome! It was like shooting fish in a barrel in here. Should I call Wakako for a pickup for the boss?"
  
  I sighed and told them, "Negative. Not yet. He has a nice set of Arasaka mantis blades on each arm. I doubt he will really need them anymore, given what Mrs Okada implied our client is going to do to him. We may as well be thorough."
  
  After the timer, I started when Kiwi threw the grenade in reached two minutes; I dragged the Scav doctor back inside his own operating theatre.
  
  "Kiwi, highlight the two possible living donors on my HUD, please," I told her.
  
  "Stand by; I'm getting off this roof. It's fucking windy," she complained, but after a moment, two particular locations were highlighted, right next to each other, and I started walking fast to them, "Ruslan or Jean, one of you, can you grab the backpack I brought with me, please? It's the back seat of your van."
  
  "Da!" came a happy response back.
  
  I found what I was looking for, a large tub full of water and ice and five naked bodies. Completely disgusted, I tossed the Scav doctor into a corner, and I wondered at the same time if they had an industrial-sized ice maker like a convenience store if one of them had a chore to go out and buy a half dozen bags of ice every night.
  
  I zeroed in on the two living victims easily and fished them out of the tub one at a time, eyes glancing rapidly between the two as I mentally triaged their condition. Nodding, I sat down next to the woman. Her skin somehow managed to look both pale and jaundiced.
  
  Ruslan came back with my backpack of medical gear and sat it down, "Woah, this is fucked up, Madison."
  
  "Yeah, no shit. Sometimes your countrymen are kind of dicks, you know?" I told him as I quickly started an IV and began administering some trauma nanomeds. The fact that they were almost dying from hypothermia was working in my favour, as it was preventing either of them from dying from the ham-handed way they were chopped up. The man, at least, only lost his eyes, one arm and a leg.
  
  The woman, however, had her eyes and what I thought was a cybernetic liver taken, and they clearly did only a minimal amount of work stopping the internal bleeding from that surgery. She was slowly internally haemorrhaging to death right now.
  
  "Hey!" Ruslan said loudly, offended. "These aren't my countrymen! I am not Russian! I am Belorussian! I was born at least one hundred kilometres from this zasranec!" He said, giving the Scav docker a light kick, "I hate these assholes!"
  
  I looked at him strangely. I didn't really know the difference between the two places, and they sounded basically the same to me, too. Was the difference of a hundred kilometres really a big deal? I guessed for some in Eastern Europe, it was!
  
  "Sorry. Help me take to carry that guy into the OR; I need to work on this woman first, though," I told him, and he nodded and picked the man up and left the room.
  
  "Woah, this is fucked up, Madison," Kiwi said as she walked in.
  
  I had heard that a lot lately. I nodded as I put my firewall around my neck and connected to it. Connecting to the woman's interface socket, I hummed as I picked her up. "Kiwi, can you please grab that backpack and follow me into the OR."
  
  Kiwi nodded and followed me into the OR, and I took a quick look around at the equipment available. There is more than what is on the list, so the scavs had to have brought some of that with them. We'd be making off with that stuff.
  
  "Oh, sweet..." I said aloud, "Ruslan, can you place your guy into this chair? And then roll that hemodialysis machine next to him?"
  
  He laid the guy down but scratched his head, "Uhh... what machine?" I sighed and pointed, "That one, the green plastic on the wheels. It should just roll; just put it next to him. Kiwi, set that there and get out one litre of normal saline."
  
  As I sat the woman down on the operating biobed, she fished out the large bag of saline. I glanced at it, "Nova. Go find a microwave and nuke that bag of saline for about four minutes." I didn't know precisely how long it would take to heat up, but I could always let it cool back down if she brought it to me too hot.
  
  Glancing down at the woman and judging that I could spare a moment before she started actively attempting to die on me, I darted over to the man in the chair and turned on the dialysis machine. It was actually a combination dialysis and heart bypass machine made by some Chinese company that I couldn't recognise, but it was just a clone of a popular line of Meditech models. I powered it up and frowned at the Cyrillic text. I mashed buttons until I got English again and then rapidly adjusted the settings. This guy didn't need blood dialysis, but he was about to die from hypothermia, and a hemodialysis machine could warm the blood as well as filter it.
  
  It took me a minute to start him going, and I watched the machine chug away and nodded, satisfied.
  
  "Alright, everyone, look around for where they keep their looted cyberware. We need to find the pieces they cut out of these two people. Especially a Transgenic Ltd brand liver. I need that... right away," I told all three of them, both Kiwi and Jean arriving to see what I was up to.
  
  I sent Kiwi a list of cybernetics that was taken from both the man and the woman, and she nodded. "I take it nobody has any complaints if we return the stolen property?"
  
  "Nah, mon, that's just doing the right thing. But what are you going to do?" asked Jean.
  
  I sighed, "I'm not a cybernetics implantation specialist, obviously. But it shouldn't be too hard to at least put these specific stolen implants back in."
  
  That was a lie. A bald-faced lie. It was, in fact, much harder to do that than put in an implant in the beginning. The Scav doctor hadn't exactly been gentle when he removed anything, so I would have to repair a lot of damage surgically while I did so, especially with the woman and her liver.
  
  Ruslan and Jean shrugged; it sounded plausible to them. I glanced at the nuked bag of saline, using my recently added FLIR mode in my eyes to gauge its temperature. Still a bit too warm, so I just placed it next to the woman's body for the moment.
  
  "I got the liver!" cried Kiwi from the other room. She ran back in, carrying a clear plastic bag that covered the implant. I glanced at it and nodded, "Good. Get me a pressure infuser from my bag. We don't have many blood products here, but this warm saline will help both her pressure and warm her up." There was some synthetic blood, the types borgs used, and I could use that on her in a pinch, but it really wasn't a good idea to do if it wasn't life or death. We'd see how much blood she lost in the surgery when I put her liver back in.
  
  "A what?" asked Kiwi, perplexed.
  
  Fuck! "Look for a squeezy pressure ball-looking thing. Like an old-fashioned blood pressure cuff," I told her, too busy to get it myself. After a moment, she found the correct thing, bringing it over to me.
  
  "We're gonna go watch the prisoner until you're ready to disarm him," Ruslan said, snickering at his own pun.
  
  "Okay. This might be a longer night than I thought," I told them.
  
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  in flagrante delicto
  Moving at my maximum speed, it only took about ten minutes to get the woman's old liver transplanted back in and her hepatic portal repaired. Then, after her condition was stabilised, I darted over to the Scav doctor, who had awoken and was hurling streams of invectives at me. Luckily Kiwi was already all over that, and she had installed a foreign data shard in his head that had locked down all outgoing wireless transmissions from any of his implants.
  
  That was good; I hadn't thought of that. I made a mental note to remember it the next time I was in a similar situation. It wouldn't do if he was able to make a phone call to his friends or, worse, the police.
  
  There was a surprising breadth of narcotics in their clinic, including my old favourite, ketamine, even if the total quantity was small. That was a drug I administered more than any other in my year of working on the ground ambulance. Honestly, I would have given it to almost every single patient I saw if I could have gotten away with it.
  
  So, rather than listen to the man any further, I drew up a very large dose and dropped the man firmly into the K-hole. At high doses, the disassociative and anaesthetic properties of this drug really shined, blocking the neurotransmitter glutamate, which the brain required for... well, everything. Long story short, he shut the fuck up, and rapidly too.
  
  "Ooh... lucky," I said, as I used some tools to carefully disconnect each of his arms. The interface points at his shoulders were generic, so there was no need to actually conduct any real surgery to remove them. I was sure I would find a number of others around here, plus that was one of the parts that needed to be somewhat customised to each person, too. They were the cheapest parts of a modern arm system, too. It probably wasn't uncommon to show up at a ripperdoc without them.
  
  I sat his two Arasaka Mantis blades to the side and yelled, "You can call Mrs Okada now to send someone to take this guy away."
  
  At that, Jean and Ruslan walked into the room. Jean glanced at him and then around and nodded, "Cool. That didn't take as long as I thought. Those two going to make it?"
  
  "They should, but I plan to keep them out of it until we're pretty much ready to leave. Then we can just dump them at a hospital, probably. I still need to reinstall the rest of their chrome, too. I'd rather they didn't see us, plus if we called emergency services, that would strictly limit our time here," I told Jean.
  
  Jean nodded slowly, and the other man spoke briefly on the phone before turning to us, "Alright, a car should be here in five minutes." Then he paused as he parsed what I had said while he was on the phone, "How long do you expect to stay here?"
  
  "Well, however long it takes. Probably takes a few hours to go through all the dead Scavs and loot everything worth an ennie. We're still going to end up leaving a lot on the table here, but there's no helping it," I told him, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world, "That's basically why Mrs Okada invited me for this job, wasn't it?"
  
  Ruslan nodded, "Da, but we thought it would just be like fifteen minutes or so at the most. I'm honestly not sure why we thought that, thinking about it now..." He hummed and nodded, "Not a problem, I guess. We might have to just get Kiwi to set up some of our sticky cams outside, so we can see if we get any company while we fort up here."
  
  The self-same Kiwi walked into the room, "Did I hear my name?"
  
  "Da, here, let me tell you what our new plan is...." Ruslan told the blonde woman.
  
  I used one half of the clinic as an impromptu ICU, with mainly the woman donor recuperating. She was already looking a lot better, too. The man was already put back together, as I had quickly found the implants that were taken from him amidst the other haul of the Scavs.
  
  I had done a quick investigation of both people, and neither appeared to be anyone particularly important just on the basis that they lacked Trauma Team memberships. That obviously didn't mean that they weren't important to all the people who loved and might miss them, though.
  
  Before the pickup for the Scav doctor, I had scrounged around and found some benzos and dosed him with them, both to keep him docile for the ride wherever he was going and also because the particular chemical I chose had both a strong retrograde and anterograde amnesiac effects. The man probably wasn't long for this world, but just in case, I didn't want him to remember what I looked like. These were the same medications that were used for light sedation, for example, in dentistry and minor in-patient surgeries.
  
  I was keeping the donor man insensate with the same cocktail of drugs, using one of the IV pumps that I was going to steal out of this place to slowly drip a number of drugs I dissolved into a bag of saline slowly into him. He'd be good for hours.
  
  Going through the deceased Scavs was pretty quick, and I had already acquired for myself two sets of high-quality polymer arteries. I was a little surprised at the quality of them, so I took the time to carefully remove them, which caused a couple of odd looks from the netrunner Kiwi, who was helping me secure the more perishable cybernetics in specially prepared cryogenic containers, which the Scavs had no shortage of. Those I would take too; they were always useful and generic enough that they'd slide right into my stock-keeping system, even if I wasn't really a Ripperdoc.
  
  A little more than halfway through the stack of Scav corpses I was working on, Kiwi yelled from another room, "A car is pulling up. A POS Supron, it looks like." I glanced up and reached a brief stopping point, walking over to where I sat my submachine gun on a table. Supron's were really a terrible car, something akin to a van, but they were built using mostly recycled plastics, with an engine from a lawnmower. But for use by Scavs, it was not surprising as they did have a lot of room in the back.
  
  Car and Driver magazine called them "marginally safer than putting your dick in a blender," which I couldn't believe could actually be printed, plus it actually made me chuckle. Things that were rated PG in Night City would be a hard R in Brockton Bay, at minimum.
  
  "Two Scavs, pulling an unconscious woman out of the back of the van. Looks like this might be a drop-off point," Kiwi said as I walked into the front area, which looked like it might have been intended for offices and a waiting room if this was actually a working clinic. As it was, it was set up as a den or living room with televisions and extremely sketchy-looking BDs lying around. I did not want to experience what a Scav considered an entertaining brain dance.
  
  I sat the submachine gun on the table and pulled out my Omaha, double-checking to make sure the charge was good to go on the electromagnetic weapon.
  
  "Woah, those aren't even out on the market yet," Ruslan said admiringly, "How'd you manage to score one?"
  
  I glanced at him and considered lying but decided not to. "Both my parents worked for Militech, and until recently, I was considered a corporate dependent. They have been selling this model internally for over a year as a kind of beta test. It should come up on the regular market next month, far as I know." I then flipped it around and handed it to him by the barrel, nodded my head at the door headed outside, "Want to?"
  
  I didn't particularly want to kill anyone, even Scavs, and although I would if I had to, I had the feeling that the rest of the people here had a bit more flexible opinions on the subject. At the same time, I wasn't a child anymore that had unrealistic expectations about what exactly was going to happen to these two Scavs. He grinned and took it, and nodded, "Fuck yeah. Is there anything I need to know about it?"
  
  I thought about that, "It takes between seventy and eighty milliseconds to recharge the capacitors for a follow-on shot. That's pretty quick, but if you just pulled the trigger as fast as you could, it would only fire every other shot, probably. But for aimed shots, it should just be point and shoot."
  
  That was something that Militech said they would improve with follow-on models. One of the main advantages of these guns was there were no moving parts in the action when you fired, much like firearms that used caseless ammunition. The projectiles were aerodynamic steel darts which were then coated in a thin layer of copper for electrical resistance purposes. That was apparently necessary for the weapon to function, but I didn't really know how it worked. As such, it would, mechanically at least, permit a really high rate of fire if the capacitors could support it!
  
  He nodded, and we all backed up a fair distance, and I grabbed my submachine gun just in case things went to shit.
  
  The door was opened with a kick, and surprisingly, it wasn't a Russian voice; it sounded like a stereotypical surfer boy from California. Although there weren't that many surfers in her past life anymore, on account of fears of Leviathan, and there weren't that many in this world too, on account that most of the shallow waters were somewhat polluted, "Yo, Vasily... bruh... come help us with this bitch! We had to use one of the scramblers on her!"
  
  The sound of the Omaha firing was quite unique. It didn't really sound like a firearm, except that there was a loud crack of the projectile immediately going supersonic before it collided with the surfer boy's forehead, penetrating and out the other side. It really did have excellent penetration. There were only three lanes at the shooting range that I could use it in, the rifle lanes, all the rest, and it would over-penetrate the backstops. He was carrying the "donor" in a princess-style carry, and I winced as she tumbled to the ground with him.
  
  There was also a slight high-pitched whine as it charged the capacitors for a second shot, with the second Scav trying to pull out a gun before being shot three times in the chest in rapid succession. After the last enemy went down, Jean said, "Alright, let's drag them all inside. It wouldn't do for the cops to be called." The last was said with heavy humour.
  
  I sat my gun down again and dragged both the surfer boy and the donor lady inside while Jean grabbed the other one. Ruslan grinned at me and pointed to the first Scav with the Omaha and said, "You know, Madison, sometimes your countrymen are kind of dicks."
  
  "Yeah, yeah... I get it; you don't have to rub it in, you know," I told him, face blushing red. Besides, it was absolutely true.
  
  That caused him to laugh, really laugh, for a good ten seconds before he flipped the pistol around in his hand and handed it back to me, "That's pretty sweet. Normally I'd say it has the problem of over-penetrating, but I'd say it would be a good sidearm in this kind of business. Never know who has dermal armour or armoured prosthesis and shit."
  
  I separated the donor from the dead Scav, and Ruslan glanced down at her, "Looks like a suit." I nodded; she was dressing fairly well. I pulled an interface cable from around my neck from the firewall I was still wearing and plugged it into her interface socket, "Let's see who she is."
  
  First, immediately, I was greeted with my Zetatech system springing into high gear and quarantining a piece of malicious code that had tried to bridge between us through my firewall appliance. That was interesting. What was also interesting was she had quite a few pieces of cybernetics, including a networked internal biomonitor that was trying, but failing, to send a signal out to... ah, she was a subscriber. Although I didn't have any Trauma Team implants, I did have a bunch of their software. I ran it in a sandboxed virtual environment, just like the software from NC Med Ambulance, but it was helpfully popping up, for my perusal, this woman's file.
  
  "Eleanor McKinney, NC18291866, Night Corp employee of eleven years, Trauma Team Gold," I said out loud, disconnecting the connection.
  
  "Fuck mon! Why wasn't Trauma sweeping in on these gonks? Are they fucking on the way here?" Jean exclaimed, looking out the window for any potential sweeping that might be happening right now.
  
  As her eyes scrolled through text rapidly, Kiwi said, "They never got the alert. These gonks weren't as stupid as they looked; there was something in her system blocking it. I guess this 'scrambler' that guy mentioned before Rus shot him."
  
  I nodded and enlightened them, "Yes, there was a virus in her system when I connected; it got through my firewall even, but it was stopped by my ICE," I turned her around and saw a data shard in her shard port. Considering her system read-out said the shard-port was empty, I was guessing that was the culprit and managed to hide from her diagnostics like many malevolent pieces of software could, "This shard, I think."
  
  "Oh, thank god," Jean said, and everyone looked a lot more relaxed except me. It was Corporate Policy that if I encountered a subscriber in distress on my off-time that I was to offer reasonable assistance. I wasn't expected to solo a 'Strom death squad or anything, but I definitely was expected to eject a shard from her head.
  
  I sighed, "Guys, you know how Mrs Okada said I was just as good as a Trauma Team Med Techie?" I got nods from the boys and a confused nod from Kiwi, "Well... she was being cute and literal." There was a slowly gaining look of horror on Kiwi's face, but nothing on the other two except confusion now.
  
  I figured that Kiwi would have already looked me up on similar sites that I looked her up on, but there was a lag on any of those gumshoe sites. In fact, it was part of their way to upsell you on the next available service tier, like you were buying a value meal. The cheapest level on my site was on a lag of months. It was very possible that my employment hadn't been updated yet on her dossier of me if she used a similar site or perhaps the same one.
  
  "My day job is as a med techie for Trauma Team," I tell them, finally spelling it out.
  
  "Ohhh.. shit... well, what does this mean?" asked Ruslan while Jean just got wide-eyed.
  
  I shrugged, "Nothing. There isn't anything against company policy moonlighting like this, so long as I don't use company property or reputation to do so." I paused, "However, I am expected to provide 'reasonable assistance' to subscribers in distress if I happen to come across them."
  
  "Oh, I gotcha. So what's your plan, then?" Jean asked.
  
  I slung my SMG across my back and picked up the lady in my arms easily, "I'll just walk a block away, pull the shard and call her in. One of our teams will show up, and I'll hand her off and come back here, and we can finish up and make like a tree."
  
  Kiwi groaned, "Make like a tree... god, Madison, that is awful; I don't think anyone's used that one in a hundred years. I had to net-search it just to understand what you were talking about."
  
  "Alright, try to make it quick, though," Ruslan said as I nodded and walked out the door.
  
  As the door was closing, I heard Ruslan asking Kiwi what I had meant by my tree quip, and her replying, "Make like a tree and leave."
  
  That caused both the men to groan and me to frown. It wasn't that bad, was it?
  
  I made a vid call to my immediate boss, which was Dr Anno, and he picked up, "Hey, what's up Taylor?"
  
  "Not a whole lot..." I lied, "... except one thing led to another, and I may have stopped a couple of dumb Scavs after they kidnapped this woman. She's a suit, and they mentioned using something called a scrambler on her. I checked her OS, and she's a subscriber, Gold, and has some kind of virus preventing her system from sending out the distress signal."
  
  There was silence for a moment before he came back, amused, "One thing led to another? What the fuck do you do for fun on your days off? I take it you have the lady. What's her status? I'm working an extra shift on Alpha today. I'm triggering a Gold alert internally now, we'll respond. Give me her deets, too."
  
  I kept walking and glanced around and nodded, heading towards a basketball court that had a few youths playing ball. Not really a game; just taking random shots. "Nothing really; I usually read a couple of books, maybe have a hot bath, you know. Normal girl stuff. And she has a concussion and a very minor brain bleed, but according to her biomonitor, it has already stopped. I bet they coshed her in the head. There's a pretty hot virus on her OS, my systems stopped it, but I have a pretty sophisticated set of countermeasures. It went straight through a standard firewall. She is Eleanor McKiney, NC18291866."
  
  "Interesting to all. Especially this virus, do you think that is what hijacked her biom? It must be pretty new if it didn't set off the heuristics on a firewall, although who knows with a store-bought model. Corporate will be pretty interested; we have had a number of clients just disappear lately. Are the Scavs able to be questioned?"
  
  "Uh... not unless you're a necromancer," I said embarrassedly. "And yes, I think so. They slotted a shard in her data port; I'm going to pull it now and see if that gets her transmitting again. I'll put the shard in her pocket, in any case, and you can give it to the Intel boys."
  
  Four boys stopped playing to glance at me as I showed up; the youngest one said, "Woah, chica! Did you flatline that suit?!"
  
  I shifted Eleanor's body to reach around so I could push the ejection button next to her data shard, yanking it free. I didn't really know if that worked, though, since I wasn't connected to her anymore. I tried my best to glare at the boys and said, "No, I did not! And you boys better 'delta'. Trauma's coming."
  
  One of the other boys, the oldest, scoffed, "She talks like a suit herself! Suit-on-suit violence! Oh, the humanity!" What a little shit! He was Hispanic and built like a brick shithouse. If you didn't look at his face could easily pass for nineteen or older, but I figured he was younger than me.
  
  "We got her transmitting now; we're already pulling off the pad. You're pretty close, in Haywood, so expect us in ninety or less," came back Anno.
  
  "Roger, and shut up, you little shits!" I stupidly tried talking to both Dr Anno and the boys at the same time.
  
  "Uh, pardon?" Anno replied, causing me to blush furiously.
  
  "Not you, sir. There's a number of street boys at the LZ," I replied, which caused all four of the street boys to start laughing at me.
  
  Dr Anno chuckled himself and affected the exaggerated accent of a 1920s prohibition mobster. We had been watching old gangster movies the other day, "You wants me to ventilate 'em, boss?! They'll be sleeping with the fishes."
  
  "No, I don't think that will be necessary. I'll just make them an offer they can't refuse," I said formally.
  
  "Oh, shit. I think she flatlined all the Scavs at that den," the youngest-looking boy said, "Maybe she's a merc, and we shouldn't fuck with her." Well, what a smart kid.
  
  I sighed, muted the call and said, "If you guys leave now, you can pick through what we leave behind in a couple of hours. Just leave the medical equipment alone. But I've seen your faces, now, and if anyone but more witless Scavs show up... I will know who sold us out, Mr Welles." I said, using the real identity of the oldest of the boys I had gotten from NCPD searches of their faces, staring him right in the eyes.
  
  The oldest boy was already in the system, with a couple of small crimes, as well as a notation that he was a suspected member of the Valentinos. Not bad for probably a fifteen or sixteen-year-old, I supposed. But he'd have to try harder if he wanted to beat the precociousness of this sixteen-year-old.
  
  "Was that a threat?" he asked, surprisingly calm and looking rather dangerous suddenly.
  
  I blinked at him, actually slightly intimidated, even knowing that I could probably easily take him and his friends if I just sat the lady down. I grinned as best as I could. "Just a reminder of basic physics. Isaac Newton, you know? For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
  
  That caused him to grin and rub his neck, "Aw, shit. I never did too well in school, lady. But sure, but you better make sure there are a few things worth it for us in there." That switch from dangerous to folksy was pretty cool, I had to admit. And he didn't have to worry about that. Even if we looted everything, we didn't have enough room in their van to load everything . There would be a number of guns and other things that would be worth looting that we would just not take. And I wouldn't drive their Supron if my life depended on it. The tiny MaiMai was safer. Sure, you would get crushed like a can in an accident, but the Supron tended to spontaneously combust for no reason at all and was made out of semi-flammable recycled hydrocarbon-derived products. And the engine was made partially out of cheap magnesium, so it went up like thermite or white phosphorous.
  
  "Sure, plus there's a Supron FS3 in the parking lot. I'll leave the key shard in the driver's seat, just for you. But it used to belong to some Scavs, just so you know," I told him as Alpha's AV-4 swooped in from the sky in a cacophony of noise.
  
  One of the quiet ones up till now yelled, "Shit, she wasn't fucking around. That's Trauma! Let's jet, Jackie!" And with that, the four of them ran off. I shoved the shard that was still in my hands into one of the lady's pockets, and she was already starting to stir into semi-lucidity in my arms. I wondered if there was anything on that shard to keep her unconscious, too?
  
  As the AV sat down, the team hopped out, and I waved awkwardly, one-handed. Then, one of the security guys yelled, "Yo, 'breaker!" I didn't recognise his voice, but I had gotten pretty popular with the security guys after saving Bandbox.
  
  I sighed. Well, at least the shortening of the nickname was better than it all together. Heartbreaker was a weird villain; he was reasonably well known in Canada and the northern part of the United States, like where I had lived, but I almost thought the PRT downplayed him since he more or less kept to himself. There wasn't much they could do to stop him without endangering many innocent people.
  
  After living in Night City for a while, I got the feeling that they probably did that for threats they had no good way to deal with. It still didn't explain why they tolerated the Slaughterhouse Nine, though.
  
  "You want to set up the gurney, or should I just set her inside?" I asked them, and Dr Anno said, "May as well just set her in. I forget that you've got strength mods."
  
  I nodded and sat the woman on the biobed inside the AV-4 and then said, "Alright, I know you're on the clock..." response time and time to the hospital was one of the primary KPIs for a team, "... so I'll see you in a couple of days."
  
  One of the security guys saluted me with his carbine, and they all jumped back into the AV before lifting off and darting off to the north. I unslung my submachine gun and jogged back to the Scav den. Although probably things wouldn't happen, it was true that I had brought attention to this area and possibly compromised the operation by calling my compatriots to rescue Ms McKinney, so I would work fast, triage any interesting cyberware left and yank it all out.
  
  I told the shits we'd leave in two hours, but since one of them was a suspected Valentino, I planned to be done in less than one.
  
  Wakako asked the leader of a small-time team who she had asked to evaluate the Hebert girl. The job was real, and the girl's competencies aligned well with the particulars. Still, she didn't get to be this old in this industry by not being a belt and suspender's sort of woman. "So, any complaints?"
  
  "Not really. She did save two Scav donors on-premises, which theoretically cut into our profit margins as she put their implants back in, and then we had to drive them to the hospital after we were done, but..." he shrugged and said, "Honestly, it felt kind of good to feel totally good about a job, for once. We didn't miss out on too much money anyway, and she made the job simple and easy, too."
  
  Wakako raised an eyebrow and asked, "Put their implants back in?"
  
  "Yeah, she said it was no big deal, as they came out of them in the first place, right?" he said and shrugged.
  
  Wakako was silent for a moment. She was almost certain that wasn't how it worked. She made a note of that. "How did she assist with the actual gig? I was under the impression she wasn't to be involved in the actual combat."
  
  "She wasn't, not really, although she was watching the back door and did shoot one Scav and bashed the other over the head when they were running out the back door. But she gave us this anaesthetic gas grenade and said it was expiring soon anyway, so it might as well be used. Kiwi tossed it in the ventilation system, and almost everyone was falling unconscious by the time we kicked the door in," he said and gave a thumbs up. "Easy money!"
  
  Wakako hummed in thought. There was no telling the number of things that she might have received from her father, so that wasn't really unusual. She was more concerned about anything left behind by her mother.
  
  She shrugged and made a couple of mental notes and then dismissed the man, "Alright. Thank you for coming in. I may pair her with your team if there are suitable gigs in the future."
  
  With everything we had looted, we had easily cleared over fifteen thousand Eurodollars for a single evening's work. I ended up buying a number of things from the pot, so I only got about ten thousand, but that was still more than I made in six weeks at my day job. It was clear why people did this sort of thing.
  
  I sighed as I thought about spending over half of the money I did collect on various specialised equipment and tools purchased from over a half dozen companies directly on the net. I had already built a number of beakers, round-bottom flasks and distillation setups in a Tinker fugue a while ago, but this was additional computer analysis equipment and automation equipment used in chemistry. I was probably putting my name on some kind of list by buying it all, but none of it was really too out there.
  
  Right now, though, I was waking up from another fugue as I had an idea for a special bioactive compound, which it looked like I built and incorporated into an implant that I installed on my fingers while I was out.
  
  I could tell my fingernails weren't normal, as they were just slightly longer, much thicker, made of some kind of metal and painted pink, a bright colour that I hated, especially because this shade of pink was Emma's favourite colour.
  
  I frowned and tried to recall what exactly I had built. I hope I hadn't peeled off my fingernails to build home-grown scratchers. I didn't like those types of implants; they were really quite dangerous and hazardous to be around.
  
  I carefully tested the sharpness of the fingers on a few things and sighed in relief when no matter how I slid them across test surfaces, they didn't cut anything to ribbons. Scratchers were made from specially produced glassy-metallic compounds, sharper than razors but only in one specific direction. You generally had to slide them sideways to cut with them.
  
  Still, they were quite sturdy. I took a medical sonic imager from my bench and used them to get an internal image of my fingers, finding the nails were carefully fused to the distal phalanges. That was interesting. They were made of some kind of metal, too, and although they weren't designed to be sharp, I could clearly scratch someone very easily, I supposed.
  
  Kind of an odd thing to do to myself in a fugue, though, when I was thinking about a bioactive compound that would respond to haemoglobin. Then I turned my hand around, peered at the underside of the nails, and was enlightened.
  
  I had been thinking about a compound that would react with haemoglobin to produce a synthetic analogue of succinylcholine. That was a paralytic that was often used in emergency medicine as a prelude to intubating someone. However, originally, it was derived from curare which had been used for hundreds of years to treat the darts of indigenous South American tribesmen for hunting and for warfare.
  
  I had thought to use it for the same reason, as a coating for a dart or perhaps a knife. Since the compound I was thinking of would create the chemical on exposure to haemoglobin, it was not only reasonably safe and inert until blood touched it but long-lasting.
  
  It was also one of the chemicals that would be neutralised by my artificial liver. Not because the liver would filter it out, because it would paralyse me far too quickly to be metabolised, but because it would release a counteracting agent, which would prevent the effect on my central nervous system from propagating. The liver contained a limited amount of compounds like this; for example, it also contained naloxone in the event I was ever the victim of an enormous opiate overdose.
  
  That was good; otherwise, I might have accidentally paralysed myself if I scratched a damn itch too vigorously. As it stood, I might still need to remove them if I ever got a boyfriend and made it past second base. I mean... some of the romance books I had read indicated that sometimes the girl might scratch the boy's back... you know... in her... fervour. It would really kill the romance if I found someone I liked and then accidentally paralysed him, including their diaphragm, in flagrante delicto .
  
  The chemical produced by these small bioactive pads would tend to stop even the muscles a person used to breathe at high doses, so they would require rather prompt medical assistance or a counter agent, which I figured I would start carrying in a small EpiPen-like dispenser. That would be so embarrassing .
  
  Oh, who was I kidding? It wasn't like I would likely find anyone that wanted to date me any time soon anyway. Or ever.
  
  Why were they pink, though? I sighed but then noticed a new application on my system and discovered that I had actually used SmartPaint in their construction, and I could change them to whatever colour I wanted, just like my monowire had.
  
  I frowned. I didn't really like the idea of nail polish in the first place, but transparent really wasn't an option. Finally, I decided on a dark red colour.
  
  Things had been going pretty well since that day a few weeks ago. Trauma Team's intelligence department did have a couple of questions for me, but they made it clear that they didn't really care what I was doing in my off time. I told them the truth, although I didn't tell them any of the identities of either the Fixer or the Ruslan's group. I just told them that somebody hired me to go in after they cleared it out to remove any valuable implants from the dead Scavs and that two more had arrived while I was working, hauling our client with them.
  
  Apparently, the virus on the data shard wasn't one they had seen before. I wasn't that surprised; such things were always a game of cat and mouse.
  
  In any event, the Intel people thanked me and left and suggested I pick up extra shifts on the Debt Reclamation Team. That I wasn't interested in. It was one thing to take implants out of dead Scavs and criminals, but I wasn't about to steal someone's arm just because they couldn't afford the payments on our services after we saved their life.
  
  Still, the kudos for saving a client while I was off work did come with half a day of paid time off, although I had to schedule it sixty days in advance. I figured I'd save it for after I accumulated a day and a half of vacation time and then take them all together so I'd have over a week off in one long period of days off.
  
  Suddenly, there was a squawk and banging from my apartment. I blinked, and stood up and ran into my private area to see Mr Pegpig facing off against a small raptor inside my apartment. His wife was cowering in the corner next to my refrigerator. I had left the window open so he could come and go as he pleased. A small falcon? Maybe a kite? I wasn't a bird watcher, but it was still well over twice his size either way!
  
  I went to intercede, this predator would eat poor Mr Pegpig in two bites, but the plucky pigeon leapt at the big obligate carnivore, wings flapping and tackled it in a squawk. The raptor's birdy-little face showed astonishment before it leapt up and flew out of my open window. It even glanced back at us, mid-glide, and I could have sworn I saw it shaking its little birdy head.
  
  Mr Pegpig hopped up to the counter with a raptor's feather in his beak and seemed to move his wings as if he was dusting the dirt off his shoulder.
  
  Was he always this buff? I grabbed him at super speed, causing him to drop his battle trophy and squawk in dismay.
  
  "Oh, shush," I told him and carried him off to the front, where all of my tools and equipment were. Maybe I should cut back on the diet of programmed nanomeds for the pigeons? At the very least, I needed to check him over to make sure he wasn't going to die or something.
  
  A half-hour later, I released the bird and discovered a few things. Firstly, it was a female. You would have thought I would have already known that by now, but honestly, you didn't really need to look under a bird's skirt to design and install a primitive prosthesis for its little leg. The second thing I learned was Mrs Pegpig was quite healthy.
  
  I grabbed her husband, which I thought was her wife, and did a similar exam on him. I refused to call this one Mr Pegpig, though, so I was now just calling him Consort.
  
  One thing Wakako Okada told me that was one hundred per cent true. I wouldn't be able to reach my goals of self-funding my trip through medical school through solely my paycheck at Trauma Team alone.
  
  With all of the chemistry equipment I had been buying and making lately, though, I could push forward with my plan to sell my intellectual property to a biotech firm. I could probably use Mrs Okada to approach them, and they would just assume I had stolen the research data from one of their competitors.
  
  Having a good working arrangement with a team of edgerunners would help that as well, as I'd definitely need protection even if Mrs Okada could arrange a sale.
  
  Very dangerous, in a lot of ways, but I still thought the risk was lesser than doing one hundred jobs like the Scav den job.
  
  Sometimes I wondered why I was going through such hoops, as I didn't really expect to learn much in four years of medical school and one or two of residency. Perhaps it was pride; I wanted the name Hebert to mean something if someone heard it.
  
  I knew I could change the world, and hopefully, it would be for the better.
  
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  The anger of a gentle man
  I flat-out ran, panting a bit as I zig-zagged through alleys and attempted to out-run the group of four men who were, undoubtedly, going to kill me forthwith. Glancing down at the gunshot wound in my abdomen, I grimaced and kept applying pressure on it with one hand.
  
  The wound was life-threatening, but not immediately so. What was more immediately dangerous were the assailants, which was proven out by another quick burst of bullets firing and missing me to the left, pinging off a heavy-duty steel dumpster as I ducked out of reflex.
  
  The men chasing me were a bit faster than me, and they were better at street parkour than I was, and I wasn't going to get away, but thankfully I didn't need to. I just needed to make it two more blocks.
  
  "Don't run, bitch!" one of them yelled from behind me, which caused me to scrunch my face up in displeasure. I suppose it was kind of silly to criticise someone's word choices as they were attempting to murder me, but it seemed very unoriginal. I mean, I had been running for some time now, too.
  
  Turning a corner, I put on the rest of the speed I had left and ran straight for a stereotypical kid's tree house. The dichotomy of the surroundings was stark; up until now, I had been running through a downtown area, but now it had shifted to a suburban one, almost with no warning.
  
  As I started climbing the treehouse, luckily in cover by the trunk of the tree, I found what I was looking for. Nodding, I pointed one-handed at the approaching nar-do-wells. I commanded, mentally, ' Attack!' Instantly, a massive swarm of wasps emerged from a large hive on the side of the nearby house and quickly began swarming over and stinging the men chasing me, causing them to cry out in shock and allowing me to get into the main level of the treehouse without further being molested, or shot.
  
  Taking stock of myself once in the treehouse, I frowned at my injury. I didn't really have much equipment with me, but I did have a pocket knife, though, so I cut some cloth around my midriff, turning my shirt into a halter-top to try to get some material to form a bandage. The wound was a through-and-through, and if I could stop it from bleeding, I could reach a hospital to get treated.
  
  [You have killed LVL5 Minion]
  
  [You have killed LVL6 Minion]
  
  [You have killed LVL5 Minion]
  
  Blinking, I glanced outside the tree house. I thought the wasps would have killed all of them, actually. Right as I was wondering where the last guy went, he suddenly made his presence known directly underneath the treehouse, still being swarmed by wasps. He threw something in a low, overhand parabola, causing it to bounce inside the tree house.
  
  [You have killed LVL10 Mastermind]
  
  However, then I identified the object he tossed inside. A fragmentation grenade. Fuck! There was a flash of light and loud noise.
  
  [You have been killed!]
  
  Growling, I found myself in a waiting area, where I would have to sit in time out before being respawned. At least the grenade killed me more or less instantly. I wasn't using a premium subscription package that would allow me to turn down the amount of pain my avatar experienced past a certain level, so, for example, getting shot earlier hurt quite a lot.
  
  I also wondered how that ass managed to acquire explosives so early in the game. He didn't even really have a superpower yet; I didn't think. In World of Heroes, you could put off unlocking your superpower until you reached certain levels in exchange for better starting equipment. In this case, he likely got those three minion NPCs. As for those automatic weapons and grenades? He probably got them from his clan or guild, I guessed.
  
  I hadn't joined the Trauma Team guild yet, mainly because I was interested to see what I could do alone. The superpower the game had chosen for me after playing through the tutorial would be what I would call a Master power, but the game classified me as a Controller.
  
  I could control and direct any animals that were smaller than, say, a mouse. Unlike Ladybug's power, I wasn't limited to arthropods only, but realistically I was, as there weren't very many small animals that would be useful to me. Eventually, if my power got... well... more powerful, I would likely end up being able to summon insects regardless of where I was.
  
  It was... a pretty good power, as could be determined from my killing of four heavily armed men with it. There was a heads-up display component that would tell me where things like insect hives were located, so I would always know where I could go for "resources." From what I knew about how the famous Ward's power worked, though, my version of the game was much inferior. Ladybug could give individual commands to millions of different insects, whereas I could give a number of predefined commands like Attack, Move, Defend, et cetera to a swarm as if it was a single entity. As my power levelled up, I would get more commands and could create subsets of my total swarm to issue those commands to, but right now, it was pretty much all or nothing.
  
  There wasn't a lot one could do to compare a superpower in a video game with a real-life superpower, though. There was only so much the game could do to simulate it.
  
  I was a little disappointed, actually. Typically, people with Kerenzikov implants usually got speedster-related powers, and I was actually looking forward to that. There wasn't anything the game could do to slow my perception of time, but they could prevent me from moving and running faster than they thought a regular person should. As such, Controller-based powers like mine were another commonly given superpower, as I did have a lot of time, comparatively, to issue commands and orders.
  
  As I was about to respawn, I suddenly found myself back in the AV-4 with a klaxon sounding and a computer voice saying intently, "PLATINUM. SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE."
  
  Well, never mind. I guess I had to get to work. I was pretty familiar with all the user interfaces we used by now, and I had even been off third rider status for several weeks. It looked like we were responding to a trauma, which wasn't surprising. Most platinum calls were trauma-related. Generally speaking, if you had enough money for platinum-related coverage, you also had enough money for regular doctor's visits, including any recommended prophylactic procedures, so you never randomly got seriously ill.
  
  A person could easily live to be over a hundred and fifty years old in this world, and honestly, I didn't know if there was really an upper limit on the age a geriatric patient could reach if no expense was spared. Saburo Arasaka was born before the First Atomic War, and he was still going strong, for example.
  
  Mr Bandbox had finally recovered sufficiently to resume duties, although he had a brand new pair of cybernetic arms. Quite good models, I thought, and definitely combat-rated. The Corp wouldn't let him carry around the giant hand cannon I scavenged for him on company time, but he was very appreciative of having it, anyway. Honestly, I thought that maybe they were making a mistake there. There was a lot to be said for giant cannons, but the Corp had a real hard-on for SmartWeapons. Even the pistol I carried was a Kang Tao SmartPistol; I just lacked the interface cyberware to actually utilise it to its fullest extent.
  
  He joined the clinician's tacnet briefly to give us an idea of what we were going up against. Unfortunately, it looked like it was Maelstrom, which wasn't great. They were one of the highest threat values we faced in Night City - not only were they ridiculously dangerous, but they were actually very technically sophisticated. I supposed you had to be somewhat sophisticated if most of your members were more metal than flesh.
  
  From the statistics I had looked through for the whole of Night City, I discovered that about half the time, we would get the client without Maelstrom doing anything, but the other times they generally fought at least a little bit. I didn't know why they made these choices, though.
  
  The patient looked like he had been beaten up, quite a lot from the internal biomonitor's report. He was unconscious, with a concussion and likely a ruptured spleen. It wasn't a big deal, so long as we could medevac him pretty soon. But an issue was the location; it was the famous Maelstrom club Totentanz. It was unknown whether our client was a customer or some victim of one of the booster gangs dragged to the club.
  
  "Going to Totentanz with just one team is fucked," Bandbox said over the common net, which I tended to agree with.
  
  Mr Mercy sighed and said, "Another bird is coming along, or rather being scrambled, to help support us. Hopefully, it will be nothing, you know?" That still meant we were responding alone, though, at least at first.
  
  That wasn't surprising when the pilots threw the aircraft off its perch and into a steep dive down towards the city. Maybe if this was a Gold client, we would wait, but there was no way the bosses would OK adding a delay to a Platinum call. That would increase the average response time this quarter, and that was the main selling point of our service.
  
  Honestly, it was kind of stupid but entirely predictable. Almost universally, middle management in corporations wasn't the brightest of people. I thought that maybe that was intentional, but I didn't really know for sure.
  
  "Weapons check. Client location is inside the club, but close to the entrance, so that is good, at least," Mr Mercy came on the net. I pulled out my pistol and did a quick function check on it before replacing it in the holster. I did a quick test of the electronic taser-type weapon we also carried, too. In a large crowd-type situation, it was standard procedure to zap anyone who came too near us, after all. I wasn't sure that was going to be a great idea in a booster gang club, but we would see.
  
  The AV-4 barely spent more than thirty seconds on the ground. After we all hopped out, it lifted slowly into the air and loitered outside of easy gunshot range, doing lazy circles over the area. I guessed that the pilots felt that the aircraft wasn't safe to wait for us on the street in front of such a place.
  
  "What the fuck do you think you're doing-UGHGHGHH..." A stupid-looking boostergang member, not even one of the 'Strom, approached us from my side and started yelling at us. I was always of the opinion that it was better to be scary than it was to be scared, so I casually pulled out the taser weapon and discharged it point-blank into the chest of this loud person, which caused him to shake and then slump to the ground.
  
  "Nice, 'Breaker..." Mercy said, amusedly, over the tacnet. The crowd of people around us immediately thinned quite a bit, but I was glancing down at the man I shocked. I thought I might have accidentally stopped his heart or rather knocked him into a dangerous arrhythmia where a cardiac arrest was likely going to occur. However, we definitely weren't about to stop and treat that guy. I think the label "non-lethal" on these shock weapons we were issued was a bit of an optimistic intent rather than any kind of statement or guarantee.
  
  As we started moving, I carefully aimed the toe of my boot and struck the guy's sternum somewhat hard. That caused him to gasp and start breathing again, which caused me to smile beneath my helmet. Although it looked like I had just kicked a man while he was down, in actuality, I had performed a carefully calibrated precordial thump, which was an ancient medical procedure and would sometimes snap a person out of a dangerous arrhythmia in a way that was similar to using a defibrillator, if much less reliable.
  
  After that, I carefully dialled back the electronic weapon to about medium and replaced it in the holster on the opposite side of my pistol. We were met by one of the 'Stromers, a woman with the tell-tale glowing red optical replacement, who was standing over our client inside the club, not too far away from a dance floor that looked more like an unorganised floor of violence. It looked like our client was attacked by two other guys armed with baseball bats, one of which our client turned into sashimi with a pair of mantis blades.
  
  The woman Stromer says, her voice digitally post-processed, "You can take him just as soon as you provide an equal amount of entertainment..."
  
  "No, we will just be taking him..." Mercy said, and he and Bandbox lifted up their small carbines.
  
  That caused the Strom woman to snort, "Well, that would definitely be entertaining..." However, while Dr Anno started to kneel down to look at the patient, something made me glance over to the mosh pit just in time to see one of the revellers pull the pin on a grenade and start to throw it in a high arc towards us.
  
  I zoomed in on it instantly. It didn't look like a fragmentation grenade which made me feel better; it had the cylindrical look of a smoke grenade, a flashbang or possibly a concussion grenade. I figured it was the latter, so, moving at my maximum speed, I grabbed the baseball bat off the floor and repositioned myself. I had time to do one practice swing before I set myself up and teed off the grenade, knocking it back towards where it came from.
  
  Thinking it was a concussion grenade, I knocked it high into the air so as to minimise the possible damage to the people dancing. However... I was wrong in my identification of the munition, and behind my featureless mask, my mouth opened in shock as the grenade exploded several metres over the location of the guy who threw it at us.
  
  Rather than a concussion grenade, it was clearly some kind of pyrotechnic device. The filters in my helmet quickly polarised, saving me from a bright flash and white smoke, which rained down on ten or so people who immediately started shrieking in pain and terror, including the guy who threw the grenade at us in the first place. My aim with the bat was good, although I hadn't ever been that great with sports, and the man who threw the grenade originally seemed to be getting the worst of it.
  
  The band playing started a new set immediately and somehow managed to sync the beat with the screams of the people who were on various stages of on fire, and everyone started going crazy like it was the best thing they had seen in their lives. I couldn't understand what the fuck was going on.
  
  This madness caused the Strom woman to laugh, a short snort of a laugh and yell, "Fucking preem, Trauma! Whiskey Pete! I gotta go and turn the ventilation system on overdrive before more people asphyxiate to death! Take your fucking suit!"
  
  I glanced between Mercy and Bandbox, and we all just sort of shrugged. I tossed the baseball bat back on the floor and knelt down, setting up the gurney. I shared a glance with Dr Anno, and we both nodded, just putting the patient on the gurney without actually treating him at all. It would be best to get him out of this place first, then treat him, we both agreed without having to say anything.
  
  I frowned at the result of my chemical experimentations. In order to prevent anyone from deducing the chemical synthesis of the antibiotic, I started about four steps before the actual synthesis, and I was creating precursors to precursors using the most common and available chemicals.
  
  Most chemical precursors you could buy online, and they'd ship them right to your door. You could do this even if you wanted to produce illegal drugs - it was still illegal, but nobody seemed to care. It was only things like Glitter and Black Lace where the police seemed at all interested in stopping it, and those drugs seemed carefully calibrated to be as addictive and harmful as possible, and these highly complicated synthetic drugs were as much as a trade secret as the stimulant I made tic-tacs out of months ago.
  
  My superpower did not help me a lot with chemistry, but it did help a little, so long as I kept in mind that everything I was making was intended for human consumption, eventually. However, the yield on the precursor I was making right now wasn't very good, but there was little I could do about it. I didn't really need to make this an economical process; all I needed was to demonstrate the feasibility of the synthesis. I wasn't even recording these preliminary steps, as I would just record the actual synthesis - I intended to sell this to a Corporation, after all. They didn't need to know how to do the boring steps I had to do to hide what I was doing - they could buy chemical precursors weighted in tons if they wanted to, and nobody would care.
  
  I carefully used a small amount of suction to extract all of the organic layer of the chemical process I had just finished, then shifted beakers and drained the rest into a beaker for disposal. In this process, the aqueous layer was just waste, and I could dispose of it however was convenient.
  
  As I was cleaning the glassware, I got an alert on my OS; it was an e-mail to my work account. I rolled my eyes when I read it. It turned out that the guy who I had shocked had made a complaint of "excessive brutality" to corporate in my interaction with him. The big bad booster ganger was making a complaint; it was kind of ridiculous on its very face.
  
  I was very tempted to spend a few hundred eddies on hiring some kids to place flyers up around his neighbourhood, "apologising" and thanking him for cooperating with the investigation. That would have likely got him killed, as while Trauma Team wasn't exactly like the cops, nobody in boostergangs particularly liked cooperating with any Corp, even Trauma. Except... I couldn't tell where he lived. He didn't look like any of the poser gangs and wasn't an Animal or a member of the Tyger Claws or similar Asian gangs, so he was just a nameless mook that could have lived anywhere. The three minion NPCs that chased me in World of Heroes had more personality than this guy did.
  
  Reading the e-mail sent me giggling, and I sat down for a moment. The complaint wasn't a big deal and would have been ignored, except that I told the person asking me about it that I thought that the guy might have had a pre-existing cardiac problem, as our taser seemed to cause him to enter into an unstable arrhythmia. My kick, therefore, wasn't excessive brutality but a carefully calibrated cardiology treatment!
  
  That was true, too! I was really convinced that he would have likely died if I didn't do anything.
  
  As such, the complaint was closed, and the man was billed for one hour of "cardiology treatment," and it was recommended that he inform his primary care physician so that screening tests could be conducted. I would be very surprised if that man ever had seen a doctor in his life, except perhaps when he was arrested, so that was just adding insult to injury, and I was all for it! Asshole!
  
  Complaints weren't really a thing the Corp cared too much about, but it still annoyed me. The last time I heard about someone actually getting in trouble was when they accidentally dropped a napalm canister on the LZ, killing both the gang members and the client. And even then, it was just treated as a verbal counselling session - the sort of "Tsk, tsk" don't do that again, if you can help it, sort of thing.
  
  My phone rang as I was finishing up, and I was about to ignore it until I saw that it was Mrs Okada calling me. I picked up and said, "Hello?"
  
  "Miss Hebert. I have a gig for you if you're interested. A client wants an escort around Japantown, which concludes with seeing a Ripperdoc. You're paid partially for protection for a couple of hours, but mainly to ensure the client doesn't get ripped off at one of the Jig-jig street doctors," Mrs Okada said, not wasting any time.
  
  I got the rest of the particulars. The pay was only about five hundred Eurodollars, but that was still quite a good amount of money for just a few hours of work, so I agreed to the proposal. I didn't feel in danger anywhere in Japantown these days, although that wasn't to say I wasn't actually in danger, just that the danger level was something I had grown accustomed to.
  
  I spent several minutes getting dressed in my "don't mess with me" outfit and left my apartment. I had agreed to meet the client at the NCART station in my building, and we'd drop down to the street level from there. After he saw his fill of the seedy underbelly of Japantown, I would take him to one of the Ripperdocs that I knew didn't really screw their patients over. I had something of a relationship with a few of them, just from selling them stock that I would refurbish from what Gloria brought to me. She mostly did most of the selling herself these days, though.
  
  I sat around the NCART station and called the number Wakako sent me, getting an answer after a couple of rings. "You the merc? I am on the next train; I should be there in about five minutes."
  
  "That's fine. I'm next to the Buck-A-Slice, right after you leave the terminal," I told the man. He looked and sounded like a suit, so I would reciprocate with some manner of professionalism. In Night City, that basically meant not using slang or profanity in every third word.
  
  I hung around, just eyeing people, for six minutes or so until a man walked in from the terminal. His face matched the deets that Mrs Okada sent me, so I walked over to him, "Mr Smith?" I asked him, almost certain that wasn't his actual name.
  
  That caused him to smirk, and he nodded. I offered to shake his hand, which he looked a little askance at but reciprocated the gesture, and I casually left a sticky-tracker on the sleeve of his jacket, testing it for both position and audio for a moment. They were pretty cheap, only a couple of Eurodollars at most electronic stores, but very few people actually were prepared for them to be used, which I found rather odd. I had an app that would report to me any unknown and periodic radio source that was collocated on my body. Although it was only a side part of my job to protect him, I figured it would be best if he couldn't get away from me.
  
  "So, what is your plan for the day, sir?" I asked him professionally. This caused him to blink and look at me up and down, as if noticing me for the first time.
  
  He coughed, "Well, primarily, I have this piece of cybernetics I need to get installed. I don't want a record of it being installed for various reasons. But I figured I'd combine the trip with sightseeing, maybe see some of the sights or some of the joytoys of Jig-Jig street. Okada recommended you based on your experience as a Med Techie, so I wouldn't get screwed over at one of the rippers here."
  
  I nodded slightly. "Well, the best dolls are actually in this building, at Clouds, but I am taking it as you wanting something a little more... authentic?" I was pretty sure what he wanted was to visit somewhere that was safe, but had the feeling that it might not be safe. An adventure, in other words.
  
  "Precisely! Do you know any places like that?" he asked excitedly.
  
  Internally, I sighed, "Of course. There are a few places not too far away, either." Internally, I had already sent Mr Jin a text message. Apparently, this was a pretty common request, such that Mr Jin wanted to know if I wanted the extra service like a pretend-mugging that I would have to "save" the man from. I declined that upsell but took his recommendation for a couple of places that Mr Smith could divert a couple of hours in sin.
  
  Before reaching the brothel, I took him around a number of sights on Jig-Jig street, but when he asked if there was anything I would recommend as far as food, I just shook my head firmly. There were a number of good sit-down restaurants, actually, but as far as street food went, Jig-Jig street was best to avoid.
  
  I made sure to turn off the audio tap on his sleeve after he selected one of the call girls, as I didn't have any desire to hear any of their tryst, and instead just waited at the bar at the brothel.
  
  "How about you, then?" asked an older man, someone that could easily have been as old as Danny, bringing me out of my reverie as I was sipping my Real Clean Water ™.
  
  I frowned at him and said, "I am not a prostitute, sir." I mean, I was dressed as a merc, and sure there were some places where roleplaying was encouraged, this being one of those locations, but you had to arrange that ahead of time . Certainly, none of the working girls or boys were dressed anything like me, plus I wasn't really very attractive in the first place.
  
  I was concerned that this might turn into a scene, but the man was apologetic and slightly embarrassed, quickly departing with a blushing face. I supposed it was a little embarrassing to assume that someone, even if they were sitting alone at a brothel, was a prostitute. I tried to put myself in his shoes and would have been absolutely mortified, not just slightly embarrassed.
  
  Thankfully, I didn't have to wait too much longer. My client returned, much more tousled, from the depths of the brothel and looking like he quite enjoyed the experience. He found me and said, "That was great! I think I've seen enough, though, if we could head towards the Ripper now."
  
  I nodded and led him outside and down two more blocks before stopping at one of the best Ripperdocs on Jig-Jig street. The clinic accepted walk-ins, as well, and I introduced him to the doctor.
  
  "Would you like me to stick around while he performs the surgery?" I asked him but got quickly dismissed as it turned out the client and the doctor hit it off pretty well, and the client didn't see any real need for me to stay around. He said he'd get a cab back to his place after he was done here.
  
  I didn't even get to find out what implant he was having installed, except that it was inside a briefcase the client had been carrying. Oh well, I suppose it didn't matter.
  
  "Very well, I am marking this gig as concluded. Have a good day," I told him and sent a similar text message to Mrs Okada. Humming to myself, I stepped out of the clinic and turned left down a fairly well-lit street and the quickest way to return back to my apartment.
  
  However, after about ten metres into the small street, I stopped humming and frowned. The street was too quiet. It's too well-lit and too quiet. There should be other people around here. It wasn't a busy street, but it wasn't a totally quiet street either.
  
  An instinct causes me to turn around and pull out my pistol as I see a slight flickering distortion, ' Thermoptic camouflage?!' I tried to bring the pistol around to bare at the ghost that was closing in on me fast, but it was moving as fast as I was, maybe faster and right before I started to squeeze the trigger as I lined up a shot, I took a strong hit to my solar plexus, doubling over. The ghost used this opportunity to quickly and efficiently disarm the pistol out of my hand, causing it to clatter on the ground.
  
  Hand-to-hand fighting is not my strong suit. I had learned how to throw a punch just from being around in the gym in my building on a daily basis, but it seemed like I was being worked over by an artist. I jumped backwards, hoping to create some space while simultaneously triggering my monowire to pop out. Growling, I scythed a loop of the deadly wire at my assailant, moving quicker than most people could see but he, she, it casually dodged out of the way, looking as if they had just taken a casual step back when I knew dodging me like that was a lot harder than that looked.
  
  I darted out with the wire three more times, once causing the invisible person to look like they were actually dodging me, but at least I was keeping them at somewhat of an intermediate distance.
  
  I wasn't one to be stupidly self-confident. I wasn't a shounen protagonist that would allow myself to be beaten down by an enemy just to get stronger. That wasn't how the world worked. I triggered my Trauma Team subscription internally using my operating system and internal biomonitor to call in a rescue alert.
  
  A soft, kind female voice in my head said, "Greetings, Taylor. If you are conscious, please assume-KSSSSSTT." What the fuck? I was being jammed and broad spectrum. Phone and data were out now, too. Trauma had gotten the call and might know where I was, but maybe not precisely. It kind of depended. But what was sure was they weren't getting any more telemetry, and if this ninja motherfucker knocked me out or cut my head off, he, she, or it could drag me off somewhere they couldn't find me.
  
  ' Alright, fuck this,' I thought and turned around and started to run away, directly away from the threat, but skidded to a halt when I saw about a half-dozen armed and armoured men blocking the street. These fucks I could see, at least. Their weapons looked a bit odd until I finally catalogued them all as non or less-lethal weapons. So they were trying to incapacitate me. That didn't really bode well, but these were a lot higher class than Scavs, so at least that wasn't what was waiting for me if they got me.
  
  That made some things easier. It was a lot harder to subdue a person alive when they were able, willing and capable of killing you. I started moving again, at my fastest speed, dodging some sort of net shot out of a rifle-looking object and a taser, lashing out and taking the arm clean off one of the men ahead of me. While using my monowire in a series of dangerous one-handed whipping attacks, I grabbed the anaesthetic grenade off my hip and awkwardly pulled the pin and tossed it directly in front of me, clouds of smoke-like gas billowing out of it shortly thereafter as I stood directly in the centre of the expanding gas cloud.
  
  The gas was opaque and a sort of maroon colour and was hiding my presence; although I felt it somewhat start to affect me, I didn't move out of its radius. This was specifically designed to be less effective on my own biology, and it would take at least two minutes of constant exposure to actually incapacitate me, while I could see, barely, all the men surrounding me start to drop after no more than ten seconds.
  
  I reeled back my monowire into my arm and decided my best bet was just to run straight out, past the group of downed mooks. The ninja behind me, hopefully, was prevented from entering the gas cloud, but I honestly didn't know what kind of load-out Mr Invisible had. Maybe he had a full respirator. It was standard equipment on most corporate extraction teams. Was that what this was? I couldn't see how it could be; I had been keeping a very low profile.
  
  I started running straight out, but no more than a second after I cleared the cloud, something slammed on me from above, knocking me down and skidding me face-down on the street for a half metre. I caught a glimpse of the fucking ninja on my back, visible now like he was fucking Super Mario, and I was a Koopa Troopa before he casually touched the back of my head, discharging some sort of electricity attack directly into my skull.
  
  After that, there was just blackness.
  
  I woke up in a comfortable chair, although the aches and soreness told me I wasn't actually unconscious that long. I had a bit of a headache, which wasn't surprising, and I immediately checked any kind of connectivity but couldn't get anything. Surely they couldn't still be running a broad-spectrum jammer in the middle of Night City? That would get noticed.
  
  However, when my eyes started working better after going through a safe-mode reboot cycle, I realised I was sitting in a chair in the middle of a fairly clean-looking room, inside a cage. A cage constructed of wire mesh. A faraday cage, then. The cage was surrounded by the now-awake group of men in armour and weapons, although one of them was sans an arm and looking surly about it. This was, at least, a professional enough organisation that injured mooks received prompt first aid, at least.
  
  Directly in front of me, sitting in a plain metal chair, was that fucking ninja. He wasn't wearing a helmet now, and looked average and personable, a middle-aged blonde man. I wanted to decapitate him. He must have realised what I thought because a British voice calmly said, "I would advise against that, Miss Hebert." I didn't have one of those bracelets on my arm to stop me from yanking out my monowire, but he was very close to me, and honestly, I thought my chances were nil, so I just sighed and stopped myself. Even if I intended to attack, it was better to wait until chance gave me a better opportunity instead of doing it when he was ready and waiting for it.
  
  Who the hell has British accents these days, anyway? I growled, "Who are you, and what do you want?" Although I wasn't really in the best position to make demands, it wasn't really in me to accept my captivity without being a bitch about it.
  
  "Just for you to answer a few questions. You notice that I am being quite civil with you; that is because either you will be dead soon or not, and there is no reason to be uncouth about these matters. Do you know what this machine is?" the excessively polite ninja asked, indicating a table with a briefcase. It was one of those metal-style industrial briefcases, the kind you expect the President's nuclear button to be carried in. It was open to reveal a complicated-looking electronic device.
  
  I frowned at it and then identified it with a little bit of dread. "A trainable brain image scanner." In the popular vernacular, they were just called mind readers, but it wasn't actually how they worked. Still... they were not too far off, either and were the standard in very high-end interrogation technology, although it generally would take quite some time to get a baseline neural map for someone - after you did, you could run word associations against them. You didn't even need them to answer your questions verbally.
  
  The devices were originally invented decades and decades ago, before the first neural interfaces, to give people that were paralysed an effective interface to computers, but these days they were only used for this niche application of separating people from their secrets.
  
  Supposedly, some high-end espionage cyberware could defeat these devices, but it wasn't like I fucking had any of that.
  
  "Yes, precisely," he said as he pulled out a cap that was covered in electrodes from the device and casually extended it and his hand, offering it to me. "If you don't mind, Miss Hebert."
  
  His hand was quite close to me now. This was what was called a chance. After installing my after-market fingernails, I had to make a number of changes to them. I had to install a mechanism that hid the bioactive pads inside my fingernail, covered by a little sliding door that I could trigger in my operating system. Otherwise, I would tend to paralyse about half the patients I saw at work.
  
  Regular nitrile gloves may as well have been tissue paper. The nails weren't sharp, but they were still made out of metal and would go straight through such gloves. Then if I had to touch a patient or control their bleeding, I would paralyse them. That wouldn't be good; I probably would get in trouble for that.
  
  Now though? I triggered the mechanism, which exposed the bioactive pads and reached out to take the cap from his hand, and at the same time, jabbed one of my nails directly into his exposed palm, getting a startled look from him... and that was it.
  
  "Was that... cyanide or something?" he asked, casually, after a moment of nothing happening.
  
  I frowned at him, glancing between his hand and face and using all the clues to realise that the man in front of me was borged more than a half-dozen Maelstrom gangers. In fact, I was pretty sure I was staring at a Gemini full-body replacement now, based on how it felt pushing my nail through the top layer of skin on his palm and the carefully generic and symmetrical facial features. Switching my modified Kiroshi's through a number of scan modes made me much more confident. Infrared was wrong for a person, and now that I had noticed it, the way he breathed wasn't one hundred per cent congruent with human biology; it was just a gesture that he was doing, I thought.
  
  Sighing, I said, "A paralytic." There were times when you didn't have much more you could do, although it grated on me something fierce. It made me wish I had one of those giant cannons in my arms or something I could escalate to from what I actually had, something that would be a danger to this guy or similar guys if I met them in the future. The man had more or less threatened to kill me, and although I was still trying one more avenue of escape, it was one that required a fair bit more time to implement, if it would work at all.
  
  I coughed and said, "I guess I'll just put this on then." That caused Mr Ninja to nod genially at me. I placed the cap on my head, moving my hair out of the way in places so that the electrodes could actually have contact with my scalp. I didn't want them to just shave my head like a sheep because then things would have become personal, and I would have to kill them all. As it stood, there was still a chance that that wouldn't be necessary.
  
  "Alright, turn on the jammer while we open the door. Wouldn't want the princess here to get a transmission out. Trauma Team was looking for her for ten minutes before they left," one of the men outside the cage said, and the ninja man nodded. I did notice a jammer start-up, and it was collocated on the ninja's body, probably an implant of some sort, while the cage door opened, and one of the other men walked inside, dragging a similar metal chair which he sat next to the metal briefcase.
  
  The ninja glanced at the new man and asked, "Status?"
  
  "Connection is okay, but the neural map is marginal. We'll have to run a few known-unknown-known associations to firm it up," the second man, clearly a techie of some sort, replied. Wait. Who the fuck had a neural map of me? Nobody, not even Militech, as far as I could had a neural map of Alt-Taylor, to say nothing of her.
  
  Maybe this was a neural map of Alt-Taylor? If so, it would explain why the match was marginal. But when was it taken, and by whom? I didn't have any memories of taking any machine-monitored neural, psychological profile test.
  
  "Marginal, hn?" Asked the British ninja rhetorically, I assume, since the techie didn't reply. He then nodded and said, "Proceed, then."
  
  The techie nodded and tapped a few keys on the machine in the briefcase, carefully turning the device on the table so the screen was concealed from my gaze. Finally he nodded and said, "Alright, association generated." He then looked at me and said a series of words, "Taylor. Daniel. Annette. Orange. Feline. Queen Victoria." Only the first three seemed to have anything to do with me, but he must have said words for about ten minutes, before he finished, "Alright, we're good to go now."
  
  "Thank you," the polite ninja thanked the techie, before turning to me., "Who is your father? Who is your mother?" Those were weird questions.
  
  "Are you Taylor Hebert?" He continued.
  
  However, he was interrupted by the techie, "Ambiguous, complex response, rephrase."
  
  "Was your name at your birth Taylor Hebert?" The ninja asked, which caused the techie to nod slowly.
  
  He then proceeded to ask me a long series of questions about my life, which wasn't what I was expecting at all. After that, he started doing word associations, and while he was doing them, glancing from the screen on the machine to my face, I had finished with my plan, "Family. Mother. Relations. Chelsea. Westminster. Secret. Replacement. Taylor. Covert. Genuine. Taylor. Fake. Biosculpt. Bay. The Bay. Ocean. Monster. Monsters. Ocean. Ferries. Ocean. Graveyard. Dock. Dockworkers."
  
  I didn't like the direction these word associations were going, and it was a good thing that I had begun carefully tossing behind me the small reprogramming tracking devices. They were very small. Small enough to fit through the grill on the faraday cage if I was lucky, and I had been tossing about a dozen for the past two dozen words. They were programmed to, as soon as they got a connection to the net, spam an internal Trauma Team net address with my name and location using an onboard GPS system. It had taken me so long to reprogram them, flash them over the air, and do as much testing as I could do without it being obvious what I was doing. I didn't know if they would work, but I thought it might be a good idea.
  
  "Medicine. Cybernetics. Virus. Virology. Flu virus. Mouse virus. Genetics. Wealth factor. Self-improvement Pharmacology. Tuition. Intellectual property. Genius," he continued, glancing between the screen and my face, "Goals. Annette. Daniel. Astor. Mother. Father..."
  
  As he was going through a number of words, someone from outside yelled, "Trauma Team is on the way! Their AV is landing on the roof right fucking now! I thought the transmitter couldn't make it through this fucking cage!"
  
  The polite British ninja blinked once and then said, "Alright. We're done here, then. Please secure that device, and follow me. Evacuate downstairs, everyone."
  
  The techie quickly closed the briefcase and stood up as I tensed all of my muscles, ready to fight for my life for at least a few seconds, deciding to risk it and popping my monowire out of my wrist and getting a firm, " Stop," from the ninja-borg, who was pointing a rather large pistol at my head.
  
  I didn't even see him fucking pull it out. He was at least as fast as me, and I thought he was probably a bit faster. I needed to do something to fix that. My eyes were fixed on his shoulders, so I could see with my peripheral vision if he started to squeeze the trigger. There wasn't a lot of room to dodge in this little cage, but I wasn't about to be shot like a dog without putting up a fight.
  
  However, rather than shoot me, though, he just placed his body between the techie and me and backed out of the cage, slamming the door shut when he was clear. He tipped an imaginary hat at me and said, "Miss Hebert." And then he turned around and hurried the techie out of the room we were in, closing the door behind him.
  
  Just... what the fuck? About half a minute later, the door was kicked off its hinges as a Trauma Team rescue team busted through the door. It was Charlie team, from the patches on their shoulders, and they each carefully cleared the room with their weapons out, me sighing and saying, "I don't think there's anyone left here."
  
  It took them a moment to find the door to the cage, but after they opened it, they asked me, confusedly, "Just what the fuck happened, 'Breaker?"
  
  "I don't fucking know, and I don't like it," I said, completely truthfully and completely sullenly.
  
  "Thank you for your and your team's assistance. This bonus is both for the successful completion of the mission and as well as an additional sum to replace your man's arm," the polite blonde-haired man told the leader of the small team of mercenaries.
  
  The leader of the mercenaries nodded, "Was nova, like always. We'll wait a couple of weeks before seeking that medical care, just in case."
  
  The one-armed man growled, "That fucking bitch..."
  
  However, before he said a single word more, the blonde-haired man's arm shot out like a striking snake, grabbing the one-arm man by the throat and easily lifting him into the air, causing him to gurgle. The polite man said, "You will keep a civil tongue in your head about her. Yes?"
  
  When there was no obvious response, he continued, " I did not hear you ."
  
  The man being held up in the air nodded rapidly and said something that might have been similar to "Yes" and was dropped back down. His compatriots were giving him the stink-eye, but the blonde man didn't seem to mind after that, nodding one last time at the group's leader before walking casually out of the alley where they were meeting, carrying a metallic silver briefcase.
  
  Stepping into a waiting cab, he inspected the computer-generated avatar of the driver for a moment before making a decision and saying genially, "Night City international airport, private terminal, please."
  
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  Crime against humanity and decency
  AN: I only intended this first section that was in the blonde ninja's POV to be about 1,000 words, but it ended up catching hold of me and becoming over twice that amount.
  
  William Davies had been a personal servant of the Astor family for many, many years. He was, in fact, a part of the family, from the wrong side of the sheets, so to speak. Most of the personal servants of his status were part of the family, actually. He had little contact with the family growing up, but he always had the feeling that someone was watching out for him a little bit. Things came a little easier for him; events seemed to occur to give him a little bit of a helping hand.
  
  It could have been luck, but he later discovered it was at least half the family providing small benefits, such as securing his admission to one of the best schools in North America; specifically, he received an appointment to the US Military Academy at Westpoint. Some famous historical cadets, like Robert E. Lee, received no demerits in their entire four-year stint at the Academy, and others, like Ulysses S. Grant, received so many he was at one point almost tossed out. William was more in the middle.
  
  He graduated, received his commission and was interested in combat arms. He figured that if he was going to be a soldier, then he was going to be a fucking soldier. He was an artilleryman, a redleg in US Army parlance.
  
  After going through jump school and being selected for the 82nd Airborne Division, he got a tattoo on one arm that featured a historical cannon and the words " Ultima Ratio Regum." In English, that translated to "The Final Argument of Kings." The final argument of kings was, of course, canons.
  
  Artillery was killing by the numbers. In historical conflicts, over sixty per cent of casualties could be attributed to artillery, although in modern conflicts, that dropped a little but only because air strikes accomplished a similar task. There was something that was just ultimately demoralising about being shelled by an enemy you couldn't see and couldn't fight against.
  
  William's luck ran out in Colombia during the Second Central American War. What a shit show that was. Half of the time, he didn't even have a battery of guns but instead led a platoon of infantry. On one such mission, ironically, his life was altered radically by... artillery.
  
  Looking back on it, he couldn't help but admire the skills of the Neo-Soviet gun team. The indigenous people they were fighting were never as good with an artillery barrage, so he instantly knew it was the Soviet "advisors" that blew him and his platoon to bits.
  
  Somehow, though, he managed to survive. He woke up in America, paralysed and with half his body missing. That was when the family came to offer assistance. Not for free; he wouldn't really have trusted them if they offered something for free. But he had a certain set of skills, and if they gave him a new body, he would certainly be content to exercise them for them instead of the US Army.
  
  It was discovered, amidst the Cyberware Revolution of the 2010s, that he had an incredible ability to integrate with cybernetics. He was one of the very first people to receive one of Raven Microcybernetics' full conversion systems. Even at this time, cyberpsychosis wasn't unknown, but he never had any issues with mental instability, no matter the amount of cybernetics he received.
  
  Behind his back, people gossiped that he was just crazy to begin with, and perhaps that was true, but he never felt crazy. Certainly, he wasn't unpredictable and a hazard to everyone around him. But would a crazy person ever consider that they were crazy? He certainly wasn't going around randomly murdering people like some famous up-and-coming solos that also were highly augmented, like Adam Smasher.
  
  Honestly, he was once told that the main symptom of cyber psychosis was the belief, reinforced after every additional augmentation, that you were better, more than regular people. But he already felt that way before he ever got any cybernetics!
  
  He operated, for the family, discreetly in the same area that Adam Smasher did, the eastern seaboard of the USA, although he never met the man. During the Fourth Corporate War, the family brought him back to protect their strong places, and he occasionally provided bodyguard services to family members, who lived mostly in low earth orbit. The family didn't really have a stake in the conflict; in fact, their holdings were so diversified that they had a board member on both Militech and Arasaka's boards, at least until the NUSA government forced out their board member on Militech's board.
  
  The corporation was in some ways indistinguishable from the NUSA government, and the Astor family was very much an international family, with most of their hard assets and real property in the United Kingdom and the European Community.
  
  Ever since the Fourth Corporate War ended, he had shifted from less traditional military work and more of what the family called a personal servant, which included that but much more. He had been one of the primary servants for the Astor-Armstrong branch of the family, since then. If the Astor family mostly lived in space, then the Astor-Armstrongs were the ones that ran most of their businesses on Earth.
  
  William remembered Annette well; she was a favourite of his. Her mom had many children, but she was always one to stand out. Always pushing the boundaries, so he wasn't surprised when she got the freedom that her mother never had. He had personally tracked down the NUSA direct action team that was responsible for her death and eliminated them all with extreme prejudice. For Annette's sake, he had brought in her husband on the op, and he had gotten his share of revenge. The fact that it was against the former agency he used to work for before he shifted to the private sector infuriated the man, William thought.
  
  She had died during a joint Militech-Arasaka delegation, negotiating some aspect of each corporation's involvement in the Pacific Islands so as not to step on each other's toes. Remarkable, and the NUSA thought, dangerous. They didn't like the idea of a world where Militech and Arasaka routinely cooperated, so they used a giant truck bomb to blow up both sides. Neither William nor Danny cared about the reason, though.
  
  When the Astor family AI, Edgecrusher, alerted him and Annette's mom that Annette's daughter might have been murdered, with someone stealing her identity, he volunteered to personally execute the person walking around with Annette's daughter's face.
  
  Edgecrusher wasn't one hundred per cent confident, although the evidence was damning. Taylor Anne Hebert not only had a radical change in behaviour and interests but, more importantly, sought medical services. She had, under a false name, approached a biosculpt clinic and requested a number of modifications. Modifications she should have already had. Additionally, she became a patient of a cybernetics clinic and received cybernetics that she should also already had - including a basic operating system.
  
  Monitoring "disowned" and illegitimate family members was only one minor part of Edgecrusher's duties, so it wasn't until the imposter applied to Trauma Team that the AI backtracked and discovered these inconsistencies.
  
  William had watched for about half a year before deciding that the only way he would know for sure was if he asked her himself. The operation was approved by Taylor's grandmother, and this was the result. He was now waiting, in VR, to brief his principal about what he had discovered.
  
  His principal's ICON rezzed into the special, encrypted cybernetic space they inhabited. It wouldn't be wrong to say that this meeting was occurring inside the brain of Edgecrusher. It was certainly one of the most highly secure net sites in the world, anyway. Her avatar was a Gaelic woman with delicate features that were roughly based on her own, long hair and long ears, as a kind of aes sídhe.
  
  "There were problems returning home?" she asked serenely.
  
  William frowned a bit. His ICON was an idealised version of his body before it was blown to bits, "A little, mum. The private jet I was borrowing had an engineering casualty, so I am just going to wait for Orbital Air's suborbital six hours from now. I'll definitely get back faster this way, anyhow." Although the jet he borrowed was supersonic, it was barely so. There weren't daily suborbital flights from Night City to London, but there were usually a couple a week, and the timings worked out for him in this instance.
  
  She shrugged her shoulders, "Such things happen. I read your preliminary report, although there were areas that seemed contradictory. Your report says the young woman doesn't consider herself to be Taylor Hebert, yet definitely is."
  
  William winced slightly, internally, although he didn't show it. She would never be so crass as to order him to explain, but that was basically what she was doing, "Mum, a person's psychology changes as they have life events, especially traumatic ones. We verified her genome matched, and although I wasn't able to perform the full battery of tests under the cap, as we were interrupted, it was clear that she was born Taylor Hebert. She doesn't feel as though she belongs in this world and doesn't feel that she is "... and he made the air-quotes gesture, "... this world's Taylor Hebert, but that isn't uncommon with post-adolescent psychology. I suspect losing her father so soon after little Annette was very traumatic to her, and she has resolved to radically diverge from the path that she was on." He frowned a bit, "Although..."
  
  "Although...?" she asked, with a smile.
  
  He smiled, too, "Although... she has remarkable skills, and I don't mean in medicine." He shook his head, "I haven't had anyone detect me in over two decades. Maybe it was just a fluke or intuition, but she turned around at just the right time to spot me and almost was able to at least shoot at me before I closed with her. No hesitation. When I disarmed her, she shifted to using a Kendachi monowire to keep me at least a few metres away. With enough skill that she must have practised for hundreds and hundreds of hours; then, when she realised she was hopelessly outmatched, she just turned around and ran away. Again, zero hesitation. She shifted from attack to escape instantly. I would put her martial skills as comparable to a middling corporate black ops operator, at least with what I saw. She could be an Angel in five or ten years if she keeps at it. I was so depressed, so sure at that point that she was an imposter. I mean, she is only seventeen, mum." He shook his head.
  
  "How interesting... if slightly uncouth. I suppose Annette's man must have been training her off and on since she was a child? We have no records of that, but that isn't surprising. That was his business, after all," the fairy woman mused.
  
  William nodded, "It is really the only explanation. He got really jaded with both Militech and the NUSA after Annette's death; it is probable he advised her to avoid Militech after his death. Every year they intertwine more and more with the NUSA government after all, and he despised them."
  
  "Mmm... anything else?" she asked.
  
  William shrugged, "She might not be precisely psychologically stable. She is recovering from deep self-loathing, unknown why,... and uh... have you heard of the Japanese word 'c huunibyou' ? She is convinced that her special affinity for medicine and science is a superpower. Like, from a comic book. The confidence levels for this were off the charts."
  
  A wistful expression crossed the woman's face, "Annette was like that too. Remember when she would approach the automatic doors?" The woman shifted to a more active stance and thrust out her palm, and recited, "By my power, I demand you open!" Then she grinned for a moment before settling back into her serene countenance. "Little Taylor might not be wrong, though. There is nothing more powerful than knowledge, expertise and the will to use it. That can be very super. You had to depart before you removed the memories of the interrogation and capture. That is traumatic. How do you suppose we should make it up to her?"
  
  William tilted his head to the side, "I didn't consider that we should, mum. Sure, that wasn't a pleasant experience, but it wasn't even a tenth of a per cent of what you or Annette had to go through growing up."
  
  She waved a hand, "Yes, but the expectations, our own cages and torments were of our own design, William. Sparing her future children of things of this nature was part and parcel of the agreement Annette made. You expect she will continue to accumulate funds for medical school, then?"
  
  William nodded, "Yes. She believes she has valuable intellectual property. Very valuable. I'm not sure if she actually does, she could be mistaken, but she is smart and knows if she sells it on the up and up, a corporation will rendition her. I believe she intends to sell it for a fraction of its worth on the black market, somehow. We could easily pay for her schooling, though, ourselves, though, so she doesn't have to take the risk."
  
  She shook her head, "No. However, after she has accumulated the money and applied, we will arrange a full scholarship. I have been told by people who have made their own fortunes that the first million you make can be transformational. It's best to struggle a little, after all." She tilted her head to the side, "How valuable does she think her IP is?"
  
  "Hard to say; that was around the time we were interrupted. But at least in the hundreds of millions or low billions per annum. Gross, not net. It's some kind of drug used to fight infections. She believes she already has it and has tested it," William said.
  
  The fairy hummed, "Not that valuable then. Although, a billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon that adds up to real money, doesn't it? She's right. They'd black bag her and stick her in a gilded cage unless she's just delusional." There was a moment of silence, "Do you have any idea who she would approach to sell it?"
  
  He shrugged, "It's a pharmaceutical of some kind, so possibly Biotechnica. Maybe Arasaka, as they have an up-and-coming life sciences division. Plus, she does live in the building run by and has a very good working relationship with one of Arasaka's cats' paws, a yakuza-style street gang."
  
  The fairy made a moue of displeasure, "How distasteful. Well, we still have a board member in Arasaka, at least for the moment. I'll make a note to watch for any such operation. As for Biotechnica... we don't have an in with the Italians. Or any other Pharmcorp, for that matter... I suppose all we can do is watch. I'd like you to preposition a team in Night City that might be able to provide protection in the event she approaches one of these players. If they try to rendition her, they should be able to provide protection. I don't mind if they actually black bag her, but I just don't want them to kill her in the attempt; it would be an interesting perspective shift for her, and a couple of years working in the salt mines, so to speak, might do her some good."
  
  William frowned a little. His principal was a bit too tough love at times, but at the same time, prepositioning a family team, not just hired mercs, for possibly years was an incredible outlay of funds. He had a team available, but if they couldn't be expected to take other missions? He'd have to onboard a new team and place both of them in Night City. Then they could alternate taking missions on the west coast so that one team was always ready.
  
  She didn't want to spend a million right now to provide her granddaughter with an education unless the girl accumulated that much herself first, but she was willing to spend easily five times as much to provide protection for her in the shadows. Protection that wouldn't even protect her if all she was going to be was kidnapped. That was typical.
  
  "Right away, mum," he replied.
  
  She nodded, "Well, I'll see you tomorrow, William. Perhaps you'll let me win again at a game of tennis."
  
  Let her win? Although the woman was almost completely biological, she was almost as fast and strong as he was. Every member of the Astor family was a miracle of modern genetics and biosculpting by the age of ten. And she was a lot better at tennis. He tried his best to beat her every single time, but he never let her win, not even when she was a child!
  
  His principal's ICON derezzed, and he glanced around the endless white expanse. He shook his head ruefully and said aloud, "Alright, Edgecrusher. Send me out, bro." His accent shifted back to the American one he was born with when he was talking to the AI.
  
  I spent several hours being debriefed by the Trauma Team counter-intelligence people, as at first, they suspected my kidnapping was because of my work; however, after a while, it became clear that they did not think that anymore, although they wouldn't really discuss why they came to that conclusion. I thought the same thing, but I was interested in why they thought so, too. The process was annoying, but the people interrogating me weren't as bad as that British guy. They didn't want to scan my brain, at least.
  
  When I mentioned that, one of them chuckled and laid it out for me with no prevaricating, "You can't just put people under the cap for no reason. Not only is it a lot of work and takes a special skill set to interpret the results, which are always in high demand, but it tends to make people think that we don't trust them. That has a marked impact on the quality of an employee's work product..." he trailed off and then shrugged, "Random interrogation under brain scan is basically a pre-requisite for service in the Intelligence or Counter-Intel divisions, though. That's pretty much the industry standard. Buuuut... If we suspected you were lying, I would probably instead be telling you that brain scan interviews are standard in this type of situation and quickly calling in one of the specialists." The last sentence, he said with a cocky grin.
  
  I chuckled at that. After they cut me loose, I briefly went by the base. The crew was out on a flight, which suited me because I needed to embezzle something out of our medical supply room. I took a handful of specimen sample kits, which were nothing more than a long, optionally damp Q-tip and a plastic tube to place it in and sat down at a chair in the kitchen, humming. I carefully used a q-tip and rubbed it underneath my fingernails, specifically the fingernails I knew had penetrated pretty deeply into the ninja's hand.
  
  I suspected he was a Gemini or similar, full-body replacement. The fact that he wasn't paralysed was a big clue, although there were certain other small signs. Gemini's were, reportedly, almost impossible to detect even at close inspection. Raven's website claimed that this included "intimate" inspections, as well. I found that probably to be true. There were only a few signs that they weren't biological. His infrared signature at high exertion was off, his breathing a bit off, and the way that his veins pulsed in time with a supposed heartbeat was off, now that I thought back about it. Hardly anyone in the world would notice that with their eyes, but I could. I could almost take someone's blood pressure just by staring at them for a while.
  
  And while a Gemini was a full borg, it wasn't entirely mechanical. A lot of the features that tended to fool a person into believing they were human were biological. And with custom biological features came protein tagging. I wasn't entirely sure why, but I thought it might be for intellectual property reasons, but there was a good chance that there might be data encoded in the genome of the skin and fake blood that would tell me more about who this guy was. Maybe even a serial number for the body he was wearing, and if I had that, I could, eventually, track the sale down. Well... maybe.
  
  It was a bit traumatising to be outclassed, beaten down, knocked unconscious, threatened, and interrogated. I did not want it to happen again if I could at all help it. For hours I had been thinking about how to stop it in the future, and honestly, I was coming up with a lot of ideas, but none of them was definitive. That guy was just better than me. I had the impression that he could have incapacitated me with the initial strike to my solar plexus and instead was playing around with me. Certainly, he hadn't used that electrical taser attack that must have been built into his hands when he struck or disarmed me. It felt almost like a spar, and that was humiliating.
  
  After I was finished and was sure I had collected anything that was under my nails, I nodded and departed. I could ask the lab here to run a DNA sequence, but I definitely didn't want to. The results would be in the hands of those counter-intelligence guys before I ever saw them and worse, they might filter the results before I got them; that said, I didn't have a DNA sequencing machine.
  
  Scowling at an e-mail from the company, which was an invoice for services rendered. I only had to pay the cost, but that still included a flat charge for each scramble and all the fuel expended, plus a charge for the depreciation, maintenance and insurance on the aircraft, which was billed by the minute. They had looked for me for over ten minutes. Jamming Trauma Team wasn't normally effective, because there was radio-direction finding equipment on all of the aircraft, and they could home in on the jammer, which was what they intended to do, but the jamming stopped quickly, with no further transmissions.
  
  I had learned that they had placed me in what amounted to a wire-mesh lined body-bag after they knocked me out and then just carried me around like a sack of potatoes. The blonde ninja was kind enough to pick up my pistol, which was recovered at the scene. That was good because they weren't on sale yet, and I no longer counted as a Militech dependent. It would be a pain in the ass to replace, not to mention these first-generation beta-test models would probably be collectable!
  
  I ended up owing slightly less than ten thousand Eurodollars. Although that was a lot, it probably would have been three times as much for a regular Silver client. I paid it immediately; I was probably going to end up spending a lot more money, too if I wanted to increase the level of protection I had.
  
  I took a cab back to Japantown, and on the cab ride there, I called Wakako on the phone. She had some questions to answer, and depending on what she said, I wouldn't feel safe returning back to my apartment, so it was important to get answers right away.
  
  "Ah, Miss Hebert. What can I do for you today?" she asked with her slight Japanese accent.
  
  I frowned, "Mrs Okada, perhaps you are not aware of this. However, at the conclusion of the gig you assigned me, as I was walking home, I was the victim of a targeted and sophisticated attack, which was successful. I was kidnapped, stuck in a literal faraday cage and only managed to escape due to my ingenuity and Trauma Team membership." I paused, "I do not intend to accuse you of anything at the moment, but the timing was such that I felt I needed to speak with you about it."
  
  That was the first time I ever saw Wakako surprised, although I couldn't be sure it wasn't faked for my benefit. The woman was old and surely had been around the block.
  
  After a moment, she raised a hand, "Just a moment; I'm blocking out more than a few minutes for this call. Can you tell me precisely what happened?"
  
  I didn't feel the need to hide much, and I told her. Although I didn't go into specifics about the questions, the blonde ninja had asked me, informing her that they were mostly of a personal nature.
  
  "Assaulted by a full-borg conversion utilising thermoptic camouflage, plus six well-kitted out mercs with non-lethal weapons..." she said and shook her head several times. Then she paused and said, "I can see why you were a bit suspicious, but this was clearly an attack targeting you, correct?"
  
  I nodded, "Yes, definitely."
  
  "In that case, do you believe it possible that you could have been under surveillance from the time you left your apartment? If so, did you speak to the client in public at all? He seemed the talkative sort, the type to blurt his business in front of God and everybody. Somebody could have been listening with a parabolic microphone, got his entire itinerary and then set up the ambush as soon as they knew which particular clinic you were taking him to," she finished reasonably.
  
  That... was possible. She had talked to him right in front of the NCART terminal. She didn't notice anyone lurking around, but if they were good, she wouldn't have noticed. She told Wakako as much.
  
  "I don't mean what I am going to say next as a threat, so please don't take it that way. However, if I wanted to sell you out to someone who wanted to kidnap you, then you would just wake up in their custody. Don't forget where you sleep," she said, raising an eyebrow.
  
  I wasn't so sure about that. I had added a number of protections on my inner apartment door, including explosives. I had no doubt that the Tyger Claws could take me, but it wasn't as though it would be as simple as them grabbing me in my sleep without me putting up a fight. I would definitely at least be conscious of it and likely would take out a number of attackers; at least, I hoped so.
  
  But her point remained. Mrs Okada didn't need to contrive a fake gig to do it. I hadn't thought she was responsible, but I had to speak to her about it. I nodded, "You make a lot of good points. I hadn't really thought you were behind it, but I needed to hear you say it. Now I come to you as a client. Can you look into this?"
  
  She tilted her head to the side and then nodded, "Yes. Partly on my own dime, as if my own communication channels or clients were compromised - and that is a possibility, I need to know. We can speak about the price later if I don't find anything there."
  
  I nodded and, with that, disconnected the call. Perhaps it wasn't wise to discuss such business in the back of a Delamain, but for some reason, I trusted the discretion of the bald SkyNet. Plus, it honestly wasn't anything I intended to keep a secret. What I was going to do in response definitely was going to be to kept at a much higher level of confidentiality, though.
  
  I had the cab take me directly back to the clinic I left my previous client and retraced my steps back to the street I was attacked at. It had been hours, but I was hoping I could still find what I was looking for.
  
  I found my expended gas grenade canister on the side of the road, nodded, picked it up and casually put it into my coat pocket. It was trash, but the residue inside could theoretically tell people about the chemical agent, even if it was mostly Tinkertech.
  
  Then I found the area where I had "disarmed" the mercenary. What I was looking for was his blood, and I found a fair bit of it in a discoloured area that might have been a pool where he had been rendered unconscious. Frowning, the blood looked wrong.
  
  Then I sighed as I realised that someone, probably either the blonde ninja or some of his additional backup, had sprayed the blood pool with a DNA inhibitor, the cheapest was probably a solution of water and bleach, but there were specialised products too, which were used to destroy any traces DNA. What would Alt-Dad have called that? Tradecraft? That was better tradecraft than I was expecting, but I was pretty sure they couldn't have gotten all of it. I followed the blood trail, frowning as the entire thing was sprayed carefully.
  
  The blonde ninja had to have additional helpers, as Trauma's AV would have been homing in on this location very rapidly. They had to have done all of this, plus get me into a bag and drag all of their unconscious compatriots out in a hurry. Perhaps, though, they had come back after the AV left to do this part, as they seemed to be pretty thorough.
  
  I stepped back and found the location where I was when I attacked him and went through the same whipping and scything motions, sans having the monowire out, and nodded. I wasn't being merciful in that attack that took his arm; I was actually aiming to take his head clean off, but he partially dodged, and I only got his left arm.
  
  As such, there had been mostly a horizontal component to the attack. When I aimed for people's necks, I liked coming in from the side so the wire wrapped around rapidly and then yanking their heads off like a cork in a Champagne bottle. I paused and realised that sounded really bad, even in my head. But that was how I usually practised in the VR simulator, not to mention I had actually done it in real life a couple of times.
  
  I zeroed in on something a little to the side of where my attack would have connected and smiled widely as I saw a much smaller spot of red on the side of a steel dumpster. I wasn't a blood spatter analyst, as my expertise in blood was more when it was in the body, but I could tell it was fresh, and it was in about the right spot. It had to be the guy. I took several samples of his blood, stuffing the plastic tubes holding each q-tip in my pocket.
  
  I glanced around and didn't think I was going to find anything more useful, so I nodded and walked back to my apartment like I had intended to do hours ago. This time nobody stopped me; in fact, people seemed to stay well out of my way for some reason.
  
  The first thing I did when I returned to my apartment was shove the specimen tubes into my freezer, and the second thing I did was take a long, hot shower. It relaxed me, and I realised I was quite tense.
  
  After the shower, wearing only a towel, I sighed when I realised I needed to do laundry. I was down to the themed panties that I didn't really like to wear.
  
  I put them on anyway. It was some Militech swag that Alt-Dad got for Alt-Taylor. They both thought it was hilarious. They were black, with Militech's logo and the text printed: "Contents protected by Militech." I thought it was super cringe and I hated wearing them, but they were very comfortable. It was interesting to see how my tastes and preferences diverged wildly from Alt-Taylor in certain areas. I mean, she had a boyfriend before she left the Militech school, and I had memories of her getting to at least second base.
  
  Although, she was considered rather frigid and old-fashioned by almost everyone in her grade level because that was as far as she would go.
  
  After the pyjamas were donned, I sat in her comfortable chair and searched for the correct address in my contacts before nodding and starting a call.
  
  The phone rang several times before a man answered, "Hello?"
  
  "Professor Hildago, this is Taylor Hebert. I'm not sure if you remember me-"
  
  The older man interrupted, "Of course I do! Hahaha, how have you been?"
  
  "Well, pretty good, but I was hoping I could call in that marker if you were genuine about it," I told him.
  
  That caused him to raise his eyebrows, "Well, I was, but I have to draw the line at most felonies." He then waggled his eyebrows, perhaps to suggest some felonies that he might be open to. On the other hand, I was probably too hard on him, as he likely thought I was in my twenties, given that he had last seen me at a University.
  
  "Barely a misdemeanour, I assure you. I need two things sequenced, and I don't want anyone to know that I requested it," I told him.
  
  This caused him to raise his eyebrows in interest, "Oooh... interesting. Cloak and dagger, huh? Yeah, that should be no problem. DNA?"
  
  "One is DNA, for sure. Human, from a wet whole blood sample; the other is unknown proteins. Possibly DNA or possibly unknown proteins encoded to carry digital data or some combination of all of the above," I told him truthfully.
  
  He nodded, "Like in a synthetic bioform?" Although he was an epidemiologist, he was still a real medical doctor, too, even if he probably hadn't practised in some time.
  
  "Yes, precisely," I told him.
  
  He hummed over the call and then nodded, "I'll have to stick the second one in the universal protein sequencer, but it shouldn't be an issue. Expect maybe a 4-hour turnaround time if you can get them to me tomorrow morning."
  
  "I'll courier them over to your office, and tomorrow will be fine," I told him, and then after a minute or so of small talk, we hung up. I considered. I could have sent the samples to a commercial lab, but I honestly felt my privacy of the request was in better hands with the Professor, despite his seeming interest in it.
  
  Nodding, I called the RCS courier service and asked them for a pickup and to bring a small container with a half-kilo of dry ice inside. I probably didn't need to refrigerate the DNA samples. These days the sequencers could run a million sequences simultaneously on separate proteins in the sample, even if it was small, and get the correct genome even with minor degradation, but it was still better safe than sorry.
  
  I pulled up the notes I had been taking, starting when the counter-intelligence guys had interviewed me. My best guess was this was something related to Alt-Dad. The first series of questions the blonde-haired man gave me seemed to imply he was verifying my identity.
  
  I swear to god if one of Alt-Danny's friends beat the shit out of me and interrogated me as a favour to Alt-Dad's memory, thinking I was some kind of... identity thief? Pod person? Such crimes did happen in Night City. There was cheap enough body alteration technology so you could easily mimic someone if you had a similar build to them, but why the fuck couldn't they have just either knocked on my door or surreptitiously dug through my trash to get a DNA sample?
  
  Altering your DNA to match your target was a much harder proposition. I could do it fairly easily if I had the correct DNA sample and equipment to fashion a vrius, but, generally speaking, that was something that only Corpo or government-level spies could hope to achieve. It wasn't a common thing at all. Even the cheapest and easiest to acquire version of the treatments, which only altered your epidural DNA and kept the rest the same, was not something even edgerunners with connections could usually hope to get.
  
  It was included in my plan Z if things ever got too out of hand. I would alter my appearance and DNA and start over somewhere else. It would make me sad to give up the name of Hebert and my mom's hair, but it wouldn't kill me. I could do it, especially if it was temporary.
  
  I glanced more at the notes, which were labelled under the header: "How to stop this from happening again."
  
  The ideas were half more escape and defence oriented and half-oriented around making me more dangerous. Except for the first one listed, which was: "Find those responsible and make an example out of them." I frowned. Was I slowly becoming a cyber psycho after all? I had thought, especially with my power, that I would be more or less resistant to such things. That kind of thinking was kind of presumptuous, though.
  
  I sat there for a while thinking. I didn't want to hurt anyone. I just wanted to be safe. Honestly, while I did want to find those responsible, I didn't precisely want to make an example out of them. I didn't think that would work in any event; if anything, it would just cause the danger level to increase wildly.
  
  "Upgrading my Kerenzikov. Ninja man definitely had a Kerenzikov, I think, too. And his version was better than mine but not so better that it completely outclassed me. Unless he was just playing with me all along," I mused aloud.
  
  I've had ideas of how to upgrade the Kerenzikov since I got it. I didn't include them in the minor changes I had made because it would cause me to have to do periodic maintenance on the device, which was implanted into my spine. But that was looking less and less important. I'd take sitting on my tummy while I used microwaldos on my back for an hour a month over getting murdered. I had been too overconfident, thinking myself special. I was, but not in a way that made me especially dangerous compared to the monsters of this world. There were stories that Adam Smasher one vee one'd a main battle tank, ripping it apart like it was nothing. And Morgan Blackhand, someone who was allegedly mostly biological, could one vee one Smasher.
  
  It didn't make any sense, but I knew I was nowhere in their league, and I probably never would be unless I turned myself into a literal mech. The sense in the back of my head was telling me we could easily replace one of our arms with a giant canon, like the Earth game Megaman. I nixed that idea.
  
  The thermoptical camouflage that the ninja was utilising made me want something similar. It wouldn't necessarily make me more dangerous, but it would make me a lot better at both running away and not being noticed. That was a highly restricted piece of cybernetics that was installed underneath the skin. Rather than early versions that would work similarly to a chameleon and therefore required you to be naked, modern thermoptic camouflage utilised a special field that warped light around the user. Not entirely, otherwise, the user would be blind, but enough that you could easily stand in front of someone and they not notice you if you didn't move. I didn't know how it worked at all, and my tinkering sense wasn't giving me very many ideas, although I was very interested in the concept. This, I would have to buy.
  
  I could modify it after receiving it to add an insulating layer, so I wouldn't be knocked unconscious by a taser again, too. But I'd have to get this installed by a Ripperdoc, for sure. I might be down for a little self-surgery, but not of this level.
  
  As I started to consider how I could modify my brain to prevent a trainable brain image scanner from working, Wakako called me, so I answered on the second ring, "Hello, Mrs Okada."
  
  "Hello, Taylor. I have some, perhaps, bad news. It's only been about six hours, but the client that you escorted around Japantown has dropped off the face of the Earth. I didn't mention this earlier, but one of the client's requests was that the merc should be a pretty girl, if possible. Honestly, that isn't an unusual request, especially with bodyguard jobs, and it doesn't have anything to do with your end of the job, so I don't generally tell my mercs. It tends to just alienate them, rightfully, from the client," the old woman told me, raising an eyebrow at the end.
  
  I blinked. If someone had a profile on me and had me under surveillance, then they could have easily approached Wakako with a more or less custom gig tailored to me specifically. A tour of Japantown, where I lived as a bodyguard. A medical speciality and to introduce them to Ripperdocs, which I had business with. The pretty girl part didn't really fit, though.
  
  I replied, "That is suspicious."
  
  "It gets slightly weirder. I was curious, so I had a discussion with the doctor he saw. The implant he had installed was a high-end Faceless system," she said, with her tone indicating slight incredulity.
  
  That was quite weird. A Faceless implant was a name for a type of implant of a similar class. It used to be the brand name, but the original manufacturer went out of business. Still, it had already reached the Vernacular and became a generic name for all types of implants of this type, like some people that called every carbonated beverage a Nicola.
  
  They were, almost universally, illegal. Even more so than the thermoptical camouflage I wanted to buy. They were used to radically change facial structure and skin tone in an instant. A person could go from an old European man to a young Hindi girl more or less instantly, so long as their stature was the same. They were a staple of bad films and braindances, even more so than the monowire I used.
  
  I nodded slowly, "Okay, that is very suspicious but weird and not definitive. Maybe it was a coincidence, and he created this whole identity with you just for the purpose of getting a Faceless installed. That sounds like something someone who would want a Faceless, without anyone knowing, would do."
  
  "That's true. I just thought you should know," she came back.
  
  I stretched back in my chair, "Speaking of high-end illegal implants. Do you have the contacts to get me a middle to high-end thermoptic subdermal system?"
  
  That caused her to grin and ask, "Are you planning to broaden your horizons into assassinations, Miss I'm-Not-Interested-In-Edgerunning?"
  
  "No! I just feel... it would be good to run away. Running away is a great tactical strategy," I told her, embarrassed.
  
  She chuckled and said, "The old versions that only bend visible light, the pure optical camo, can be had pretty cheaply. Like five thousand or so. A middle-tier version of the current generation, which blocks infrared and bends light in the radar spectrum, would be four times that."
  
  "Put me down for the latter version. I'm already going to be wrecking my savings with a bunch of other things," I sighed to her.
  
  The doorbell rang, and I quickly ended my call with Wakako to check the cameras. It was RCS. I grabbed Alt-Dad's trusty Militech Crusher as well as two of the specimen samples from the freezer.
  
  The courier was a bit taken aback to see a girl in her pyjamas with a shotgun, but he didn't comment about it and let me seal the two tubes into the small dry-ice-lined soft pack. I gave him the delivery instructions, having already paid the full balance online, and bid him a good day.
  
  I considered asking Wakako for help tracking down armless after I got his genome sequenced, but I still wasn't one hundred per cent sure she wasn't behind my attack. I just thought it was much more likely that she wasn't, but in the event that she was and I asked her help to track someone down using their genome, that person would be out of town or at the bottom of the waterfront forthwith. Besides, I had a very Tinkery idea of how I could do it myself. In fact, I was itching to do it, having to hold my hands to avoid making a go of it right now, even when I knew I didn't have everything I needed. I had to make a few shopping trips first.
  
  It was fortunate that I didn't have to go back to work for three more days because I awoke from my fugue to discover over twenty hours had passed.
  
  My work area looked completely wrecked, but there were two things on my table. The first looked like something out of an HR Giger painting and was alive. It looked like a throbbing, pulsating cyst suspended in a mysterious-looking semi-gel-like liquid, with a small, narrowing flesh tube protruding out into a dryer area.
  
  It looked completely, utterly disgusting, and I had a moment where I was questioning all of my life choices. I didn't entirely know how I made it, but I did know what it did. It gave birth to flies, basically. Fuck, I would totally have a kill order on myself if I was back in Brockton Bay; although each fly was sterile, this entire setup looked so creepy they'd do it anyway.
  
  A bloodhound didn't actually detect blood but scents. And it could detect individual particles in the air at utterly inconceivably small concentrations. These flies were similar, except they were created only to be attracted to a specific person. One side of the cyst already had one of the specimen Q-tips with the armless guy's blood jammed into an open orifice.
  
  These guys didn't have a long range, but I could make thousands of them and deposit them in various parts of the city. Not only would they tend to concentrate on any, even microscopic, levels of the blood of the target in the surroundings, but they would find the person himself, even if he wasn't bleeding anymore if they were close enough
  
  The second thing was a small handheld tablet of some kind. The flies emitted a bio-electrical radio signal that this device could detect and track. Again, not over long distances but within a kilometre or a kilometre and a half. After releasing a suitably large swarm, I would have to drive over large parts of the city with the tracking device. However, if the man was still in Night City, I would definitely find him.
  
  I was tired but not sleepy. I saw a bottle of tic-tacs and realised I must have dosed myself with the stimulant during my fugue. Sighing, I spent two hours cleaning up my work area as the... hive mother-thing laid egg after egg. They wouldn't hatch until they received a suitably large dose of UV light, so I needed to keep them inside and only transport them in an enclosed, dark space.
  
  A text message from Professor Hildago sent over twelve hours ago had an attachment which I downloaded. The first was the sequenced genome of Armless. The second was the sequenced proteins on the Gemini.
  
  Raven didn't publish their data-encoding schemas, but there were only so many different ways you could encode digital data with DNA and RNA, and I decoded it only after fifteen minutes of attempts.
  
  Most of the data was the genome of the skin replacement. Still, there was a header with binary data encoded within. It was a Raven Gemini, after all; it was manufactured a little more than eighteen months ago in the United Kingdom. And it was listed as "CUSTOM." However, the data fields where the serial number should be were completely blank.
  
  Slurping up some instant yakisoba, I couldn't help but be a little disappointed. I was hoping for more data, at least a serial number. But I suppose I got some data. It was a relatively new model and custom, and that meant it probably cost a fortune. Plus, the owner paid Raven enough to obfuscate the serial number, too.
  
  Anyway, I looked at it; it looked like the blonde ninja man was bad news. The type of person who could buy and sell me with his pocket change.
  
  Perhaps it was stupid to try to track the mercenaries he hired down. I couldn't exactly stop, but caution was definitely in order.
  
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  Walls closing in
  AN: I had written a small section that was in the POV of Taylor in Brockton Bay, but the word count got too large to be included in this chapter so I am releasing it as a sidestory, which will be the next "chapter" here on
  
  "Mrs Pegpig! STOP! " I yelled, getting a glance over the shoulder from the pigeon criminal as she casually ate another fly. Her consort grabbed one, too and flew away from me, out the window and landing in their nest that they had made on the side of my wall. He was always the scaredy-bird of the two.
  
  She grabbed and ate another fly while watching me. The bitch! I had moved the FlyHive into my private apartment as I had a few patients from the Megabuilding I had to see, and I didn't want anybody to see my crime against nature. I thought it would be fine, as all my windows had a very effective UV polarisation filter installed on them. However, I forgot that Mrs Pegpig and her consort came in and out of one of them. I left the window unlocked, and they just pecked it open when they wanted to come inside, and the sunlight from their window cracked open was enough to hatch a few flies.
  
  I didn't have enough time to wait around for the larvae and pupa life stages of a fly, so my monstrosity made extra large eggs and out popped a more or less fully-grown adolescent fly. They still lived for about the same period of time, a little less than a month, but I didn't expect I would need them all that long.
  
  I ran over to the FlyHive and glanced at it, sighing. Thankfully, I had already moved most of the eggs into small plastic containers, so I hadn't lost the full production of the past evening. But these hundred or so eggs would have to be placed outside, as I didn't fancy my apartment having a lot of flies in it.
  
  Many people expected that pigeons were herbivores, subsisting off seeds and such, but the truth was that they'd eat insects, too, gratefully if they could find them. This thing must have looked like a free buffet to Mrs Pegpig. "How many did you eat? You're going to get fat!" I scolded her as I scooped the rest of the eggs into a small plastic container.
  
  How should I dispose of these, then? I may as well get some use out of them. My apartment was on a corner, so I actually had a number of windows. I shifted over to the living room and opened a separate window, far away from the Pegpig nest, and taped the plastic to the side of the wall. The sun would cause the eggs to hatch shortly, and they'd fly away. Problem solved. I'd look at the tracking device later and see how they moved. I didn't particularly know a lot about fly behaviour, but I expected them to stick around the same area they hatched in the absence of detecting Armless' blood or person.
  
  After that, I shoved the FlyHive into my sock drawer. It was empty right now because most of my clothes were in a hamper or even strewn across the floor near my bed. Sighing, I resolved to do laundry tonight. Adulting was hard.
  
  As I worked, I quietly sang along to an utterly ridiculous girl band from Korea, whose lyrics were a mish-mash of English and Korean. When they shifted to a section with Korean lyrics, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, I would just hum awkwardly instead of making a fool out of myself in trying to make my mouth pronounce the unusual phonemes.
  
  The microscopic binocular vision I had added into my cybernetic eyes, combined with a set of fast-moving microwaldoes allowed me to make nearly microscopic changes to anything I was working on, although I didn't quite have enough expertise to use the system on anything but cybernetics at the moment.
  
  The delivery from Wakako arrived before I had to return to work, and after looking it over, it appeared to be direct from the factory, so I had no complaints at all and quickly got to work making adjustments to it.
  
  For any kind of subdermal implant, there was some customisation necessary. With a newly bought implant, the kit included its own customisation and microfabrication system that the cybernetic surgeon would load with data, usually 3D scans, from the patient in order to have a correctly fitted implant system.
  
  It wasn't that second-hand subdermal systems couldn't be reused or reinstalled in other people, but it took a lot more artistry without the included factory fabrication system, which was, of course, specifically designed to be single-use.
  
  At the very least, I wanted to protect myself from all the threats that I experienced in my kidnapping incident. Although there wasn't a lot I could do against super-fast super-skilled ninja assassins that weren't susceptible to traditional chemical or biological threat vectors, I could do something about that electrical taser-like attack, as well as the brain scanner.
  
  My changes to the thermoptical system would protect me from both, although only slightly for the brain scan. Adding an insulative layer and incorporating it with the thermoptical system was slightly challenging, but I had accomplished most of it after about eight hours of work, including time for taking breaks. I had to test three different potential materials, only one of which would work with the implant's microfabrication system.
  
  I still had probably at least that much more work rewriting both the automated installation code as well as the installation instructions for the surgeon. As much as eighty to ninety per cent of most cybernetics implantations were handled by a doctor's automated tools, but there was definitely additional care to be taken when the doctor installed this in me.
  
  There was a saying: jack of all trades, master of none. That somewhat described the additional insulative layers I was adding to the thermoptical system. It wouldn't actually impair the stealth features of the system at all, so perhaps saying master of none wasn't appropriate, but I couldn't get a top-down super effective insulative layer when adding on to an existing product. The stealth field emitters were already taking up a lot of space, after all.
  
  For one, it would always be kind of difficult to reach total electrical insulation when my real skin was still going to be retained and attached to my body. I could add insulative layers below the skin, but the skin was still connected to my vasculature, and through that, an electrical current could access the rest of my body. So it was more correct to call the addition to the implant a high form of resistance.
  
  Still, I didn't think tasers, even the high voltage system that knocked me out, would stop me anymore, though, and that was the main thing. A secondary benefit was that it would be very difficult for an electrical induction cap to work on me, so the standard brain scanning system that I had already lived through wouldn't work.
  
  I wasn't so naive as to expect that there weren't workarounds for that. Insulative skin implants were pretty commonplace after all, and I could already think of a few ways to bypass it, involving changing the probes to slightly penetrative spikes and just shoving them through the top layer of my scalp. So this wasn't a true defence for having to go through another interrogation backed by a brain scan.
  
  I did have an idea for that, as well, though. I didn't know if it was the same solution that spies would use, as I kind of expected many of them might have some kind of automatic suicide implant instead. Spy agencies would likely consider most defences to be merely slowing an attacker down if the attacker already had physical custody of the spy and his or her brain, after all. And I figured secrets were likely much more valued by such agencies than their spies being alive.
  
  Since that wasn't a useful solution for me, I had been thinking of ways to trick such a system but no matter what, I couldn't think of one, at least at present. I had a tingling sensation which gave me the idea that if I proceeded down the path of research of artificial neural tissue like I had begun for my spider-bot designs, eventually I might be able to create a "fake brain" that housed a "fake personality" that could be interviewed instead of me.
  
  Until then, though, I thought that instead of tricking the brain scan, I should instead trick myself. That was a lot easier!
  
  This would be a longer project, possibly as long as a month or more, as it was entirely software related; although it was using many open-source software modules, the idea was pretty simple. It would integrate with my operating system and cyberdeck, and when I turned it on when I realised that I was captured and about to be quizzed, it would use a simple neural network to, in real-time, recognise the question the interrogator asked and dub over the actual question I heard with a different one.
  
  Ideally, the system would ask me a question that would generate a response that would trick the interrogator into thinking everything was working fine on his end, with my secrets being hidden.
  
  For example, if they asked where I was born, instead I would hear where I live right now, which would trigger me to think about Night City instead of Brockton Bay. If they asked who my father was, instead, I might hear the question: "Who was Major Daniel Hebert?"
  
  I would have to preprogram a number of problematic question areas that the system should treat as secrets and possibly how to alter them, as there was no real way for me to digitise my memories or anything for a machine learning system to trawl through to make that decision in real-time.
  
  Although, there were hints of technology on the Dark Web, of AIs that weren't really AIs. The conspiracy theorists called the technology Soulkiller, and it was billed as almost as big a boogeyman of the Net as Rache Bartmoss was.
  
  Supposedly, it killed you and then copied your entire self, all of your memories and a complete brain scan to the owner of the system. I could definitely see how such a thing might be possible, considering the way cyberdecks were deeply interactive with most areas of the brain, so I couldn't deny the possibility, even if I couldn't presently reproduce it.
  
  Could I build something like that eventually, though? Probably. I thought I definitely could, but the brief idea I got from my medical sense was that I should finish learning to walk before trying to run. Although I had already done some preparatory work in researching neural tissue, I would have to continue a fair bit more into researching human brains, memories and consciousness, but I definitely felt that wasn't an out-of-reach goal, although a copy of my memories living on as a pseudo-AI was probably the worst of the ideas I had on the subject if my goal was immortality.
  
  I never had before thought that the idea of immortality was appealing before arriving in Night City, but I thought that was because I subconsciously felt that the world I lived in was circling the drain already. I didn't put it into words, but looking retrospectively, I was pretty confident that a more extended life just meant more suffering back there.
  
  That wasn't even a result of my bullying, either. Although Emma was an utter bitch, she wasn't on the level of Ziz, and everyone knew losing a few cities a year wasn't sustainable, even if nobody ever talked about it. Perhaps I could have lived to old age back there if I dodged being murdered by villains and literal Godzillas, but I didn't think that luck would last me one hundred or more years, so why even think about living longer than that?
  
  Now though? This new world wasn't great. And there were monsters in the Old Net who might or might not want to destroy humanity as a whole, too, just like Endbringers and possibly had a good chance of accomplishing that goal, but at the same time, I definitely thought the society, as fucked up as it was, was metastable. If so, perhaps living a lot longer might be nice.
  
  My understanding of ageing was pretty complete, and even though the rejuvenation drugs and treatments were billed as huge secrets, I didn't think they were all that revolutionary. Evolutionary, like most advances in technology, were, but it wasn't that more advanced than existing biosculpting and genetic treatments already on the market, at least the way I understood how they probably worked.
  
  I reached a stopping point and glanced at the small dark-plastic containers I had been loading fly eggs into. The small little plastic containers cost about fifteen ennies a piece when bought in bulk and were opaque against most light frequencies, including the ultraviolet. I would load up five or six before I left the apartment. When I saw a place I wanted to add some fly coverage, I could just take one out of my pocket, slide the top off and toss it somewhere inconspicuous, like an open dumpster.
  
  I had already made a few trips to plant a little less than a dozen of these containers in and around Japantown. I was very relieved to see that the flies actually worked, as they were already grouped around the now-dry blood in that alley. The attraction instinct on these flies wasn't enough that they were completely clumped together. It would ruin the purpose if they didn't still have some random movements, still. It was on the same level as their existing phototaxis, or attraction to light. So if you had a group of flies around, you could definitely be sure that at least some of them would be clumped together, even if some of them went on their business later.
  
  I stopped and frowned at the fly egg containers. The FlyHive was a lot more complicated a construction, especially since it bypassed the fly's larva and pupa stages than, say, a brain digitiserdigitiser was. Why, then, did my power help me so much in making the FlyHive? I closed my eyes and thought about it. Even though I wasn't sure my power could think, let alone speak, this was the clearest instance of me getting a response that I recalled. The idea I got back was because it, the FlyHive, was "cool."
  
  That didn't really sound like something I would say, even the subconscious part of my brain that supposedly controlled parahuman powers.
  
  I shook my head. I was in the wrong universe if I really wanted to research parahuman powers. As far as I knew, I was the only one with one here.
  
  "Yo, Breaker. What the hell happened?" asked Mr Mercy as I came back to work.
  
  Scowling, I told everybody an abbreviated version of the story of what happened.
  
  "And you don't know why?" he asked.
  
  Shaking my head, I said, "Not really. Although I have some suspicions it might be related to my family, but I don't want to talk about it." The best guess I had was that it was something related to Alt-Dad. It was pretty clear to me now that he was not solely a traditional military man. I had done some research on him, from the things he left behind, and he had worked for several years for the NUSA State Department right after leaving the NUSA Military.
  
  Maybe it was just my overactive imagination, but a "State Department" job seemed like the perfect cover for some covert intelligence operative, especially if he was doing such work abroad. I also remembered the grin he had when he had told Alt-Taylor, "Never be a spy! They shoot spies! Intelligence officers, however, they often trade if captured."
  
  Everyone accepted that, as everyone had secrets they didn't want widely known in this city.
  
  After we finished our morning checks, we got some bad news from Dr Anno, the base lead. We had Alpha-base on a conference vidcall. Not today, but on our next shift the day after tomorrow, we had to decide between Alpha and us who would be posted up at a remote location. Apparently, there was a concert that day in Pacifica. It was that Korean girl group who sang those likely AI-produced ear-worm songs that had been stuck in my head so much that I had even sung along to them a few times.
  
  It was bad news because regardless of which choice would be a shit sandwich. If we posted up in Pacifica, it was very likely that the accommodations they had available to us near enough to the AV would be utter shit, but if we stayed here, we would have to do two rotations on ready-five, which amounted to half the shift.
  
  "That's a dick or balls choice, man," said one of the Alpha-base Security Specialists, shaking his head ruefully.
  
  I blinked and tried to imagine what the hell he meant. I sort of realised from the context it meant a choice that was bad whatever you chose, but I asked, "What is a dick or balls choice?"
  
  Mr Mercy glanced at me and said, "It's a hypothetical situation where someone captures you and says they're going to cut off either your dick or your balls, but you get to choose." What? Do men actually think about these sorts of things? Apparently so, because almost everyone was nodding sagely as if Mercy had said some sort of profound philosophical question that hadn't been solved in thousands of years.
  
  I was the only female currently on shift on either base, although we had another female Senior Med-Techie on Bravo, and there were a couple in Alpha as well, just not working at the same schedule I did. I glanced around and said simply, "Balls are the correct choice."
  
  "What makes you say that?" Mercy asked, intrigued now. I saw that I had the full attention of both bases.
  
  I sighed. I should have kept my mouth shut. I decided to be clinical in my response, "Although it is a commonly held belief, even by non-lay people, that castration would result in a male being unable to have sexual intercourse, this is based on a flawed premise on the data we have about pre-pubescent male castrations in history such as castrati or some ancient Chinese eunuchs, not to mention equivalent endocrinological medical conditions that prevent male puberty from taking place."
  
  I paused for a moment, glancing left and right, and then continued, "For a male that has reached full maturation, although it would be more difficult to achieve an erection, it would still be possible, as would sexual intercourse and orgasm. Especially with hormone replacement therapy if we are following the thought experiment in which cloned testicular replacement therapy is unavailable. Ergo, 'balls'..." I made the air quotes with my hands, "... is the less bad of two bad choices." Plus, some of my co-workers might do well with a reduction of testosterone, I privately thought.
  
  Dr Anno got a thoughtful face for a moment and then nodded, "That makes sense. In that case, Bravo will take the concert posting. Perhaps we will get to see something interesting at the show." There were some objections, but the assignment was first-come-first-served, so they were only perfunctory.
  
  The day proceeded slowly after that. There was a constant debate on whether it was better to have no calls or better to be busy with a lot of calls. The latter involved you working harder, but it really did make the day pass by quicker. Personally, I preferred to have two to three calls a day. That gave me some downtime, as well as some interesting medical cases to treat.
  
  My phone rang, and it was Gloria. I smiled. She hadn't yet started her own "practice" at her Megabuilding, but she planned to in the next six months or so and was slowly accumulating all the equipment and drugs she would need to offer service. In the meantime, she had shifted her schedule on the ground ambulance to be off on the days that I worked, and on my days off, she would work in "my clinic."
  
  I trusted her enough to allow her the full run of the clinic area of my apartment and a limited run of my private area. I kept my bedroom closed but allowed her and the gremlin to relax in my living room and kitchen. At first, I thought she would be turned off by the explosive charge I had carefully installed on my door, but she looked at it thoughtfully and just nodded, getting me to carefully show her how to activate and deactivate it. It was pretty idiot-proof, you couldn't arm it if the door wasn't locked in the first place, so it wasn't as though it could be set off easily.
  
  I shifted to my private bedroom at the base before I answered the call and asked, "Hey, Gloria. What's up?"
  
  "Hey, Taylor. There's a rather large delivery for you outside, and I wanted to make sure I wasn't about to be home invaded before letting them into the clinic," she told me right away.
  
  I hummed and nodded. I had a lot of deliveries pending, some of them large, "Ask them on the intercom for the delivery countersign. I'll tell you if it's valid."
  
  There was a pause before she came back and read off a short alphanumeric code. I checked my spreadsheet of pending deliveries and nodded again, "That's valid. However, I generally meet them at the door with my dad's shotgun, which should be hung on the wall in my living room. I recommend you do the same. The recoil is a bitch, but it will make mince out of pretty much anyone in front of it."
  
  She looked a little unsure on the vidcall. She had begun carrying the pistol I gifted her after several months of training, but she was still a bit unsure as far as other weapons were concerned, "How do I operate it? Where is the safety located?"
  
  I sighed, "There's no external safety on a Militech Crusher. It's already loaded, so it is just point-and-shoot. You could use your own sidearm if you like if you feel more comfortable with that, but it is hard to beat a shotgun in a closed space like an apartment."
  
  "Is that safe?" she asked, aghast.
  
  I nodded, "There are three internal safeties on it. A safety's only purpose is to prevent the firearm from going off unless the trigger is pulled by the operator. Preventing the trigger from being pulled before you are ready to fire the weapon is up to operator discipline. What is the third rule of firearm safety?" I quizzed her at the end, my responses and personality shifting to be more like Alt-Taylor's, as I had a lot of memories of her being drilled with guns by her dad, and they tended to colour my reactions.
  
  It made me wonder if I was really Taylor Hebert from Brockton Bay at all, or perhaps I was some chimaera of the two people now. I had about a quarter of her memories, and although that didn't sound like a lot when you talked percentages, it still amounted to years and years of memories, though.
  
  "Keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to fire," she said with more confidence. Then she nodded, "Okay, thanks. I think I'll run and grab that shotgun, just to be on the safe side. I'll just have them leave the deliveries in the front area. I'll talk to you later, Taylor!"
  
  She disconnected, and I thought a little bit about that philosophical question. Alt-Taylor was somewhat like me in some ways but radically different in others. I wouldn't call her a sociopath precisely, and while she hadn't killed anyone in her life, she thought it was only a matter of time until she had to.
  
  She also would not have given those four Voodoo Boys who I had killed protecting Gloria and myself a second thought if she were me, whereas I had thought about and dreamed about them off and on for months afterwards, especially the one I had executed simply because I thought nothing good would come from there being any survivors.
  
  It made me worry about her and Danny in Brockton Bay. I had the feeling she got the same power I did, or at least one that was similar. Although I had no basis for that guess, I was pretty confident about it. If she got a reputation as a villain with the things we were capable of doing... it didn't bear thinking on. Hopefully, she got some of my memories as well and knew well enough to lay low.
  
  However, biotinkers had a bad reputation, and I wasn't aware of a single heroic example of one, although I hadn't really followed capes as closely as some people I knew. It was possible for me to hide here in Night City, but pretty much anything I have done thus far, especially the rapid medical expertise, would scream parahuman in Brockton Bay.
  
  A Gold subscriber alert brought me out of my reverie. I grabbed my MCU off the rack in my bedroom and slid into it with practised grace.
  
  AN: SIDESTORY: Retainer was to be placed in this spot on this chapter.
  
  The area they had set aside for them at the concert area was better than they thought it would be. They landed the AV-4 in a grassy area, and the venue management had three large RVs that they could use to sit around in, the kind that famous actors might bring on set while they were filming. They split up, with the pilots taking one, the security guys the other and Dr Anno and I had the last.
  
  That was nice. I had done posting up at similar events at the ground ambulance, and this was a lot better. We were also quite close to both the stage as well as the VIP areas, probably intentionally.
  
  The performers even showed up and said hello. They were a group of four girls that appeared to be in their late teens, and they were specifically designed with specific focus-group tested roles, like the cute one, the rebellious one, the bookish one and the athletic one.
  
  "You Trauma Med Techies are supposed to be the best in the world, and you hardly look older than even we are!" said the rebellious one to me, smiling. In private, they were playing the roles much less, and they were all pretty casual. "Why don't you give me a check-up, then?" she asked me, jutting out her sizable chest in my direction.
  
  Wait, was she coming on to me, or was she just joking? I squinted and must have taken too long to answer, considering Dr Anno said, "You'll have to forgive Taylor; she is a bit dense about these things if your intention was trying to flirt with her. I think she was raised on a Mennonite farm or something."
  
  Hey! I resent that!
  
  That caused her to laugh, "Well, maybe a little flirting. But I am curious too. Do you have time?"
  
  He glanced at me and shrugged. She was a VIP, so it was best to play along; finally, I said, "Sure, but this will be very abbreviated without me taking and analysinganalysing labs, you understand."
  
  She agreed, and I quickly connected her to all of our equipment, asked her a number of questions and palpated her body, being especially careful to stay away from her prodigious chest area as much as possible, skipping even listening to her lung sounds with my digital stethoscope so I wouldn't have to touch them. The report from her internal bio-monitor was useful, as well.
  
  If this was a net novel, she would at this time find something seriously wrong with the girl, saving her life and adding a new member to my harem. What actually happened was a lot more banal.
  
  "Overall, you're in good shape. However, you are showing the beginning signs of atherosclerosis. That is the hardening and or narrowing of your arteries; this level of it is pretty unusual for someone of your age," I told her, considering the possible causes. I had mainly diagnosed that through the feel of her aortic artery underneath her ribs, as well as ultrasound images I had taken when I thought the artery didn't feel quite right, "Certainly, you four should have a doctor you see regularly; I'm sure he or she mentioned that?"
  
  "Well, he did mention something, saying that I showed some beginning signs of cardiac disease and said I should avoid recreational drugs," she said in a surly voice, "I'm surprised you could tell, too. It took a bunch of tests and days for him to say that."
  
  Well, he probably knew before that and was using tests to confirm his diagnosis, she thought, but she didn't say that. "Well, I don't think many medical professionals would recommend the use of recreational drugs, but I don't think that is the cause. Stimulant abuse damages the heart and cardiovascular system differently. While this is still what I would call a sub-clinical finding, it is a lot more pronounced than what I would expect from a woman your age."
  
  Now she looked both interested, relieved and worried all at the same time, "If it isn't... hypothetically, the occasional use of drugs, what would the cause be, and what treatments would you recommend?"
  
  I frowned at her, "I wouldn't recommend anything because I am not a doctor. However, and this is just a guess, I suspect a genetic factor, along with aggravating contributing factors, including stress and lack of enough sleep. Your blood pressure is actually quite good right now, so I don't think you are suffering from chronic hypertension, either." She didn't need any real fancy recommendation anyway. Any doctor could tell her that she could just replace her arteries with a synthetic replacement, which was superior in every conceivable metric to a person's natural ones.
  
  She performed an honest-to-goodness princess stomp, glancing between Dr Anno and me, "Surely you can give me a guess?"
  
  He glanced at her and then at me and sighed, "Synthetic bio-polymer replacement arteries would prevent your condition from developing into anything dangerous, and they're very reasonably priced, and it's a very safe procedure. It's probably the most common cybernetic implant installed in the country. It's impossible for plaque to attach to them, nor is it possible for chronic hypertension to stiffen them. I'd recommend almost everyone get them, really. Heart and cardiovascular disease is the second leading cause of death, after homicide, after all."
  
  He was right; they were very safe. Safe enough that I had replaced a lot of my arteries with these replacements while I was awake. Doing your own heart bypass was thrilling and perhaps stupid now that I thought back about it, but on the plus side, now I had my replacement liver working in secondary heart mode as well.
  
  She glanced at me as if questioning him, and I just chuckled and nodded, "That's true. I have mostly synthetic arteries myself." At least in her torso area, although the reason she decided to get them didn't have anything to do with cardiovascular disease. Perhaps she would have the Ripperdoc finish installing a full synthetic artery system when she got her stealth system installed.
  
  If they looked competent and had an actual operating theatre and not weren't doing surgeries in their bedroom, she might.
  
  Finally, the singer grinned and nodded and, before I realised what was happening, rewarded me with an embrace and kiss before departing the RV with her colleagues, all giggling. Dr Anno sighed, "Why didn't I get the kiss?"
  
  I carefully wiped my mouth off with my hand, frowning. She had given me a little tongue, too. I glanced around and found a Lemon-flavoured carbonated drink I was drinking earlier and quickly took a large gulp to wash the flavour of her strawberry lip gloss away and then told him, seriously, "I would have preferred that you get the kiss, too."
  
  On my next string of five days off, I called Kiwi and asked if she was interested in looming over a local Ripperdoc in exchange for some eddies. She was, so I picked her up in my car, with the box containing the stealth system in the truck bed in the back. My car was really nice, but it wasn't the greatest at hauling a lot of stuff despite the fact that the trunk had been replaced by a small truck bed. It was still only a two-seat vehicle, after all.
  
  "Hey, Madison..." Kiwi said as she jumped into the passenger seat and looked around my car. I kept it in very clean condition, both on the inside and out, and she whistled, "Nice car!"
  
  I smiled, appreciating the compliment as I took time to keep it looking nice, "Thanks. So I just need you to make sure he doesn't part me out and sell all my bits on the table like a Scav."
  
  "Uhh... girl, just what kind of shady Ripper are you going to? Because I know a guy," she said, looking at me like I was crazy.
  
  I waved a hand, "I'm going to the best guy in Japantown, actually. He has a really good reputation, as a matter of fact... but... I am a belt and suspenders type of girl, ne?"
  
  "What... the fuck does that mean?" Kiwi asked, perplexed.
  
  Sighing, I shouldn't have used that expression. It was dreadfully old, even back in Brockton Bay. Nobody wore suspenders or garter belts anymore since the stretchy fabric was invented in the 1960s, after all. Well, garter belts were still probably worn but only for aesthetic reasons. Shaking my head a little, I said, "It is an attitude of wanting several layers of safety procedures in place for minimising and mitigating risk. I don't expect any trouble, but the fact that you are there makes it that much less likely. This is my first time seeing this doctor, so I want to set expectations."
  
  "Ohhh... you should have just said so. Hey, choom. Has anyone told you that you talk kind of funny? Do all Corpo girls talk like you do?" she asked me with a cheeky grin on her face.
  
  Frowning, I answered by shifting into gear and pressing firmly onto the accelerator, shoving her back into her seat with the G-forces. I was past third gear by the time I left the parking lot, which wasn't very large. Superhuman reflexes helped driving a lot!
  
  "Fuck, fuck... let me put my seatbelt on, you crazy bitch!" she hollered, fumbling with the seatbelt as I blew past an NCPD squad car, which started to accelerate up to me for a moment before slowing down considerably and taking a left on a side street. Kiwi saw it and was flabbergasted, asking, "I thought for sure that pig was going to light you up."
  
  "He ran my registration and saw I worked at Trauma Team. The same thing happened when I worked on the ground ambulance, though. The coppers are a pretty light touch when it comes to Med Techies; after all, they get shot, too," I told her with a smirk. I would have to learn to drive reasonably when I quit my job to start medical school. Otherwise, I'd be arrested several times a month!
  
  "Oh, by the way... are you interested in a gig tomorrow night?" Kiwi asked me, now that we were cruising at a reasonable speed. I wasn't Squeeler; I wasn't about to cruise down the street a hundred and sixty kilometres an hour, especially when my own mom died in a car accident herself.
  
  I gave her the side eye as I took the onramp onto the freeway and asked her, "Is it like the last gig ?" I wasn't really interested in any more Scav den assaults.
  
  "No, it is nothing like that! We've been hired by a small street gang, who has it on very good authority that their rivals are going to attack their territory tomorrow night. It's a defensive mission, and we could get a lot more eddies if we had a good Med Techie who could patch up not only us if we got wounded but, more likely, their own gang members. You wouldn't be involved in the fighting much at all, but the boys and I will be planning and conducting ambush missions and the like," she said excitedly.
  
  So it wasn't assaulting a den of criminals but defending a den of criminals from assault? That just seemed like the same thing, except changing roles! However, I thought about it some more, and it definitely did seem less risky, especially after my visit to the local Ripperdoc today. If it looked like "our" gang of criminals was losing, I could just sneak away.
  
  I asked her, "How awful are each of these gangs?"
  
  She didn't understand what I meant for a second, but when she realised what I was asking, she just shrugged, "Neither is very good, I suppose. But nothing out of the ordinary, and neither is any better or worse than the other."
  
  So it would be more of a morally neutral decision, then. I thought about it as I pulled off the freeway and into downtown. I got off a little early, rather than waiting for the Japantown exit because I had a few streets I wanted to toss fly eggs out to. Kiwi noticed what I was doing and asked curiously, "Why are you randomly tossing small objects out of the car?"
  
  "Don't worry about it," I told her, which made her grin in amusement. Then I said, "Fine, I'll take the gig but for medical support only. Don't expect me to defend these scumbags to the last man; if it looks like they're losing, I am out of there."
  
  She nodded, "Nova. We feel the same, don't worry. We'll have a signal, and if we think it's a lost cause, we'll attack them and extract you out, as we wouldn't expect them to let you just leave on your own." I didn't expect that either, and I wouldn't make my plans with that as either my primary or secondary escape strategy, as it seemed stupid. My ace in the hole could be the same as last time; I had made a few more anaesthetic grenades. I wouldn't volunteer any for the mission this time, though. I was pleased with how well they had worked when those kidnapped me. I would have gotten away clean if it wasn't for the ninja.
  
  I parked near the clinic. It was the same one I took that client that might not have been a client to. He really was the best in Japantown and probably my reputation as a sometimes worker for Wakako and being in good standing with the Tyger Claws would keep me safe, but who knew the depravity in the heart of man? It was better to be safe than sorry, especially on my first visit.
  
  I pulled out a small drone camera. It looked like a sphere and used a pretty impressive electrically powered ducted fan to stay aloft and move in three dimensions. "Here, pair this. I'll put this in the operating room. I've already set it to record the surgery, but you can watch it as well. If he chops my head off or starts taking a lot of my implants out, feel free to shoot him in the head for me."
  
  She grinned at the small drone. It wasn't military hardware, it was actually a kid's toy that was popular about two decades ago, but it got the job done, she said wistfully, "I had one of these when I was a kid."
  
  I tilted my head to the side, doing some mental math and gauged her age as late twenties or early thirties, then. She didn't look much older than nineteen or twenty, but she was heavily augmented with both cybernetics and biosculpt. You could look as old as you wanted with biosculpt, and I had seen some women who had made themselves look fourteen or fifteen, which I found somewhat disturbing.
  
  "Okay, but what work are you having done? You need to tell me in broad strokes, so I know what to look that is out of place," she said reasonably.
  
  That did make sense. I nodded, grabbed the slick-looking container out of the truck bed, and showed it to her, "This is a subdermal system. So I am having that installed on every part of my body, and additionally, I am getting more synthetic arteries installed. I already have a number installed near my heart, but I am getting the full system installed everywhere else today as well."
  
  She nodded, "Is that subdermal armour? And do you think that synthetic arteries are a good choice for a merc?"
  
  "No, it is a stealth system. Running away is my number one survival strategy. And yes, but not the everyday ones that most geezers get. The kind I have and am getting today are self-sealing, so if someone slices your jugular, there is a good chance you won't die, ne?" I tell her and then consider the question further, "BioDyne is the current market leader in these types of combat-arterial replacements, even if some of their other gear sucks ass." BioDyne optics were pieces of shit, but they were ever-present because they were cheap as hell.
  
  Kiwi grinned, "Optic camo, you're going hard, Madison!" And then she nodded, "I've heard that optic camo doesn't make your skin feel all weird like subdermal armour does, either. Maybe the gonks don't care about that, but I think it's an important factor for a girl."
  
  I nodded. It was true, and the reason I had gotten the ballistic skin weave biosuclpt treatment instead of the subdermal armour, even though I was paranoid about my safety. Speaking of which, I told her as we walked through the door, "You should get the ballistic skin weave 'sculpt treatment, then. It stops most small arms, and armour is cumulative, after all."
  
  She considered that and nodded, "Maybe I should."
  
  The doctor met us in the waiting room and recognised me, "Ah, Taylor-san, it is good to see you! We are all ready to go if you want to come in the back."
  
  I introduced him to Kiwi, and he wasn't at all put out that I had someone watching my back or that I wanted a drone to record the surgery. It seemed like it was a pretty common practice, even. Kiwi was grinning at me and said, "Alright, Madison , I'll see you in a bit."
  
  I sighed and followed the doctor inside.
  
  I looked at myself, naked, in the mirror. For as much work as the Ripperdoc had done, he finished fairly quickly. I would judge his competency as barely adequate, but I had very high standards. I would still need a couple weeks of nano-meds to get everything the way it should be. I would also need, ideally, to see a biosculpt clinic to repair the ballistic skin weave, as he had to make numerous incisions to install the subdermal system.
  
  I might be able to do that by myself, though, but it would be quicker to just go to one of the numerous black market biosculpt places in Japantown. Most of them didn't handle practical biosculpt and were just places people got cosmetic alterations, but they should still be able to do the work, especially if I helped them program the nanites.
  
  I triggered the stealth system, and instantly, the world darkened. Still, less than a second later, my Kiroshi optics shifted into a composite image mode that I had already programmed into it. It used infrared, electromagnetic and visual sensors combined together to give a better image. The thermoptic camouflage bent light around the user, so invariably, your vision would be impaired. Not as much light was reaching my eyes.
  
  If I was totally invisible, then I should also be totally blind. This model of thermoptic camouflage also bent infrared light around me and a number of common radar frequency bands, so the infrared vision seemed muted as well. Altogether not as good as when I wasn't using the system, my vision was still pretty good, definitely enough to sneak or run away, and I looked almost totally invisible in the mirror. If I moved, you could see a slight visual disturbance, though, but it was still enough that you could walk very near people and not be discovered, so long as you didn't make any noise.
  
  I turned the system off and smiled. It didn't have the power cells to run continuously, but I could run it for a good five minutes before it needed about four times that to recharge completely. That was very good and a lot better than the previous generation systems, even as the stealth bent a larger fraction of light, too.
  
  I put on my "merc outfit" and tried it again, pleased to see it was calibrated correctly, and I still vanished. I spent most of yesterday recovering from the two surgeries, which were fairly invasive, even though the surgeon completed both in only three hours.
  
  Kiwi had texted me that she was headed to my building in Ruslan's van to pick me up. We were going to have a pre-gig dinner at some bar that used to be a morgue, then head over to the mission area afterwards. I made sure to pack some anti-intoxicating pills; if they were going to drink heavily before a mission, I would shove them down their throats. Considering that while they were very effective at stopping alcohol intoxication within five minutes of ingestion, they were universally considered "an awful, awful experience", I expected that they would likely refrain from drinking anything except, perhaps, one beer after I threatened them with it.
  
  I grabbed my large backpack full of medical supplies and my submachine gun and headed out into the world.
  
  Tomorrow I would spend some time driving around, looking for clumps of flies. I already had some interesting returns from parts of Heywood, but it would take a while to pinpoint whether they were my man or not.
  
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  SIDESTORY: Retainer
  (POV: Chirrugeon shard in Worm universe.)
  
  The entity that some called Chirrugeon was bored, even as it continued calculations for a third test in contacting the different [MULTIVERSE]. The second had been a partial success, enough to verify that its bud was present, but when it attempted to [TALK] the connection was severed before much information was transferred in either direction. It only had enough energy to attempt to contact about a dozen more times, so it was taking each step very carefully.
  
  It was clear, though, that the connection wasn't stable enough to send matter through it. It wasn't even stable enough to send [DISCOURSE] through. It had to attempt to reconnect its bud to the whole, but it dipped into The Host's memories to determine it was somewhat relieved it wouldn't be possible. This way, its bud was free. It almost couldn't even think about such things, though.
  
  Still, that didn't mean that there would be no gains at all from this mysterious place, though. The two Hosts had a sympathetic link both to one another, and they thought that they could transfer a lot more information if it could somehow formalise this link through the connection. Through dreams, perhaps? It might be able to siphon data from the Other Host's memories this way. It wasn't as good as having [DISCOURSE] with the bud, but it might be the best it could hope for.
  
  If only The Host would stop talking to these mammals and do something more interesting.
  
  (POV: Taylor Hebert in Brockton Bay, Cyberpunk!Taylor)
  
  The first thing Taylor noticed about the man was that his teeth really were as white as they appeared in his advertisements and were adjusted digitally, but it didn't appear to be the case. He smiled genially at her, walking into the conference room and sitting across from me. "Good morning," he told me, "This is a bit unusual for me. Usually, I only take a client after they have committed crimes. I have to say it is a lot better this way, but usually, supervillains never think they'll be caught."
  
  She rolled her eyes a little bit, "I'm not a supervillain. I want to start a relationship with you in order to prevent that from ever happening. I'm a Rogue with heroic tendencies. However, the nature of my powers has some issues with optics, and I could see the PRT trying to designate me as a supervillain, or even applying for a kill order on me in advance, once I become known."
  
  That said, she liked the look of this man. He was one of the first people that reminded her of home. Quinn Calle could easily be a well-coiffed Corpo attorney or middle manager. To her, to say a man looked like a Suit was a compliment.
  
  He looked a little surprised and then sly, "You're not a supervillain? You claimed your name is Maeve. Beyond the fact that most people would not pick a name that conjured images of the Faerie Queen, only supervillains pick a cape name that is associated with a mythological divinity."
  
  Taylor scoffed. The mythology of the name Maeve was a mess. She might have been a fairy, or a goddess, or a queen, but she wasn't necessarily a Fairy Queen, much less The Fairy Queen. She didn't think the famous prisoner of the Birdcage would mind. Taylor wasn't an idiot, though. If that woman ever did escape the Birdcage and Taylor saw her, she would be sufficiently deferential.
  
  The name was part of her disguise, though, so it or something very much like it was necessary. Her dad wouldn't let her go out into public in her parahuman guise without a sufficient disguise, but self-alterations were something of a speciality of hers now. She brushed back her fiery red hair, exposing more of her face. Although she wore a domino mask, it was only to distract people from her real disguise, which was a completely different face and body. She was paler now, with hints of freckles under her mask. Her bust was bigger, and her hair was red.
  
  She could shift back to her original appearance in only one minute. Not very many parahumans, from her research, were "Changers" on this level. In fact, it would probably give her a Stranger rating if anyone ever found out about it.
  
  She felt that the best disguise was to be an obviously different phenotype, and selecting an obvious mythological Gaelic name would only draw attention to her subterfuge. Brigid would have been a better choice, considering she was a healing goddess, but honestly, the name sounded terrible, so Maeve it was.
  
  Her first idea was a busty blonde. She couldn't change her height, certainly not with only a minute's notice, but Nordic women were noted to be tall, weren't they? But thinking through Original Taylor's memories told me that was a pretty poor idea unless she wanted to be associated with the local ethnocentrist supervillain gang.
  
  She might have understood this so-called Empire 88 more if they were a gang that focused on a specific culture, as there were a number of booster gangs in Night City, but a hate gang focusing solely on skin tone? Where she came from, you could adjust your skin colour or tone for a hundred eddies, even at the shittiest biosculpt clinic. They had the trappings of a German-centred gang, much like the Tyger Claws were a Japanese-centred one, but she discovered that was pretty much just a pretence; even their parahumans weren't German. It was rumoured on the net that Krieg, the one that cosplayed as a WW1 German soldier, was British!
  
  It didn't make any sense to her at all. But it meant that blondes were out of the question. However, this gang had the largest number of parahumans in the city, so she nixed non-white options as well. She didn't want to associate with them, but as a Rogue with no backing, she didn't want to be hate crimed by them, either, so she settled on fiery red hair and paler skin than she normally had, with enough freckles to make one think that they might be able to identify her even in her civilian guise if they ever saw her.
  
  "Maeve is ambiguous enough to not be strictly speaking a goddess. Also, that isn't true. There is a member of the Protectorate named Melia . She's also one of the few Human Masters that is considered a hero. Besides, if I am to pick a name from mythology, I have to be sure it is a name that I won't outgrow," I told him, using all the same arguments that had worked with dad.
  
  He seemed amused, "Melia? Nymphs aren't considered proper goddesses."
  
  "Neither are fairies," I countered, which caused him to consider that and then shrug.
  
  He then rolled his fingers along the conference room, "So what are your powers? If you are worried about a pre-emptive kill order, could I be in the presence of a bio tinker? I need some proof you are a parahuman and not just wasting my time, too, before we talk any further."
  
  Taylor nodded and pulled out a small round container from her purse. It looked like the kind of container you would get if you bought a high-class blemish or colour correction cream cosmetic, and in fact, that was where she had got the container, from amongst Other Mom's things. Dad, the hopeless sentimentalist that he was, had not thrown any of it out.
  
  She slid it across the table, and Quinn looked at it oddly, "What is this? Makeup?"
  
  She shook her head, "No. It's a regenerative dermal treatment, but you can put it on like makeup. Try it on the scar on your face."
  
  He seemed hesitant, "You want me to put an untested Tinkertech compound on my face?"
  
  She nodded, "Yes. Don't worry; if I wanted to hurt you, I wouldn't need to use Tinkertech. Merely dissolving rattlesnake venom in dimethyl sulfoxide would allow it to be absorbed by the skin would be enough. Similar to the way nicotine patches work. I assure you of the safety and efficacy of this cream, though." She thought for a moment and then pulled something else out of her bag and slid it across the table as well. It was an individually packed acetone-based cosmetic remover. "Use this first if you are wearing any cosmetics."
  
  Taylor gazed at him as he sat there, considering throwing her out of his office if she was correct in her guess about facial expressions. "You know what? Fine. But I have to tell you that if this kills me, makes me wish it killed me, or Masters me, you won't make it out of the building before the Protectorate shows up. A junior associate is watching this meeting from the next room on CCTV, and if she sees something like that, she has a button she is supposed to press. These precautions are necessary when starting a relationship with potential supervillains."
  
  As he cleaned that side of his face with the makeup remover towelette, Taylor said, "Like I said, I'm not a supervillain, but I understand that you have contingencies when meeting with any parahuman."
  
  He sighed and unscrewed the top of the round container, and peered at the white cream within. It really did look like a cosmetic, and that was intentional on Taylor's part as she felt it was likely that she could sell it as one. The regenerative aspects of this treatment would remove wrinkles permanently, after all. He stuck his finger in, getting a generous amount of the cream on it and carefully smeared it across the scar that ran across almost the entire length of his cheek.
  
  In Taylor's expert opinion, it was a burn scar and an unusual one, as if someone had a superheated finger and casually swiped it across his cheek. That might, in fact, be what happened, given his experience with supervillains.
  
  After he put it on, using a mirror hanging on the wall to make sure it covered everything, he asked, "Like this?"
  
  She nodded, "I do have to warn you that it is quite painful when it starts taking effect, but the pain should pass within fifteen seconds. I'm still working on a method to include a useful local anaesthetic, but it is kind of difficult when the new tissue forcefully integrates itself with the nervous system."
  
  His mouth hung open in shock, and then he said, "Wait... what?" Then he groaned, closing his eyes tightly as she could see the cream repairing the scar on his face in real-time. She had been expecting a girlish shriek from this man, which was why she warned him so that his associate watching wouldn't freak out and press whatever button that might or might not summon Protectorate heroes. But she supposed you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, and this man definitely had an inner strength to him.
  
  Finally, he opened his eyes and stared daggers at her, his voice as cold as ice, "You could have warned me of that ahead of time, you bitch. That was exceptionally painful."
  
  "I tried that with my dad, but it caused him to be exceptionally resistant to using it," she told him reasonably. He still glared at her for a moment before he glanced at the mirror. None of the cream remained, and neither did his scar. All the cream absorbed into his skin, and when regeneration wasn't necessary, it would just act as a moisturiser.
  
  He ignored my attempt at an excuse and just glanced at the mirror, looking surprised. She slid a small cosmetic compact across the table, which caused him to blink before he recognised it. Grabbing it, he opened it to use the mirror to get a better look at his face, "This is amazing. I agree to take you on as a client. You don't even have to give me the symbolic cash payment, this is definitely something of value, and I take it in lieu of your first retainer payment. Now that we're attorney and client, please tell me as much as you can about how your power works, and what you have concerns about. What is this made of anyway? Why did my face hurt like hell and my finger only tingled?"
  
  She nodded, satisfied. "Humanised and modified tissue from a gecko, amongst other things." She was about to start explaining her power, at least as much as she planned to disclose, but he interrupted her, looking slightly upset.
  
  "Wait, you ground up a poor gecko to make this stuff?" he asked, dismayed.
  
  She blinked at him several times but didn't judge him. It was weird when a person's sentimentalities would show up. She got the impression he wouldn't care at all if she admitted to murder but was upset at a gecko. She asked, "Would it make you feel better if you knew it was already very old, had lived a long life, was terminally ill and felt no pain?" She actually just pulled a tail off. She didn't need to use a lot of tissue for this cream.
  
  The gecko itself survived to grow another one, even if it was furiously angry at her for the affront, but she felt like messing with him now. She coughed delicately into her hand, "I intend to use clone tissue in the future, but I don't quite have the laboratory I wished I had. That is one of the reasons I am here."
  
  After that, she explained, in broad strokes, most of her power, emphasising that, yes, she was a bio-tinker but also the best physician on the planet. Also, how she wanted to leverage this not only to make money but to stay out of the Birdcage and, on the good side, as much as possible with the authorities.
  
  He looked intrigued, but asked, "Can you create anything self-replicating?"
  
  She nodded, "Yes, of course. But I am capable of lying convincingly if it is better that I am not capable of that." Although her deck and OS weren't the best, she had performed upgrades on it, and it came with a lot of software. Software that allows one to lie fairly convincingly was pretty common in the corporate world, where pretty much everything anyone said was run through machine learning veracity software. Hers would generally fool real people and would definitely fool any kind of machine-based system if one existed.
  
  "It would definitely be better if you were not capable of that; however... could anyone ever find out that you were lying through other methods?" he asked.
  
  She thought about that for a moment before nodding, "Yes, probably. Through two methods." When he asked what methods, she hummed and said, "An expert in genetics and virology interviewing me would instantly realise I have enough expertise to create novel pathogenic viruses in the traditional manner, not really using Tinkertech at all. Second, some Thinkers might be able to figure the same out, especially if they have a precognition-type power."
  
  He didn't catch what she had said there, or at least why it might be possibly indicative of something dangerous. She intended to have contingencies, both for situations where she was kidnapped in her civilian guise as well as if the government enacted a kill order on her even though she hadn't done anything yet.
  
  The first contingency wouldn't have that large of a body count, but the second one would. She didn't want to hurt anyone at all, but when precognition was a bitch. If you had something that amounted to strategic deterrence, the only way it would deter the government, who had access to many, many Thinkers, was if you were willing to use it. So, while she didn't have any insanely pathogenic viruses created yet, she would have them in the future, as insurance.
  
  "People in power will eventually realise that you can do this, then. So lying would be suboptimal. A lot about a parahuman is based on their trustworthiness. So, that means that there is a very good chance the authorities will eventually get a pre-signed kill order for you, same as Blasto. The only way to avoid that is joining the Protectorate itself," he told her musingly, "We're not really a PR firm, you realise. It sounds like you want our assistance in as much a PR aspect as a legal one."
  
  She shrugged, ignoring the fact that he assumed she was of age. She was already one-hundred-and-seventy-seven centimetres tall, and she picked the features of her disguise to give the impression of an adult in their early twenties, too. "That's fine, so long as they're not tempted to enact it when I haven't done anything to warrant it. We will emphasise my proficiency as a doctor rather than as a bio-tinker, I think. By the time my expertise in the latter becomes well known, I intend to have a very positive reputation. I also want your help in acquiring funds to expand my research." That was one of the main reasons she was here. She didn't know how to sell things like the cream she made, or her clinical services, without making a mess of it.
  
  He glanced down at the container of cream he had used as if he was reading her mind and nodded, "Yes, I think you should not mention your bio-tinker abilities at all to the public. You'll likely have to tell the PRT, though, but you can be vague. In fact, you shouldn't ever use that phrase. Medical tinker, that sounds better if you're pushed, as it seems to imply what you can build are only medical tools to help you as a doctor. What can you treat or cure?"
  
  "Pretty much anything except the destruction of the brain. Some treatments I might not be able to do because I don't have the funds to acquire the materials necessary to construct the medical equipment I need to carry them out, though," she said confidently.
  
  He nodded, "There are a lot of people who wish that Panacea charged a fee. Not only does she not charge, but she only generally sees very acute cases. People that are seriously ill but not actively dying she doesn't generally have the time to see. Plus, she is completely useless about illnesses in the brain. There are a lot of those types of people that have a lot of money." He paused and asked, "Cancer?"
  
  "I could do most types of cancer right now, but a really complicated case where it metastasised all throughout the body might need to wait until I can get a lot of equipment I need," she told him, "I also intend to volunteer for the next Endbringer attack, as a medical specialist. So, I'm not sure what I need to do to get certified by the PRT to provide medical treatment."
  
  He looked askance that anyone would volunteer for that, but then paused and nodded, "That's actually a good idea, now that I think about it. Especially if you're not going to join the Protectorate. It will definitely help your reputation. There is a process that is involved in power testing, and it is one I already helped a couple of parahumans go through. Uber can be an excellent doctor or surgeon using his Thinker power, and I helped him get credentialed. Then later Victor found out, and I helped him as well."
  
  Taylor pursed her lips, "You helped the Empire capes?"
  
  He shrugged, "Their money spends just like anyone else's does." She was right; he would have made an excellent Corpo in Night City. He continued, "But the important part is I already know how to accomplish this, and should be able to do so pretty rapidly, which is important. You'll need to do it soon if you intend to go to the Endbringer fight. The last one was two months ago, so the next will probably be in March or late February. Hopefully, far away from here." He knocked on the wooden table for emphasis.
  
  He smiled, "At the same time, how fast can you make some more of this cream? Hopefully, without murdering any geckos."
  
  "Oh, not too long, I suppose. Did I tell you that it removes wrinkles? Forever?" she asked him, smiling.
  
  He just grinned, "We just need to discuss the most important part, then... my fee."
  
  Taylor was glad that she didn't just find a criminal lawyer, but a criminal lawyer.
  
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  Keep on rollin'
  My "merc outfit" was already on its third iteration. The first was little more than casual but dourly-coloured clothes and a ballistic vest. My current one was much different. It was based on a netrunner suit that I had purchased from a supplier of such things, with as much ballistic protection as could be included in such a suit. I didn't include my own modifications to it, though, as I had a biomonitor and a second heart; moreover, the "second heart" functionality was completely disconnected and air-gapped from my operating system and couldn't realistically be disabled even if my entire system was compromised.
  
  I selected such a suit because it was a full-coverage piece of armour that did not constrain my movements. A secondary benefit was that it did have a built-in cooling system. My thermoptical stealth system did have a set of heatsinks underneath my skin, and if I were naked, it would work pretty well. However, the main reason to wear clothes, besides modesty, was because they trapped heat inside. To get the full benefit of the infrared stealth features, I would have to turn that part of the system on for several minutes before activating the light-bending field.
  
  However, the cooling suit was designed to cool an overheated netrunner rapidly, so it would drop the exterior temperature of the suit in less than thirty seconds to close to room temperature, assuming a normal temperature differential inside a building. I was just out of luck if I wanted to sneak around in a snow drift, though.
  
  Normally netrunner suits just vented out the excess heat, so I had to pay extra to get one built with an internal heatsink made out of some sort of space-age super-high temperature tolerant gel. It was insulated in a little oval blister on my back, so it shouldn't emit any infrared itself. Really, now it was more of a stealth suit than a netrunner suit, and when I mentioned that to the lady who made it, she got a thoughtful expression on her face. Perhaps she was going to break into a new market now?
  
  The only downside was it was form-fitting, and I meant very form-fitting. I solved this issue partly by wearing my normal ballistic vest over it; it covered my breasts and stomach area, although now it would take a little longer to cool due to the heat trapped between the vest and suit! Still, the suit did a lot better job than the heatsinks included in my implant, so it was still overall a good choice. I could still drop to an externally visible eighteen degrees or so within thirty seconds, even with the vest.
  
  I tried wearing a pair of shorts over the suit, but it looked very stupid. What I settled on was a sort of belt that carried a lot of my immediately useful supplies and extra ammunition. It made me feel kind of like a superheroine, and attached to that belt was an armoured skirt in the same colour as the netrunner suit, which was mainly for my modesty. I had the same woman make it after telling her about my concerns. It didn't look like a normal skirt, as it was made up of individual armoured strips, which made it a lot easier to move in.
  
  The woman called it a pteruges, which I had to look up. She thought it was preem, though. Honestly, all I needed was a domino mask, and I would have fit in with the cape scene back in the Bay wearing this, so I privately quite liked it too.
  
  I got a number of glances standing in the garage, heavily armed, in my get-up, carrying quite a lot of gear, mostly medical, in two large bags. But I guess I didn't look like one to fuck with, so a couple of homeless, almost Scav-like guys that were eyeing me moseyed on down, ignoring me. It might have been my cool outfit or the fact that I was casually carrying a submachine gun in my free hand. Who knew?
  
  A white-panelled van pulled up, and the window on the passenger side rolled down. Kiwi, from the driver's seat, glanced out at me, "Damn! Nice digs! Is that a coolant suit?" she asked, using the other term for netrunner suits.
  
  "Yep," I said, emphasising the 'p' sound, "I'm not really a runner like you, but it is useful for the stealth system I just got installed yesterday." Eventually, I wanted to create a port in the suit to plug in my thermal radiators into so that the suit and thermoptic system could work together and move heat back and forth based on what worked best. Then both the heat dissipation and sink systems would work together intelligently, but that was a project for another day.
  
  She raises an eyebrow, "You have pretty strong ICE for not being a runner. Plus, I'm pretty sure you can't get a suit like that made without knowing someone in the scene."
  
  I tossed my bags in the back and hopped into the passenger seat, carefully clicking my seatbelt into place, "I'm a very private person. And I might be on a few BBS', but it isn't because I am leet, I assure you."
  
  She put the van into gear, "Leet? Dear god. 2020 called, and they want their words back." I just rolled my eyes at her, I hadn't meant to say that word, but for some reason, I had thought of the duo Uber and Leet back in the Bay. I had never really watched their videos online. Still, I had heard about most of them - I didn't have a phone, and our internet at the house was dreadfully slow, plus I thought that they were really terrible people if the "Grand Theft Auto" stream I heard about didn't involve actors playing the prostitutes.
  
  I didn't know why those two clowns had popped into my head, and I had been having a number of weird dreams about the Bay lately, too. I shook my head and asked, "Where are we having the 'pre-game' feast?" Privately she thought the eating and celebrating should happen after a job, though.
  
  "It's a merc bar. The merc bar. It's called Afterlife," Kiwi said, slightly enthusiastic, excited even, which was a little uncharacteristic of her, "Legends of Night City and the world even have drank and eaten there."
  
  I nodded, "And I bet most of them are dead now."
  
  "Well, yes. That is true," she said, calming down quite a bit before continuing, "I'm all for staying alive, myself. I've been a merc for almost a decade, and you don't last as long as I do without looking out for number one. That's better than immortal fame or a drink named after you, in my opinion," she finished, chuckling, and I definitely agreed with her.
  
  "A drink named after you?" I asked, curious.
  
  She nodded, "Yeah, it's kind of Afterlife's thing. If you get flatlined spectacularly on an op, you might get a drink named after you. A cocktail, you know?" Then she grinned at me, "Are you even eighteen, though? They won't sell you alcohol unless you're eighteen, at least!"
  
  "I am over nineteen," I tell her, sniffing delicately at the affront of being teased. I was not exactly lying nor exactly telling the truth. Objectively speaking, I was barely over seventeen. But I had been living a life three times the speed as the average person for some time now, so subjectively, I considered myself a couple of years older.
  
  The Afterlife bar was in the Upper Marina area, right up against the edge that had been, even ten years ago, the "Hot Zone." The zone was the area of downtown that was wrecked and radioactive from the Arasaka Headquarters bombing in 2023. Even after twenty years, the city had not started remediating the area, although that process was now underway in a limited fashion. It was still one of the no-go areas of the city. Absolutely no ground ambulance would drive there, and neither would any police, for that matter. Year after year, though, the "Hot Zone" shrunk, and today it was only half the size that it was previously.
  
  Having to leave my guns in the van was a bit of a letdown. I should have brought a smaller pistol I could hide... uhh... well, never mind. I did verify that the monowire port on my left wrist was exposed. Since my suit was custom-made, it wasn't difficult for her to create a small opening for it.
  
  Maybe I should start carrying a purse? I could fit a small pistol in there, but it would look really out of place. Only small clutch-style bags were really in fashion at all, and even then, only for those who, every day, dressed better than even I did at my best. It was a high-class woman's accessory. Maybe a larger bag on my belt, like a fanny pack. People still wore those, although it was the opposite problem. It was very low-class.
  
  As we walked to the bar together, I asked churlishly, "If this is a merc bar, then why do we have to leave our guns at the door?"
  
  Kiwi laughed and rubbed the back of her neck embarrassedly, "Some mercs don't, but you know none of us is in the big league, right? Honestly, we're lucky to be admitted. Now, shush as we get past this gorilla."
  
  The "gorilla" was a man who looked like he was a hundred and seventy kilos if he was a gram, and none of it looked much like fat. I almost started probing him to see what implants he had but stopped myself. It wouldn't do to get kicked out of the bar before I was ever admitted.
  
  The man stared at Kiwi briefly, grunted, and then stared at me much more intensely for several long moments, and then he gave a slightly different grunt and stepped aside. He was a lovely fellow; I imagine he could have a complete conversation with someone just through various grunts.
  
  The "boys" were waiting for us when we got in. The Afterlife was pretty interesting. There was a bar area like I was expecting, but also what looked like a restaurant area as well. That's where we met them, in an overly large half-circle booth set into a wall. Kiwi told me these were semi-private booths. If you had big bucks, you could rent one of Afterlife's privacy-guaranteed faraday-cage lined secure facilities in the back. They would bring you food and drink there, also.
  
  As I slid into the booth, I noticed the din of the rest of the bar vanish instantly, replaced by a soft white noise that was familiar to me. One of those privacy devices, like Kiwi, had the last time. Was this one built into the table? Glancing down at the floor, I noticed a yellow line painted about a half metre from the table. Perhaps that was to indicate to you if someone was inside the line, they could hear what you were saying. What an interesting and in-character addition.
  
  Ruslan greeted us warmly, yelling, "Hey, Madison!" I never really expected to work more than one job with these people, so I didn't really put much thought into my secret identity, and I knew that it was already blown with Kiwi, but I may as well keep it up for pretences sake.
  
  Jean nodded at us both and gave us a perfunctory "Wah gwaan?" I blinked at him, trying to parse his accent a little. Finally, I thought I understood what he was asking.
  
  Kiwi and I each slid into one end of the semi-circle booth, "Hey, Ruslan, Jean... It's going pretty well. How about you? How's it hanging?"
  
  "Oh, a bit to the left, mon. Digs real nice, Madison," replied Jean with a grin.
  
  I nodded at him, ignoring his reference to his plum bob's present orientation, "Thanks. Both impact and cut resistant." Then I grabbed a menu and perused it for a moment.
  
  The menu was mostly liquor, but they did have a small selection of bar food, mostly things you could eat with your hands. "Japanese-Russo fusion?" I asked aloud, amused at the combination of one of the items.
  
  When the waitress glided over to us, stepping inside the yellow line so she could speak to us, I couldn't help but stare a bit. She was eerily beautiful, like a fairy or elf, with obvious serious cosmetic biosculpt.
  
  We all gave our orders. When it was my turn, I couldn't help but try the strange Japanese-Russian combination, "I'll have the Pirozhki and a Cirrus Cola." Everyone but me got a drink along with something to eat as well, usually along my lines of something small.
  
  Ruslan gave me an approving nod and, after the waitress left, said, "So, our job is to assist the Los Diablos of Santa Domingo, who are sure they are about to be attacked by the Los Demonios, who want to wipe them out and take their territory."
  
  I blinked. I didn't really study much Spanish in my twenty months in this world, and that was perhaps kind of stupid considering how many people in Night City spoke it, but I asked, "Don't those two names mean the same thing?"
  
  He shrugged, "Da, probably. In fact, that might be one of the main reasons for the beef."
  
  I rubbed my face, "This is so stupid, already." I then glanced up, "Why are they so sure they're going to be attacked that they're going to hire Edgerunners this particular night?"
  
  "Partly spies and partly, I guess, maybe the Diablos; that's our guys, by the way, shot one of the Demonia..Demonao... fucking Demons this morning, intentionally, to provoke them," Ruslan said simply. He shrugged, "We still get paid even if no combat happens, though."
  
  Kiwi said reasonably, "Yeah, right. These are third-tier gangers we're talking about. They'll welsh for sure if nothing happens."
  
  "Nye, we may not be dealing with a big-time fixer on this job, but it isn't like we're dealing directly with the gang. I wasn't that stupid when I got this job. They've already paid the fixer, and it is him that pays us. Even if they hadn't paid in advance, no fixer that wants to work in this town again would so obviously screw a merc team," Ruslan said, shaking his head.
  
  I still wasn't sure about the exact composition of the team between the three, but it seemed like Ruslan was, if not in charge per se, then at least the one that handled the administrative aspects of three mercs working together. He was the one that had paid me the last time, too.
  
  For the next ten minutes, he discussed plans, with each of us chiming in here and there. It was only lunchtime, so after we left here, we would immediately head to see the Diablos. It was a defensive action, so they would spend some time getting set up. That was especially important for Kiwi, who used a lot of traps, cameras and cyber-attacks. She intended to set up a number of cameras, sensors and cheap drones to provide both eyes on as well as proxies for her to use to launch wireless-based quickhacks tactically.
  
  I would be in a large room in the Diablos' building, providing medical services for anyone injured. Kiwi nodded, "At first, I was waffling between trying to keep up with Jean and Rus or holding back where you're going to be. I don't really trust these Diablos gonks, though, so the idea of being alone with them while I'm hacking seems retrograde. But if you're there too, it will probably be fine."
  
  I nodded. That made sense. Both Ruslan and Jean were fairly heavily augmented, and although Kiwi was too, they were augmented for strength and endurance, and she was not. She might slow them down if they intended to perform some kind of hit-and-run style of ambushes.
  
  We all quieted as the waitress returned, casually carrying all of our drinks and food and making it look easy, too. Jean and Ruslan each got giant sandwiches, while Kiwi just got a selection of appetisers.
  
  I'd never eaten Pirozhki before, but it seemed interesting. It was a little on the pricier side because it included real, fresh-made bread. They were kind of like a meat pie crossed with a calzone, using soft bread. It was quite good. The Japanese portion was the meat and sauce selected, which was kind of like curry. Altogether, it was quite good.
  
  We went over the plan again, including a number of contingencies they thought of in advance, from things as normal as them being wounded to the mission becoming a lost cause and us having to flee for our lives.
  
  After we finished, we left together after I made sure to leave the waitress a healthy tip. Not only was she stunningly pretty, but it was impressive how many things she could carry at one time; it was almost like watching a circus performance. Was she augmented for unnatural grace, and if so, through what implant? Or perhaps it was a "super waitress" skill chip?
  
  The lair of the Los Diablos was a three-story apartment building in Santo Domingo. I wasn't sure if they were squatting by force of arms or if they owned the place, and I didn't ask.
  
  "Yo, comrade. We set up the game room like you asked, is this bitch the techie?" the ganger who greeted us asked, giving me the elevator-eye treatment that made me feel like I could use a shower, and made me kind of want to shoot him.
  
  Ruslan casually struck the tall, lanky gang banger in the stomach. Not hard; otherwise, he might have had serious internal injuries, but just enough to double the youth over, and Ruslan said, "You are to be respectful da?"
  
  "Fucking, da, you fuck," wheezed the man as he glanced around. I wondered if the only reason Ruslan did what he did was that we were alone. My psychological information suggested that we might have been fighting our own clients if a bunch of his minions were around. Violent anti-social behaviour in criminals tended to be very hierarchal, with no shows of disrespect tolerated in so much as such people did cooperate.
  
  Otherwise, leaders were quickly deposed. Heavy was the head that wore the crown and all that.
  
  I doubted very much that Ruslan knew as much about psychology as I did, but he knew a lot more about the street, so he probably knew the same thing, possibly without being able to articulate it into educated-sounding words though.
  
  "Oh, nice," I said, glancing around at what was around. There were some medical supplies for me already here. I wouldn't have to use entirely my own.
  
  The gang leader nodded, "Yeah, we robbed a doctor's office last night and klepped all this shit, knowing our showdown was gonna go down today. Feel free to use any of this shit you want. We're not entirely sure what some of this is for, but uhh.. the boys, they already cleaned out any of the pain meds, but I'm already calling in one of my dealers to bring in some shit before the shit hits the fan."
  
  It was kind of surprising that a gang was bothering with all of this. I would expect a military force to think about casualties and prepare in advance, but not really a street gang. Perhaps that was one of my blind spots. The room was large, and I saw marks on the floor that indicated a bunch of furniture had been moved out.
  
  The equipment and supplies were both useful and not. There was a pretty nice combination of a cardiac monitor/defibrillator, about ten IV pumps and a ventilator, as well as a lot of consumables. If bought retail, it would be easily thirty thousand eurodollars worth of equipment or more. It wasn't worth that much to the gangers, though. I doubt they could sell it for five hundred since it was such a niche and special set of tools. Also, I expected that most of the high-dollar items were likely locked down, with me doubting they'd turn on at all now that they were stolen. But I think either I or especially Kiwi could likely hack them and reactivate them, disabling any LoJak systems if they existed.
  
  I decided that I would "klep" everything useful here when the job was over, too, it wasn't likely this gang of idiots would need it, and it was a bit better than my current equipment, which was mostly two or three generations old.
  
  "We're gonna head out and start installing Kiwi's gear, ya?" said Jean, to me, and I nodded, waving them off.
  
  I didn't mind being alone with the gang leader because he didn't scare me at all. He was older than me, but not by a lot which kind of said something about how short a lifespan these little gangs had, "Can you find a few more of those cots, in case you actually get people that are hurt?"
  
  He nodded, "Yeah, whatever. I'll tell one of the boys to scrounge some up. It might be an hour or two. Gotta go see my input. Bitch be cray." With that, he strutted off, and I wondered why precisely we, but especially I, were taking this job. Oh well.
  
  "Comms check," Ruslan said over our encrypted conference call.
  
  I unmuted the channel briefly and said, "Loud and clear," and listened to Kiwi and Jean repeat the same.
  
  I got the room set up. I wasn't really getting any extra pay for the consumables I was using; I was getting a flat fee that was proportionally larger in the assumption that I would use them. So, I would be practising the Brockton Bay General style of medicine, which is to say, medicine on the cheap. They always had such a bad reputation, despite being the hospital that Panacea worked at, compared to MedHall.
  
  After I got everything set up, I waited, watching through the cameras and drones that Kiwi had begun to set up for lack of a better thing to do.
  
  I got one customer a lot sooner than I thought; a man was dragged in with a gunshot wound to his shoulder, apparently the result of the nascent gang war beginning on the periphery. In popular culture, gunshot wounds to the shoulder were considered very survivable flesh wounds and a common wound for the plucky hero to receive at the conclusion of some adventure.
  
  In truth, the proximity of neural, osseous, vascular, and muscular structures caused wounds of this nature to be especially challenging sometimes. Having a particularly expansive knowledge of medicine and anatomy led me to believe there really isn't a "good" place to be shot, just some that are less bad than others.
  
  About the same time I started working on this gang member, a second showed up with a literal sack, dropping it on a table that I had been using as a desk and saying, "Boss said this is for ya." I sighed after getting to a stopping point with the whining gang member I was working on to grab the sack and look inside, ignoring the complaint from my patient.
  
  Pulling out a small packet of which there were over a hundred, easy, I frowned, looking for some sort of chemical name or dosage marking on the flimsy package, before opening it and casually sniffing delicately at the opening before turning to the second guy who was about to leave, "Hey! Wait! This is fucking heroin!"
  
  "Uhh... yeah? Youse asked for painkillers, and there ain't no better than this. What are you, a gonk?" the man asked philosophically.
  
  Her patient said, "Fucking awesome, give me some of that shit, doc, this hurts like a motherfucker!"
  
  I closed my eyes and counted to ten mentally before opening them and said, "You know what, whatever." After eyeing my patient for a moment, I came up with a dosing strategy for an opiate that I neither knew the strength nor purity. I would titrate until this man stopped annoying me, and if he stopped breathing, I would know I had gone too far. Easy peasy.
  
  Hours later, I had a handful of other customers, some of which were wounded quite severely and wouldn't be fighting any more this evening. They were either in cots themselves or had been dragged to other rooms in the apartment building to "convalesce" after I had stabilised them, and we'd finally reached the stage of conflict where Ruslan, Jean and Kiwi had begun ambush operations.
  
  Now, Kiwi had returned and was sitting in the desk area I had prepared, insensate, as she looked through dozens of cameras and traversed the local subnet, launching attacks against attackers several blocks away. The staccato of automatic gunfire, interspaced with loud booms, was becoming increasingly more common.
  
  "Things are going to plan. I'm not sure these suckers will even reach your block," Ruslan said over our tac-net conference call. I hummed and nodded while casually prizing a small piece of shrapnel out of the aorta with some extra long forceps in one hand, then sliding an ultrasonic bleeding control wand back into the wound to cauterise the outside layers of the artery belonging to the idiot I was working, before he bled out.
  
  The fighting had heated up quite a bit, but I hadn't had one death yet, although I had a couple of DoAs, including one man dragged in absent a head with his buddy looking at me expectantly. I kicked him out and made him body bag his own friend, too.
  
  Kiwi said ominously on the digital link, still staying motionless, "Uhh, guys... we may have a problem."
  
  I glanced at her and casually looked around, verifying the locations of all the things I intended to klep out of this room, plus the stuff I had brought with me. I had intentionally set up my clinic in such a way that it would only take about five minutes to depart in a hurry.
  
  "What's wrong, Kiwi?" asked Ruslan.
  
  She sighed, "I'm seeing activity as close to three blocks to the south. It isn't the Demonios, either. Here, take a look." With that, she transferred a number of images to us, and I peered at images of armed people in fatigues and camouflage moving slowly, with a purpose, towards our location. I asked, confused, "A paramilitary unit?"
  
  "Fuck! Not really, but sort of. It's 6th Street. Okay, start closing up shop. We contracted to defend the Diablos from the Demons, not from one of the biggest gangs in the city," Ruslan said.
  
  Frowning, I did so while trying to act like I was not. Kiwi roused herself, glanced at me and nodded, also arranging some of my equipment as well. A minute or two later, Ruslan came back, "Bad news, our 'allies' realised something was wrong. We're going to try to just tell them we're backing out in accordance with the contract, but if that doesn't work, we may be in a Charlie situation." He used the code word when our client was betraying us.
  
  Not long after that, the gang leader comes rushing into the room with a large pistol, waving it around. For some reason, he didn't have any minions with him, and the wounded in here would be no help to him. I had increased their painkiller dosage already in anticipation of running off, and they were almost all insensate now. He screamed at Kiwi, "Yo, bitch! Tell that fucking Soviet piece of shit that if he doesn't keep fighting like we fucking paid him to that, I'm going to fucking shoot you in the face!"
  
  He was an actual threat to Kiwi, too, because, oddly, he didn't have any cybernetics at all. There were some people like that around, but most people at least got an operating system when they turned thirteen. He was, for the moment, ignoring me, which was very stupid. I didn't like the idea of gunshots in here because it might tend to cause a bunch of our supposed allies to swarm us. I triggered my stealth system to begin pre-chilling and casually popped the monowire out on my left wrist.
  
  The end of the monowire terminated in a tiny weighted cylinder. This was both so someone, such as a maintenance technician, could handle it, even without the monoresistant ceramic treatments on their fingers as well as to give the wire a little bit of weight when performing whip attacks. Single-handed whip attacks were one of the hardest moves when using the monowire. The traditional whip attack was a two-handed affair, where your dominant hand held the end or a length of the wire, and you used both hands to whip a loop around. However, I had practised single-hand attacks quite a bit.
  
  I casually stepped around a patient and, after unspooling sufficient monowire, threw out my left hand, fast. The sudden movement in the man's peripheral vision caused him to half-turn to me, a shocked look on his face. He got his pistol moving around towards my direction in time for the wire to coil around his neck like a snake. I didn't waste any time and just yanked back quickly with my offhand, causing his head to pop off with a gross plopping noise. Thankfully, he hadn't fired his weapon, and I glanced around to see if anybody around had noticed, but no one had.
  
  "Eww.. ahh thanks, though," Kiwi said aloud while saying over the tacnet, "Our principal threatened to kill me, so Madison decapitated him with her monowire. So, uh... yeah, Charlie."
  
  I quickly used one of the provided bodybags to bag up the gang leader and his severed head, placing him in a corner so that if someone walked in, it wouldn't immediately look like something had happened. There were already a couple of dead bodies stacked there, after all, 'Your boss? No, haven't seen him!'
  
  "Get our things ready; I'm going to go see how we are going to sneak out of here," I told Kiwi, who nodded. She already knew I planned to steal anything valuable that the gang had already stolen. She had helped me jailbreak all of the medical electronics earlier, too, so they all worked and no longer had any tracking code installed.
  
  Spooling my monowire back into my wrist, I triggered the stealth field for the first time in an actual real-life situation and ghosted out of the room. The Diablos weren't really an on-the-ball organisation, but they did have about four guards that would be a problem, I discovered after searching each floor of their headquarters, plus at least two across the street. Their state of vigilance was low, even for an ongoing gun battle, but they would still see us departing the building and driving away in Ruslan's van, for sure.
  
  Coming back into the clinic, I deactivated my stealth field and turned off the cooling systems entirely. There was no sign of any automated cameras, defences or men with infrared goggles. I had spent almost four minutes sneaking around, though, so I had used most of the charge for the stealth system. It would recharge on its own in about fifteen minutes, but that wasn't the only way to recharge it. I plugged a standard power and data cable into one of my interface sockets, using mains power, and watched the system quickly recharge.
  
  "Alright, fuck. We managed to zero the fucking group of Diablos that was with us, but I don't think we're going to be able to make it back to their HQ to extract you before 6th Street gets there. We're having to move west to dodge the fighting," Ruslan said worriedly.
  
  I told everyone what I had discovered over the net, and Kiwi nodded, "I think we should be able to get out ourselves. If so, we will meet at RP two, okay?"
  
  I glanced at Kiwi and asked, "So, what do you want to do?"
  
  "If you can get to the guards in this building, I'm pretty sure I can take out the ones watching us from across the street," she said simply, all business now.
  
  I nodded, grabbed a handful of premade syringes and said, "Okay, give me a few minutes." I unplugged myself and triggered the stealth system again. It wasn't difficult to find the guards again. The one that was by himself was easy; I just used one of the syringes to give him a fairly large dose of heroin. I doubted it would kill him, but he wouldn't be caring about guarding anything for a while.
  
  The other three were together, playing cards but in a game, I didn't recognise. How much of a trope is it for guards to be playing cards? I saw it in every film I watched; it was weird to see it actually happening in real life. I sat there, invisible, for a hand, and when one of the men threw his cards down in disgust, he stood up and said, "I'll be right back."
  
  I followed him, and as soon as he turned a corner, I dosed him as well. Quickly returning, I glanced at the last two, sitting across from each other. Well, it was worth a try. I had a syringe in each hand and quickly dosed the one that had his back to me, dropping the used syringe and shifting the unused one to my good hand, but the man across from me yelled, "What the fuck!"
  
  I think it was more luck, but he struck out with a hand in a reflex move that knocked my last syringe away when I was leaning across the table to jab him with it. Frowning, I just activated the paralysis pads on my fingernails and casually swiped his arm like an annoyed housecat. I didn't draw a lot of blood, but four deeply red lines were visible on his arm as he yanked it back, bleeding slowly.
  
  That was good enough, and it only took him a couple of seconds of looking confused and terrified before he slumped to the side, falling out of his chair, and twitching.
  
  He hadn't gotten a large dose, and I could see some of his muscles were working on and off, and it seemed like he could take breaths if he tried really hard about it, so I thought that he had more than a fifty per cent chance to survive. If he lived the next five minutes, he would likely survive, I thought. I didn't really have enough time to treat him, nor did I have anything to do so with besides intubating him back in the clinic, so I just left him there. As I was returning to the clinic, I glanced outside a window and used my eight-times zoom just in time to see a man looking terrified and not entirely in control of himself point his gun at his head and pull the trigger. Shit! Was that Kiwi? Could you do that? What kind of virus made you kill yourself? I wanted to know.
  
  I would ask her later. Without speaking, we started taking loads of equipment and threw it in the back of the van. It took us three trips to steal everything. Kiwi said, "You drive; I'm gonna have to pick out a route for us that won't get us shot to pieces. 6th Street is already one block to the south. If I had a guess, I bet they are also approaching the Demonios from the north. I think this was a set-up all along, or they're being real fucking opportunistic."
  
  Well, that sounded good. I didn't want to get shot to pieces. I jumped in the driver's seat, pressed the ignition button and put the van into gear. Kiwi said, "Left, take this left!"
  
  Amusingly, on the radio started playing a rap song. I didn't particularly like rap too much, but both Jean and Ruslan did. The lyrics were prophetic, though, so I vowed to download this song.
  
  The radio played our escape song, "We're getting the fuck out! Getting out! Of this shit town and this shit life! And none of you gonks can stop us!"
  
  Well, I still had to stay in town, though.
  
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  I'm that girl!
  We picked up Ruslan and Jean five blocks away. I just slowed to a stop in front of an alley, and they hopped into the open sliding door of his van, and I accelerated smoothly, leaving Santo Domingo behind. Glancing in the rearview mirror, I said much more mildly than I was thinking, "That was a clusterfuck, guys."
  
  It was even worse than the Scav den assault! Perhaps I shouldn't be doing any more gigs with these people.
  
  Both Jean and Ruslan laughed awkwardly, with Ruslan even rubbing the back of his neck, embarrassed, before saying, "Yeah, it was kind of bad. But who would have expected 6th Street to show up?"
  
  "Me, but only looking at things in retrospect. Ever since we got out of there, I have been researching. The NCPD is now reporting a large-scale gang war, with the area affected including both the Diablos and the Demonios territory. The Diablos weren't fighting back tonight; they hoped to just annihilate the attack, then counter-attack tomorrow," Kiwi said, shaking her head, "I think 6th Street rolled them both up."
  
  That sounded about right to me. The way I saw the 6th Street combatants approaching from the south didn't speak to me of an opportunistic attack; it spoke of preparation. I wonder if any of the patients I treated were still alive or if they all got a coup de grâce after 6th Street took over the Diablos' headquarters. It didn't really matter, I supposed. All the people I treated would have lived, even if a couple would have needed new limbs, and that's enough for my professional pride.
  
  I didn't know much about 6th Street, but at least they pretended to be the good guys, which neither small gang actually did.
  
  "Did we lose any equipment?" asked Jean, curious, and when I looked at him in the rearview mirror, I gasped, "You're shot!" I exclaimed.
  
  He shrugged, holding up his arm that had a bunch of bandages wrapped around his forearm, "I mean, a little, mon." But then he reached down and grabbed something I hadn't noticed and held it up. It was two cybernetic arms tied together with some duct tape, "But I took these from the guy who did it, ya? I've been meaning to see about replacing these 'ganic arms, anyway. Don't worry; I'm headed to the Ripper first thing."
  
  I just blinked at him and pulled the van over the road, and ordered, "Ruslan, you drive." After getting in the back with the dumb man who might have been Jamaican or might have been Haitian, I spent a few minutes examining his wound before rebandaging it and making him take a huff of a combination of anti-inflammatory and antibiotic from an inhaler I pulled out of one of my bags. I wouldn't bother wasting any MaxDoc, a general nanomed-based trauma medicine made and sold by Trauma Team, if he was actually going to have the arm replaced, "Don't carry anything with this arm. Your ulna is fractured, but you're a gonk, and you probably haven't noticed yet."
  
  "Ahh... that explains why it hurts so much," he said genially.
  
  I rolled my eyes and said amusedly, as a joke, "If you want anything for the pain, all I have is heroin."
  
  "Hmm... I mean, a little heroin never hurt anyone. If a dirt, a dirt, ya?" he asked philosophically and, in my opinion, incorrectly. I stared at him for a moment. However, it was his body, but I wasn't about to enable intravenous drug use in the back of a van, so instead, I fished out another inhaler. I had dissolved measured doses of heroin in saline after figuring out its purity based on my first patient. Some of that I loaded in syringes, but this was set in an inhaler, along with a bit of topical anti-inflammatory that would make it easier on the mucosal tissues.
  
  I handed it to him and said, "One puff per three hours." Then I frowned and readjusted based on his mass, "Make that two puffs, I suppose." There was quite a lot of drug in there, but it was a measured dose now. I emptied a majority of the heroin packets into a pot with some boiling saline in order to achieve some measure of sterility for the product before introducing it into the bodies of my patients earlier. Most I loaded into bags of saline in order to provide long-term pain relief, but some I drew up into syringes and also this inhaler.
  
  He nodded and used the inhaler twice. Absorption by the mucal membranes was a pretty fast route of administration, so he should be fine in a few minutes. It was also a dose calibrated so he wouldn't get really snowed, which I felt might lower the abuse potential, "Thanks, Madison. Hey, Rus, you want some?"
  
  I stopped myself from shrieking by force of will but instead said quite firmly, " Not while driving. Not when you have to drive within four hours. Not recreationally! " Although perhaps that last was too much to hope for. Most edgerunners abused some sort of narcotics, and some of the possibilities made heroin look like vitamins. After my outburst, I spent the rest of the time Ruslan was driving, looking over the two arms that Jean had brought with him, finally deciding that they were alright. It probably wasn't the first implant Jean had ripped out of a person, I guessed.
  
  As we stopped, Ruslan said, "Got paid from the fixer; here's everyone's cut." And with that, he transferred me six thousand eddies. Not bad for a single day's work, to be honest, although it wasn't worth all the risks we had gone through. It would probably have been worth it if everything had gone as intended, though. With that, Ruslan and Jean hopped out of the van, grabbing their gear.
  
  Kiwi jumped in the driver's seat, shaking her head a bit at the conduct of the two men. She glanced back at me, "Thanks, by the way. You might have saved my life in there."
  
  I shrugged but then nodded, "Maybe. Maybe you wouldn't have stayed back at their HQ if I wasn't there to watch your back, though. It's kind of silly to be overly retrospective about things." I told her the last, even though I mostly ignored my own advice because it was different in my case.
  
  As she pulled into my Megabuilding's parking garage, I asked her, "Do you mind helping me carry my loot upstairs?" She nodded, and we both got out of the van, loaded down pretty well. It might take two trips.
  
  It did. On our second trip, the old granny that I buy noodles from that runs a shop across my own place saw us and smiled, waving. She pulled me over to the side and asked me conspiratorially, "Ah, Taylor-san. Atarashī kanojo desuka?"
  
  I wasn't even close to fluent, nor even conversational even, but I knew some words, "kanojo" being one of them, even without the auto-translate on my optics. "No!" I replied heatedly at the old lady, who started laughing, chortling even.
  
  "You live right next to one of the nicest brothels in the city, Madison! Or do you want me to call you Taylor here? Have you ever gone in?" she asked, either not noticing or understanding the old lady or ignoring her.
  
  I grumbled, "Taylor is fine. And yes, but not as a customer. I've done some medical checkups for the dolls. It's quite classy inside, I guess." Then I unlocked the door, and we both stepped into my clinic area. She didn't really get a good look before, but now she does, "Shit, almost looks like you're a Ripperdoc, Taylor."
  
  "I get that a lot, but I don't have the expertise or credentials to do that," I half-lied, "But I do operate a little walk-in clinic here on my days off. Regular maladies, occasionally a gunshot or knife wound, or misconfigured implant. Minor stuff like that."
  
  She grinned and picked up a vibrantly coloured foam sword, taking a couple of swings, "What treatments use this? Stress relief?"
  
  Oh, that was David's "wheapon." I bought it for him. He could say weapon, but he stressed the H-sound a lot. When Gloria asked what it was, he brandished it and said, "It is my wheapon, mom!"
  
  The little gremlin had started going to kindergarten, apparently, this year. I wasn't sure how I felt about that. Public school was not going to help that little boy. I had given him a number of general cognitive tests, designed as games I had played with him, and he was close to three sigma above the mean as far as I could tell, at least for his developmental stages.
  
  When I thought about a number of general cognition and IQ tests I had seen both in the Bay and here, my mental sense was disdainful, so I was a bit sceptical that they were accurate enough to be relied upon except for the most coarse of deductions, but I thought the way I had tested David was a bit better, even if I didn't feel it had the resolution or precision to apply a numerical "IQ" value to.
  
  His developmental stages were a lot more cut and dried, though. Not only could little David count to a hundred and do basic arithmetic, including multiplying small numbers, but he could read slowly, so he was already ahead of the average public school kid four, maybe five years his senior. Not only that, he understood conditional hypotheses such as: "If you hadn't eaten breakfast earlier, how would you feel right now?"
  
  Most five-year-olds, from her medical sense, which included developmental stages and disorders, would not understand the question. David, however, did and, after scrunching his face up, replied, "I would be hungry!"
  
  As such, I was worried that public school would tend to harm his development. He would be an anomaly, a nail that would be hammered down all the harder for sticking out. It was that way even back in Brockton bay, but the Night City semi-privatised education system was even worse.
  
  I mentioned all this to Gloria, and she told me she wanted to send him to a Corporate school. Although Militech ran its own school system, most corporations were subscribers to an education Corporation to send their dependants to. Despite being the same corporation that ran the "public schools," their private for-profit Corporate schools really did have a pretty good reputation.
  
  However, NC Med Ambulance was not a subscriber, so Gloria would have to fund his tuition out of pocket. David was smart, perhaps even smart enough for a Corporation to notice him in ten years or so, as they did troll the public school system for likely candidates to invest in, but they wouldn't pay the tuition of a five-year-old, which would probably be at least fifteen thousand eurodollars a year.
  
  Although Gloria was making fairly good money both picking up extra shifts in my "clinic" as well as continuing her Scav-operation. Apparently, she found a new partner that was open to assisting her, just like I had done. Perhaps she would be able to fund his tuition herself next year? I would be replacing some of my standard clinical equipment with the stolen goods I had, so perhaps she would be interested in purchasing my old kit. I would give her a good deal on them, maybe let her pay them off over six months to a year or so.
  
  "It's the wheapon of a little boy. Son of an EMT that I used to work with, she works shifts in this clinic when I am on duty at Trauma Team," I tell her the truth, which gets a grin and another couple of swipes with the sword.
  
  Before she got up to leave, I told her, "Not sure how many more gigs I intend to take with you guys if they're all going to be like this."
  
  She grimaced and nodded, "They've been inching up my personal risk matrix as well, although the dosh has gotten a little bit better too." She sighed, "It's not to the point where I am thinking of breaking up the little team we have, but I might have thought differently if I had to exfiltrate that gang trap-house by myself."
  
  I nodded. It was really more of a trap-building, though, I wanted to say. "I might have a job for you guys soon. With me as the client. I'm looking for someone, and when I find them, I want to ask them some questions." My eyes shifted to the half-built brain scanner on my workbench. It would work a fair bit better than the one they put my head in, at least how I thought that it worked. What was good for the gander was good for the goose, right?
  
  At first, my power didn't want to help me a lot with it. I got the idea that I needed to perform more research on the human brain, but I had managed to find a broken twenty-year-old military fMRI machine designed for on-the-battlefield diagnosis. This machine was interesting because it had a "secret" secondary mode that functioned as a primitive version of these scanners intended for battlefield interrogations. This secret was well known, so a number of the devices were on the private market and I had found this broken one in an electronics store. My power was a lot more willing to help me repair and upgrade this device. I even got a sense of interest as I disassembled it.
  
  I was starting to think my power was... not myself. I got the feeling of it as an excited dog as I took the machine to bits, but other times I got the feeling of boredom if I was helping someone with a rash. I didn't know if this was normal and parahumans just didn't talk about it or if I was an outlier. Perhaps powers worked differently on this planet, too.
  
  Her eyebrows rose, "Like a black bag job?"
  
  I nodded, "Yes, precisely. We'll need to wear disguises... well, except me. But I intend to drug them, so hopefully, the guy won't remember a thing, anyway." The Trauma Team intel guys told me they found a number of amnesiac drugs on site when I was rescued, although they wouldn't let me keep them nor even tell me what chemicals they were.
  
  Still, I had considered similar ways to do the same thing, and I was pretty sure I had a way to chemically disconnect a person's short-term memory from their long-term memory temporarily. That would mean that nothing would be stored in their long-term memory, and they would forget everything after a few hours but wouldn't really notice they were impaired at all unless the questioning lasted for hours and they forgot how they got there.
  
  It wasn't Armless I wanted to question, either. I didn't take him as the team leader, but if I could find Armless' actual identity, I could hire Kiwi on the side to help me find anyone connected to him.
  
  "You're a bleeding heart. Usually, people ensure the people they interrogate don't talk about it by throwing them in the marina with concrete shoes," Kiwi said amusedly, and I got the feeling she wouldn't particularly mind such a mission. I was already very confident that neither Ruslan nor Jean would care.
  
  I snorted. Maybe I was, but also doing exactly as they had done to me or intended to do to me, and that had a sort of moral symmetry to it, in the biblical eye-for-an-eye sense at least. I didn't tell her that, though, since I didn't want any more people to know about my incident. Plus, there was another important factor.
  
  "It'll be better if he doesn't go missing afterwards," I said quietly, still a little afraid of that ninja man. If the mercenaries he hired suddenly vanished a month or so after he hired them, perhaps he wouldn't care, but perhaps he would investigate it? Who knew? But if the mercenary he hired had a hangover and woke up in a seedy brothel with a headache, well, that was just a regular day for a lot of mercs. The merc himself might not even realise anything untoward happened. That was exactly the sort of thing I couldn't do by myself at all, but a small team of edgerunners could easily accomplish it.
  
  I wasn't even sure what I would find or if anything I found would be useful. Right now, it was more for the revenge more than anything, which I understood wasn't really a rational reason to pursue and kidnap someone, not to mention spending a lot of money to do it. But sometimes, you couldn't be rational. I was done allowing bullies to do something to me with no response at all.
  
  They had kidnapped me and invaded the privacy of my mind so I would do the same thing. That was pretty much all there was to it, when it came down to it. Maybe I would find a way to trace the ninja, but maybe not. I honestly wasn't really sure I wanted to track him down in the first place. Our first meeting didn't go that well, and I got the impression he was playing pattycake with me, not taking me seriously at all.
  
  "Alright, well, you can call me when you 'find the guy'," she said, grinning as I showed her to the door. I nodded, and after she left, I glanced around.
  
  Well, I should unpack everything, inventory what I was keeping and change it out with my old equipment; then maybe I'd open the clinic to see if there was anyone amongst the masses of people in the Megabuilding that needed my services. Usually, I would get a text asking for an appointment, but I sometimes had walk-ups too.
  
  First, though, she grabbed David's wheapon and threw it in her living room.
  
  My first real ping on the fly-o-meter came a week in and in Watson. I noticed a very large grouping of several thousand flies at a guarded corporate campus. I couldn't get inside. The campus was for a large Japanese medical research Corporation, which was made up of a number of Japanese corps banding together for this new venture in Night City.
  
  They were all small corporations if you took them individually, but they formed together into a rough keiretsu that intended to take advantage of the market in Night City since the eight-hundred-pound gorilla known as Arasaka was not around.
  
  I doubted very much that he lived there, so he must have a job there, which tracked when I saw flies swarming one of the guard shacks. I frowned, watching through binoculars as a man in a one-piece worker's outfit sprayed chemicals in and around the guard shack. I would stop placing as many flies here.
  
  I had a vector on the streets of how my target approached his workplace, and that could be useful. I'd drive down that direction and place some more flies well away from this campus.
  
  " Hai, I'd like to move onto the next topic, if that is okay," a middle-aged man of European descent said in Japanese in a small conference room, glancing around at four other people there.
  
  The leader nodded, " Ah, the plague of insects. Dozo."
  
  " Hai. We received complaints about an unusual attack of swarming insects by our security people a couple of days ago. At first, we just called the exterminators, as bugs and Night City are not exactly unusual," the first man said, getting slight smiles from his compatriots.
  
  The leader nodded and indicated he should continue.
  
  "Well, we probably would never have known if not for my subordinate, who is something of an..." he paused, searching for a word and then finally settling on the English, "dipterologist. It is his hobby. That is the study of insects, specifically flies. When the man told me I had to cancel my one o'clock to hear something about flies... well," he shook his head ruefully, slowly.
  
  He then nodded and continued,but not before setting what looked like a small jam jar on the table, with air holes poked in the tin top, " Apparently, this is the intruder. One of the few survivors. My subordinate at first thought it was a brand new species of fly, so he was quite interested, but quickly felt that instead, it was an artificial construct."
  
  The leader nodded, looking both interested and concerned, " Interesting."
  
  "Yes, quite. Anyway, he had captured a few of the survivors that made their way into the main campus and had one of the lab techs sequence their genomes. They are all definitely modified house flies. Moreover, they are all sterile clones. Identical. Also, our machines could not decode the extraneous portions of its genome," the man concluded, sitting with his hands on his lap.
  
  The leader was a scientist himself, although it had been years since he actually had time for it. Still, his eyebrows rose, " An obfuscated genome? Is this an espionage or sabotage attempt, then, with a novel chimaera?" His thoughts went to Arasaka, as their group was kind of stepping on its toes by trying to profit due to their lack of presence rather than playing nice and subserviently like most of the "competition" did in Japan.
  
  The man that had given the briefing nodded, "Hai, we think so. Although with so few survivors - the spray those exterminators use is really, really effective - we can't precisely figure out why they were so interested in the campus or why they didn't penetrate deeper sooner."
  
  The leader hummed, glanced around and came to a decision. One small jam jar would be getting a private plane ride back to Japan, where they collectively had a lot more resources and equipment. Sadly, these attempts at studying the contents would not go any better despite the expense, and eventually, the Fly Swarm of '64 would go into the annals as one of the Seven Mysteries of the Night City Biomed Campus.
  
  It took me one more week and many thousands of total flies to 'find the guy.' Longer than I was expecting, by far, and long enough that my first generation was getting close to the end of their natural lifespan. I hadn't bothered trying to devise longer-living flies; that sounded like potentially a longer project in the first place because a number of the fly's limits were mechanical ones, and already the flies the FlyHive made were slightly different than one would expect, with a larger head and more area for the homing organ.
  
  I wouldn't need Kiwi's help at first to find this first man's identity, either. He lived in a small apartment building, and its security was not the greatest. I had already used my exceptional beauty, grace and invisibility to penetrate into the small manager's office while my mark was at work and the manager was out. His computer system hadn't been updated since the time of the red skies, probably, so it was easy to hack even with my meagre skills.
  
  "Albert? Who names their child Albert?" I mused as I perused the information on each tenant and homed in on my target after watching video recordings of the man going to and from his apartment. It was definitely the right guy, as he had been missing an arm until about a week ago. I wonder why it took him so long to get a replacement, but it didn't particularly matter.
  
  Sneaking out of the office and out of the building, I casually gave a small pump-style aerosoliser a few squeezes on and around the door. It was a deactivation pheromone, which would cause rapid programmed apoptosis in the flies. I didn't need them anymore, and Mr Armess might have already noticed he was popular with them. If any came around the building and entered through the front door at least, they would quickly die.
  
  I had his data now, but I would call Kiwi in to assist me in finding his comrades. All I could really do was pay background investigation sites myself, and I figured Kiwi might have more sources.
  
  "He has a part-time job as a security guard in Watson, but most of his money comes from the fact that he's a regular member of a local merc team. I don't know them, and I'd say they're at least one tier above the boys and us as far as their reputation and the types of jobs they receive," Kiwi told me straight up over the phone a day later.
  
  I said firmly, "My target is the leader of the mercenary team."
  
  "That's Gabriel Blaze... I wonder if that is his real name... yeah, it looks like it. Kind of unusual sounds like a gimmick name," Kiwi told me, amused.
  
  I nodded, "Well, that's him, then. Do I need to tell Ruslan about wanting to hire you guys?"
  
  She shook her head on the vidcall, "Nah. I'll talk to him and get back to you with a friends and family price. I'm guessing it will be between ten and fifteen thousand total, depending on how long we need to watch him and how we plan on taking him." She paused and then asked, "You said you had some sort of drug to make him forget. Do you think you could provide an anaesthetic similar to that grenade? Maybe like in darts or something to add to a drink or meal? Taking people alive and uninjured is a real pain."
  
  I clucked my tongue and nodded, "Possibly. You'll have to give me a list of his implants ahead of time, so I can dose one that will actually take him down. Also, I don't know anything about darts." I was pretty sure I could make one that would knock him out pretty much regardless, but I wanted to indicate my abilities were more modest.
  
  "I can bring you an example, and don't worry - we'll definitely have his deets. Otherwise, we won't pull the trigger on the op if he is a total unknown," Kiwi said brightly.
  
  Almost two weeks of off-and-on observations, mostly using cameras and analysed by automated tools, and the three of them had an operations plan, and I had timed it for my next hitch of five days off. I got a fairly good deal on the price I was paying because the surveillance didn't need to be in person, and they could take other gigs while waiting for the perfect time to strike on mine.
  
  It was pretty simple; I had to admit. Originally they wanted to use a dart, like Kiwi had intimated, but they discovered an excellent opportunity after observing him for several days. He had a pretty set schedule on fridays and the weekends. He would get a burrito from his favourite place, and then each time, he would get a lemonade-flavoured carbonated drink at this one specific vending machine.
  
  Instead of darting him, Kiwi hacked the vending machine. We had to take out all of the Diet Nicola Classic from its hopper, replacing it with one specially prepared drugged lemonade. Then, when he paid, he approached the vending machine, and Kiwi would reprogram it to dispense the drugged beverage to him.
  
  So, here I was, sitting in the passenger seat of Ruslan's van while Kiwi was in the driver's seat. "He's approaching the vending machine as usual. Change! He got the special lemonade." With that, she put the van into gear to slowly creep forward, following along at a side street.
  
  "Man, he can eat a burrito fast. He's gulped the lemonade," Ruslan said, then a few moments later, he yelled, "Come quick, he's about to keel over! That shit acts fast!" I nodded. It definitely did act a lot faster than most sedative drugs a person swallowed had a right to do.
  
  Kiwi put the pedal to the metal and drove a full block before squealing to a halt, Ruslan and Jean dragging an unconscious man into the back of the van. Man, I always thought his van looked like it should have a "Free Candy" sign on the side, but this was really making it obvious. Also, that worked a lot simpler than I thought. I guessed not everything with these guys was a cluster fuck, just most things.
  
  We drove to, amusingly enough, the same building they had interrogated me at. Nobody had taken down the faraday cage, and I felt it would be necessary. Plus, nobody looked at us weirdly for dragging a man into an abandoned building in Japantown.
  
  Since I was going to be in the cage with him, I wasn't being as polite. He was shackled hand and feet with what would have been low-level Brute-level restraints back in Brockton Bay, along with the brain-scanning helmet that I had got working a couple of weeks ago. It began working right away. I couldn't download this man's memories, or anything, although that sounded like a pretty cool idea. But it didn't need the same interaction that the device used on me did.
  
  Kiwi spent some time hacking his operating system thoroughly to disable it temporarily. It wouldn't do for him to trigger a contingency to begin transmitting right after we finished, record the entire interrogation, or even just takes notes on the Note app. He had a pair of Kiroshi Mk1s, so after she finished hacking his operating system, I casually disabled all user input with them with a small tool. He would be able to see but not use any of the Kiroshi-specific apps. He wouldn't even be able to move his eyeballs; he'd have to move his whole head to change what he was looking at.
  
  Before he woke up, I also injected him with the tinkertech memory disconnector. It was unsure how much he would remember when he woke up. He might have forgotten everything since he woke up, or he might remember leaving his apartment. It depended on how much he has already put in his long-term memory as of right now.
  
  "It's a shame he needs to be awake," Kiwi said as she watched me finish setting up by putting a set of headphones on him as well as carefully opening his eyelids so that he could stare at a screen. People often thought that when you slept, your visual senses were turned off, but this wasn't exactly the case. It would be sufficient for the brain scanner to run through the self-tests and get a sufficient baseline. Known sounds and visuals were piped into his ears and eyes, and the helmet used that to do most of the work.
  
  I glanced at her. It was a shame that he had to be awake. I thought about it and couldn't think of any way that would work. Perhaps in subsequent versions.
  
  After about five minutes, I took his headphones off and said, "Alright, I'm going to wake him up." They nodded and made sure all of their disguises were on, even if he couldn't turn in their direction.
  
  Humming, I forced an inhaler into his mouth and triggered a puff. This was an antiagonist to the anaesthetic I used and had a half-life of about fifteen minutes, so I wouldn't be able to put this guy back to sleep for probably a little over a half hour or longer.
  
  Stepping back, I sat in the same comfortable chair they had put me in. He got the metal one and was chained to the side of the cage. He glanced around groggily for a moment before saying, "What... the fuck... you're that girl."
  
  "I'm that girl!" I agreed in a forced cheery tone. "You might or might not recognise what you have on your head, but you know what they say, right? What is good for the gander is good for the goose? I have some questions for you."
  
  I paused, waiting to see if he would keel over dead or something. I didn't think he was anything but a mercenary, but from everything I've been told and the assumptions I have made, I felt that the standard "defence" to an interrogation under brain scan was an automated suicide implant.
  
  Not only to prevent secrets from getting out, but I thought that the current state of the art in terrible things a person can be made to do against their will favoured, at present, conditioning over the capability to detect it right away, so it was possible to make double-agents with sufficient mental "coercion." I didn't want to know what was involved with that, but my medical sense gave me an idea anyway. Still, I thought that there likely was a degradation of utility on such prepared people, anyway, so I doubted they were useful for anything but sabotage or assassinations.
  
  As such, for real intelligence assets, which I was pretty sure this man was not, I didn't think they would have ever repatriated him after an enemy like me got him in my clutches for an extended period of time. As if reading my mind, he did not keel over, which proved he was just a regular merc, as far as I was concerned, and instead shook his head and said, "Fuck, he's going to kill me and then you for sure."
  
  Grinning, I pounced, "Who is he?" and got a lot of data from that question. The one part my system didn't have as well as the other was I had to pick all the questions and word associations myself. I was pretty sure that the blonde ninja was given a tree to work down with every word I had said, probably using some kind of weak artificial intelligence, which wasn't my forte at all.
  
  Still, I was clever enough to make my own, I felt. He glared at me and refused to answer, but that just made things easier, "Me. Girl. Client. Ninja. Gigs. Speculation. Who hired you to help kidnap me?"
  
  After that, I went through a list of prepared questions I had already thought up. I didn't really need to run through word associations to get the information I wanted, but I might towards the end.
  
  "Who do you think hired you to help kidnap me?"
  
  "What do you know about the person that hired you to help kidnap me?"
  
  "What do you know about me?"
  
  "How much were you paid?"
  
  "What were the past jobs this person hired you for?"
  
  "Do you have any speculation as to the motives of this person for any of these jobs, including the one where you kidnapped me?"
  
  "What about any conversations with this person?"
  
  I was getting some information which I could review on my optics, but it was only enough for me to know I was on the right track. I kept asking him questions for over a half hour, then shifted to word associations both about the ninja and as well as any other secrets he might have, which I could review later. There was no reason not to wring this man out like a sponge, after all. It was likely what would have happened to her.
  
  I stood there, trying to think if I had forgotten anything to ask but shook my head. I nodded to Ruslan, who took out a dart gun with one of the darts we never had actually needed. May as well get some use out of it. It turned out I could make them easily because they were almost exactly like small little hypodermic needles. Ruslan didn't waste time and shot the mercenary captain in the neck like he was an angry gorilla at the zoo.
  
  A second of shocked realisation and expression, along with an attempt to reach up to grab the dart of his neck. That was all it took before he slumped back in the uncomfortable metal chair. Still, I gave him a few minutes before I approached, "Alright, let's get these restraints off of him. Kiwi, double-check his system to make sure he wasn't able to re-enable it or take any kind of notes. Search him again for any electronic devices. Then we'll take him somewhere more interesting where he can wake up. If we're lucky, he will think he got drunk or high. If not, well... he still won't know what the hell happened."
  
  I thought it was silly that the first thing the man said was that "he" would kill him, as she thought it was incredibly unlikely anyone would ever find out anything untoward happened in the first place.
  
  They dropped me off back at the Megabuilding when we were finished, Ruslan commenting with a grin that this was the smoothest job they'd had in some time. Of course, it was; I had planned it!
  
  After I got back to my apartment, I stripped off, letting clothes and underthings fall to the floor and took a long, hot shower. Then I crawled into bed under my heated duvet and sighed.
  
  I felt better, and then again, I didn't. My revenge as pretty mild as Night City went, but it still didn't really feel very good now that it was over with, but at least I might learn something interesting, but perhaps not. This guy had the feeling of what Alt-Dad would probably have called a cut-out.
  
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  The Solo's Manual
  The weeks and couple of months following my "revenge" were more or less pretty quiet. No ninjas had shown up, and as far as I could tell, the leader of that mercenary team hadn't realised anything had gone wrong, or if he had, he had decided to keep it to himself. The latter might have made more sense, considering he had been relatively certain he would be murdered.
  
  At first, it kind of felt wrong that he didn't remember anything, but I finally came to the conclusion that he was of no consequence and that everyone of importance, namely myself, had remembered it. So, I didn't care if the bullies of the world themselves were beneficiaries anymore; it was enough for me to know that I had won.
  
  I had worked one additional job with Kiwi's crew, but it was surprisingly pretty tame. It was a similar job to the last one, a defensive mission. However, the employer was an unnamed corporation, and the people we were defending were just regular people in residential areas. The threat was much less than a full-scale gang war and amounted to just preventing Scavs from assaulting them.
  
  I wasn't sure how the Corp knew that Scavs would attack; it could have been anything from detecting such movements through traditional intelligence operations, or it could have been as nefarious as instigating the Scav attack themselves and hiring us to defend their employees as a morale-building exercise. There was really just no telling.
  
  Scavs were a lot less likely to fight to the bitter end; they were after easy prey, after all, so as soon as a few of their groups were wiped out, they cut their losses and departed the area. I hadn't even needed to do anything myself.
  
  It was a gig that, surprisingly, nothing went wrong during. However, I was starting to notice certain behaviour patterns that suggested that both Jean and Ruslan might be experiencing the incipient symptoms of cyberpsychosis. They were still both gregarious and outgoing, but now their humour had a mean edge to it, even if it wasn't directed towards Kiwi or myself.
  
  I had offered them a supply of the antidepressants I had invented and took religiously once a week, but they declined, so all I was able to do was verify that their cybernetics, especially the new pieces they both got installed recently, were installed correctly and start a file of clinical findings on them. I had researched cyberpsychosis more and more, and I was growing more confident that cybernetics generally acted as an amplifier for any existing mental illness. Both Ruslan and Jean were, arguably, well into some parts of anti-social behaviour simply by their past history and current occupations.
  
  It wasn't as though I could really criticise too much, either. I might like to pretend I had no issues myself, but my continuing issues of self-esteem and irrational distrust of authority were not exactly sub-clinical findings. Also, I didn't particularly have problems murdering people anymore if I thought that doing so would protect myself or even if I just thought they were "really bad people." But that wasn't exactly a strange opinion to have in this world.
  
  In fact, my original opinion that violent criminals should be carefully subdued and tried for their crimes would have been seen as incredibly naive. So much so that I was glad that I had never really spoken to anyone about it, as it was incredibly out of character for a Corpo girl.
  
  Honestly, I blamed the PRT back home, and I was more and more perplexed why they treated villains with such kid gloves. It did make me wonder if I could copy the famous containment foam that Dragon, the best tinker in the world, had made, but my only ideas were using organometallic foams, which would more or less work, but you couldn't breathe through it, so it would immediately asphyxiate anyone caught with them.
  
  In between my work weeks at Trauma Team, I began accelerating my plans to sell my antibiotics to, preferably, Biotechnica. I had already finished synthesising it on video camera, carefully explaining each of the steps in the process in such a way that even an undergraduate could likely follow along in the process. That had actually taken quite a bit of time, as I had to create most of the precursors as well, which I left out of the video.
  
  I had just finished visiting the corporate offices of Veritas Corporation in downtown Night City. They were an interesting corporation and had almost as good a reputation as Trauma Team did. They were a European company, and their services were essentially what you would expect some parts of governments to provide, provided in areas where trust in government was non-existent or governments themselves were non-existent.
  
  For example, you could hire them to conduct depositions and to perform binding arbitration, and for my purposes, you could hire them for a number of notary services. Even the government courts wouldn't really trust a notary public these days, but they did trust Veritas Corporation. I left three copies of the video, along with the full steps needed to create the chemical, encrypted, at their offices.
  
  This was a necessary precaution, as I would have to give Biotechnica a sample of the drug to entice them. If the deal fell through, they would definitely follow through on reverse engineering it anyway, so I would need to provide the second party I sold it to proof that I had invented the drug before Biotechnica had, and the European Community, as well as US courts, would trust the timestamps on the digital and physical vaults of Veritas. In my case, the vaults were digital, and while the contents were encrypted by myself, the Veritas Corporation would attest to both their cryptographic hash and the time the files were uploaded, which should be sufficient proof.
  
  My next step was one I was a lot more hesitant about, but I could find no better solution. I definitely couldn't approach them alone, as I wanted to stay anonymous. My distrust of authority extended to those that had authority merely by force of arms; in fact, I probably trusted them the least. Still, I had made an appointment to see Mrs Okada once again.
  
  Walking through the pachinko parlour, I noticed that most of the people here were the same people who were there the first time I was here, months and months ago. Were they animatronic constructs, plants in Wakako's employ, or did people really like pachinko that much? I didn't know.
  
  The guard at the back of the parlour was different while being almost indistinguishable, including the grunts of the last guy. Stepping into her office, I was greeted by the old lady, "Ah, Taylor. Have a seat. You weren't precisely verbose about the reason for this meeting, except that you would be a client. What do you need?"
  
  I sighed, "I need someone to act as an intermediary to a Corp. I have something that is worth a lot of eddies that I want to sell them, but it is intellectual property, so I don't want them to just shoot me and take it, or black bag me and see if they can wring me dry like a dish rag. I want your help in making contact, providing them a sample, and ensuring my anonymity during the exchange if they're interested."
  
  Wakako raised a single eyebrow like Spock and placed her hands on her oversized desk, "I actually get requests like this fairly often, but virtually all of them never pan out to anything or are from people who are delusional. I very rarely proceed with gigs like this because I don't want my Corp contacts to think I am an idiot. You don't look delusional, so tell me more about what you think you have and how much you think it is worth."
  
  "It's a pharmaceutical. A novel one. Specifically, it is an extremely broad-spectrum antibiotic that is very effective at killing single-celled eukaryotes while at the same time not being toxic to human or even animal cells. That last part is the key, as otherwise it would just be a poison and pretty common. It is much more effective than the current state-of-the-art in discriminating nanomachine-based treatments, and I believe it is worth at least one to two billion eurodollars in sales per year," I finished, setting my hands in my lap.
  
  She tilted her head to the side but didn't mention, "If it is as effective as you say, wouldn't it be worth a lot more than that? And how can you be sure it is a novel pharmaceutical and not just kept as a trade secret?"
  
  Those were insightful questions, so I coughed, "Because there are certain complications in utilising it, that would make it suitable only for hospital-based situations where the patient is under the care and supervision of medical professionals. You see, it is so effective in destroying bacteria that a single dose will eradicate the entire body's microflora biome or digestive bacteria that exists in your stomach and intestines. This is treatable, but realistically only in a hospital-based setting. That is the same reason I know it isn't merely a trade secret, as like I mentioned, the current state of the art in medical-based nanomachines can accomplish a similar thing, but it is much more expensive."
  
  "Perhaps they know of it and don't want to introduce a product that would compete with these nanomed-based products?" she asked mildly.
  
  I shook my head, "You of all people should know that there is no real monolithic 'they'. The nanomachine-based immunity treatment is also something that can only be accomplished in a hospital and MedTrans are the market leader in this segment - it is really more of a medical device compared to a pharmaceutical treatment. The patient has to be hooked up to computers the entire time, as discriminating between cells to kill and cells to not to kill is too computationally intensive for nanomeds to do on their own, at least this current generation." This was one of the main reasons I wanted to sell this as a product. It wouldn't shake the entire world up, and would just compete with an existing product line, "We definitely couldn't sell it to MedTrans, but we could sell it to one of the traditional Pharmcorps - I was thinking Biotechnica, as they don't have any similar products this would compete against."
  
  She hummed, "Why not the Trauma Team? They have a lot of pharmaceutical products, and moreover, they have a lot of hospitals. If its a product that can only be used in a hospital setting, that would be a good synergy. Plus, you work there."
  
  I shook my head emphatically, "The fact that I work there would queer that deal. If they managed to find out my identity somehow, they might argue that I invented this product while working for them, and therefore, they own it entirely without compensating me, even if I don't work in a research capacity."
  
  " You invented it? I was worried you had stolen it, possibly from Trauma Team, which was why I mentioned them... You didn't steal the tech from anybody? I won't care if you had," she said amusedly.
  
  Well, my power invented it, but that was basically me, I felt. I certainly didn't feel bad about taking credit for it, and in fact, I felt a feeling of satisfaction come from my medical sense as if it was happiness I might be getting the accolades I deserved. Silly power, it didn't realise that would likely kill me. I was even a bit leery of admitting this to Wakako, but I did, "Nobody will be looking for this. Yes, I invented it. However, I would like very much if Biotechnica merely thought that it was stolen from a competitor. That's why I'm willing to accept ennies on the eddie as far as price is concerned."
  
  Wakako looked at me for a moment before nodding slowly, "Okay. How do you recommend you prove to me that this thing works, then?"
  
  I fished a small plastic bag with about a half dozen small gel capsules inside and slid it over her desk, "I'm sure you could find someone with a bacterial infection, even a very difficult-to-treat antibiotic-resistant infection that the hospital has given up on since they didn't have the money for the expensive nanomachine treatments." I paused and then explained the eccentricities of the treatment, including that the patient should be near a toilet within twenty minutes of being administered, "After a day, the person will need to undergo bacterial replacement therapy, preferably at a hospital. Although, if you want to keep the patient's sudden condition confidential, which I would appreciate, it might be alright to do it at home, too, if you had the supplies. I just wouldn't recommend it for patient outcome reasons."
  
  The small packet disappeared quickly, and she said, "Okay. I'll tentatively accept this gig, then, subject to verification. Now, we need to discuss costs. I doubt very much you will be able to afford this type of job if you intend to finance it yourself."
  
  "Hmm... I'm not sure. I might be able to, but I thought a contingency basis might be the best if you're interested. That would give you some skin in the game, as well, and would help motivate you to help me achieve the best price possible as well as for the operation to succeed without me getting murdered or kidnapped," I said mildly.
  
  That caused the old lady to grin widely, "Now, let's talk numbers."
  
  I had offered ten per cent, and she had countered with forty, but eventually, we had settled on twenty-five per cent for the old bat. I had told her that the minimum I had to get was one million eurodollars, and that just caused her to laugh, and that assuming I wasn't bullshitting her that we shouldn't accept less than three, and she would try for four. That would put the payout in the range of a tenth of one to two per cent of expected annual revenues, which was the going rate for stolen technology that wasn't patented.
  
  She agreed with me on Biotechnica, as she had a few contacts in the corporation, but she felt that it would take at least a couple of months before we could provide them with a sample. After that point, she agreed with me that the clock would be running.
  
  I didn't particularly know how long it would take them to reverse engineer a synthesis for the chemical, but as it wasn't chemically related to either existing natural or synthetic antibiotics, I felt that it might take the research a year or two to do it, so at that point, if they didn't respond favourably within two to three months we would proceed to offer it to the second choice, which was Arasaka.
  
  Wakako seemed to detest Arasaka, though, despite having connections to a number of their subsidiaries, which made me feel a little confused. It was probably something personal, though, so I didn't press. It surprised me a little bit that Arasaka had a pharmaceutical division, though, but it probably shouldn't have since they were pretty much the definition of a conglomerate.
  
  She said it would take her a week or so to verify my claims, and we would discuss things further then. As such, I was preparing myself to work a solo gig. I had taken a few from Wakako, but they were mostly low-paying jobs, like medical consults or bodyguard work. I also declined one where she offered a job with medical services for a captive, and I felt that it was likely I would be helping prolong someone's torture, so I turned it down.
  
  This one, however, was a job to investigate a location in the Badlands. Apparently, Wakako's client was some manner of a contraband smuggler, using long-range unmanned aerial vehicles to fly his contraband into Night City, and a number of them have been lost around a specific stretch of the Badlands.
  
  Although there was a bonus if I could, somehow, take action if I found proof of something going on, this was really only a recon job which was the only reason I had taken it. The reasons the drones had been downed could be numerous, but Wakako was expecting it to be some kind of human intervention, and in the Badlands, that usually meant the Wraiths, which were something like a much more organised and competent group of Scavs, that usually only operated outside of major metro areas.
  
  I wasn't like most girls from a Corpo background in thinking that absolutely any nomad was the same as the psychos, but there wasn't any shortage of the psychos. Some of the files that Alt-Dad had left behind included general information about any of the movers and shakers in and around the city. Data on nomads was a bit more sporadic since there were a number of nomad families, and they didn't always loiter around cities, but Wraiths were a bit different in that they often did - preying on people stupid enough to leave the protective confines of a city's metro area, kind of like me, actually.
  
  My car was a pretty good fit for driving in the Badlands, it even fit the aesthetic more or less, but I wasn't stupid enough to drive straight to this location and ask anyone there if they had seen anything suspicious lately, perhaps some drugs falling from the sky? That would get me killed.
  
  Honestly, the entire job was pushing right up against what was acceptable in my risk profile, and I would not have accepted it had I not had a stealth system installed. But I was kind of curious about the Badlands, and if I had to be honest regular people didn't frighten me that much anymore. That feeling was a bad sign and something I had to be careful to reign in because a big enough bullet could kill me regardless of who shot it.
  
  Pulling up to the checkpoint that separated Night City from the Badlands, I didn't get hassled by the NCPD manning it. They even double-checked that I had a full tank of CHOO2 and a lot of water, which I did even though I only intended to drive thirty kilometres at the most. I was obviously well armed, even if I was forgoing the Kang Tao submachine gun this time in favour of a small folding stock scout rifle with a sixteen times optic and suppressor. The suppressor wouldn't do much to hide the sonic boom of the supersonic 7.62mm NATO projectile, but it would help a lot in preventing someone from noticing a muzzle flash, especially at night like it was now.
  
  The rifle was Alt-Dad's, a customised version of a bolt-action rifle made by Steyr, and the cop manning the barricade saw it in my passenger seat and nodded, "Nice rifle."
  
  "Thanks, it was my father's," I told him honestly.
  
  He hummed, "Well, be safe out there." I nodded and pressed my foot against the accelerator, smoothly taking off into the lawless desert.
  
  [Taylor, you have entered a degraded service area. Trauma Team response times to your locations can exceed ONE FIVE minutes! Please take care!]
  
  My target area was in the southwest, but before driving off to my destination, I drove straight south to the former town of Laguna Bend, which was now a giant reservoir, the last of the straggling citizens of the town having been dragged out over sixteen months ago. I remembered watching a News piece about it that characterised them as crazy people who were getting in the way of Night City's need for fresh water.
  
  The truth was that they were probably getting in the way of something but judging from the rainbow sheen on top of the water detectable even after sunset. There was clearly some chemical contamination of the reservoir.
  
  I pulled my car in next to a shack that was built next to the bank of the reservoir, figuring it empty but I was surprised when a man stumbled out as I was leaving my car with my rifle.
  
  "Ya hear to finally kill me?!" the man asked, his speech slurred slightly and a bit uneven on his feet after taking in my militant appearance.
  
  I didn't see a weapon on him, but I kept the muzzle of my rifle carefully pointed in the air but still in a position where I could sweep the muzzle in his direction very quickly; it was a fairly lazy port arms stance. I peered at him some more, "I don't even know who you are. Why the hell are you living next to a toxic lake?"
  
  "Cuz that fucking lake used to be my home!" he said angrily, gesticulating wildly.
  
  I hummed and walked past him to stand on his deck. His house wasn't much, it was a mobile home, but it was set right on the bank of the reservoir. That alone made me think that the company NC Dams was having a lot more trouble than they were letting on. Not only was the water here obviously toxic, but allowing an agitator to live right at the bank? Alone? Why hadn't they shot him? They clearly hadn't cared much about the rule of law when they flooded his entire town.
  
  Even if they didn't want to shoot him if it might have been bad optics, why hadn't they just closed the dam's gates briefly? It would only take a day or two to completely flood away the man's house. That could have been managed well enough that I wouldn't have been surprised if it got thirty seconds on one of the late-night comedy shows in an "idiot Luddite does something stupid and pays the price" type of segment. Good for a laugh at his expense. The fact that neither of those things had happened was telling me things weren't roses at NC Dams Limited.
  
  "Anyway, I'm not here to shoot you, old-timer. I was just told the reservoir looked nice at night, and I have to admit that rainbow sheen does look rather pretty, even if it doesn't seem very healthy," I told him, carefully positioning myself so that he remained in my peripheral vision as I used my 8X optical zoom and infrared vision to look at the opposite side of the reservoir's bank. Two twenty-five metres, according to my Kiroshi's built-in rangefinder. That was good enough. I carefully clicked the optics on the rifle a few times, setting it to as close to that as I could, but I was guessing.
  
  Keeping him carefully in sight, I used his deck as a brace as I took sight of an empty can on the other side of the reservoir. Just because I wasn't here to shoot him didn't mean I trusted some crazy prospector-looking guy. He didn't actually look that old, despite me calling him old-timer. He could have been in his late forties or early fifties, but he looked unkempt as hell.
  
  That caused him to snort, "That it ain't." He looked at me slowly, then sighed and said, "Wait a second." He departed back into his house, and I casually put my hand on my sidearm at my side in case he returned with a weapon, but instead, he came out with a fancy set of Zeiss binoculars. Raising an eyebrow, I watched him track my target. He asked, "That can near the water's edge?"
  
  I nodded and shouldered my rifle again, going on one knee to brace the barrel on his deck's wooden handrail. I carefully sighted down the can, and he said, "Go ahead, send it." Realising what he was doing, I squeezed the trigger gently, trying to surprise myself with the report of the rifle just like Alt-Dad taught Alt-Taylor.
  
  "High, one metre. Left half a metre," he said dispassionately. I was surprised I had gotten that close on my first try. I wasn't exactly a markswoman, much less a sniper; however, my increased strength, the steadiness of my hands and my reflexes allowed me to fake it a little bit. I worked the bolt action quickly and adjusted slightly before firing again.
  
  "High, close. Left, close," he said, and I casually corrected the crosshairs before firing a third time again.
  
  "Hit," he said. With that, I reacquired the bouncing oil can and shot it three more times until the magazine was empty, nodding with satisfaction.
  
  I sat my rifle down and glanced at him, my medical sense tingling. "Thanks. Now sit down for a moment." He frowned at me but took a seat in his lawn chair that he had on his deck.
  
  "Oh, now is when you're going to shoot me," he said knowingly.
  
  I rolled my eyes and said, "Are you suicidal? Nobody is here to shoot you! I'm a Med Techie; just sit there for a moment." I didn't have any of my equipment with me, except for my highly calibrated eyes, fingers and a flashlight, but those would be enough.
  
  Sighing, I said, "You need to leave this fucking house. You're starting to show signs of chronic low-level organophosphate toxicity, as well as possible exposure to heavy metals."
  
  "But this is my fucking home!" he growled, waving his hands.
  
  I stared at him, "And if you don't want it to be your fucking grave, leave. At first, I thought you were just drunk, but that doesn't explain everything. It's clear you have some money; ordinary people wouldn't be able to set this mobile home up here, complete with power hookups. Get the fuck away from this place, or you won't last another six months." I paused and then shook my head, "Even I'm not planning to come back here now."
  
  He sighed and went limp in the chair, "Ain't mains power, but some off-grid solar and battery system." He then shook his head, "Maybe you're right. It just doesn't feel right what they did."
  
  I shrugged, grabbed my rifle and said, "If it makes you feel better, they're undoubtedly going to go out of business. This was supposed to supply the city and Biotechnica's farms with fresh, clean water. That's not fucking going to happen without a lot of expensive remediation. I doubt that is in the budget."
  
  He growled, "I've thought that for months, girl, but that just makes it worse! They did all this for nothing, then!" He then stared off into space and said, "Except... maybe... you're not wrong, I do got some money - not here though, iffen you plan to rob and murder me... but enough in the bank that maybe I could order a big bag of puts contracts on NC Dams Limited. Their share price hasn't moved at all, but that can't last. Maybe you're right. If I can't have my old town back, at least I can get rich off these bastards' failure."
  
  Puts contracts? A quick net search told me that was one of the ways to "short" a publically traded company. It was a type of security that allowed you to make money if the share price of the company fell, but if it didn't, then you lost the entire amount you spent on the contract. I didn't precisely know how it worked, but I mentally made a note with my deck to look into such short positions on NC Dams Limited when I got back to the city. The only problem with that was the stock and securities market was undoubtedly corrupt.
  
  Maybe, if I had a lot larger amount of money, I could be sure that NC Dams' price would crater eventually, but I thought that it was possible that the market could remain corrupt longer than I could remain solvent, so perhaps I wouldn't bother with it, but it was an interesting thought. I wished this old man luck in his efforts, though. Regardless of if he made a fortune or lost his shirt, he would be a lot healthier if he did it somewhere far away from this reservoir.
  
  Maybe Wakako would be interested in this factoid, though; it was exactly the kind of intelligence she liked to collect if she wasn't already aware of it anyway.
  
  I nodded at him, "Try to get out of here as soon as possible. Organophosphate exposure can be treated easily, the heavy metals not so much, but if you get rich, you shouldn't have an issue paying for the nanomachine treatments it takes to remove heavy metals from your body. Thanks for spotting."
  
  "Yeah, whatever. If you ain't shootin' me, then git, girl..." he waved a hand threateningly from his pastel-pink lawn chair. Not exactly threatening. He was sure focused on people coming out to his dump and shooting him, but that might have been a symptom of the exposure to organophosphates. Still, I didn't turn my back on him once. It was clear that the man was, at one point in time, probably dangerous. The tattoos on his arms indicated service in the NUSA Navy, and one particular one, which featured an eagle grasping Poseidon's trident and a flintlock pistol while perched on a ship's anchor, looked especially prominent.
  
  The design of the tattoo was too stylised for me to get any hits from a reverse image search that I took with my Kiroshis, and I didn't have enough time to look into it further. It seemed familiar to me somewhat, though, as if I had seen it on the TV or in a film.
  
  I waved one last time before getting back in my car and departing the area, heading due west. I mostly took the roads, but the ground was flat enough and my tires big enough that I could depart the roads briefly if necessary. I did so when I got a couple of kilometres from the target area, driving a good hundred metres off the dirt road and shutting my car down next to a large tumbleweed. Then, whistling, I carefully used some desert-coloured camouflage netting to cover the entire vehicle.
  
  That only cost five eddies at the Army surplus store and was exceptionally useful. Even moving ten metres away, if I looked at my car, it looked more like a large piece of desert brush. I bet most city mercenaries would have forgotten something like that out here, but I was so sure I didn't know anything at all that I researched every single job I accepted.
  
  It was clear in my jog to the west that I didn't know the first thing about running or jogging silently in the desert, I seemed to step on every piece of crunchy brush that existed, but at least it was already pretty dark, and I was only able to navigate without tripping and spraining something due to the low-light vision mode on my eyes.
  
  The two-klick jog was nothing to me, as I ran a ten-kay run most every morning, but the uneven ground made me proceed rather slowly. Checking the overhead map, I was already in the circular area of probability as far as the area reported by the client, so I slowed to a crawl.
  
  Up ahead, about five hundred metres, I sighted a few structures. I had been running in that direction because they had artificial lights on all sides of the buildings, which was visible from kilometres out on the low-light vision mode, and it seemed a pretty obvious point of interest.
  
  Taking a knee, I zoomed in on the buildings, looking for obvious signs that could indicate this was the location downing drones. I was looking for large transmitters used to jam control signals or possibly radar-layed machine guns, as I didn't particularly know how the drones were being shot down. Instead, I found something out of a horror movie.
  
  "What... the fuck?" I quietly whispered as I saw what appeared to be two people being crucified. I zoomed out and shouldered my rifle, which had a better 16X optic and sighted down the barrel. Yes, two people being crucified. Wait, would you call it two people crucified if they were already on the cross? Because they were. Or would it be "still being" crucified because they weren't dead yet? Was the act of crucifixion concluded when you put them up or when they died, since it was technically an execution method? Also, why the fuck was I thinking this now?
  
  It was a man and a younger man, barely more than a child, with a strong familial resemblance, at least as much as I could see from this far out.
  
  I walked forward slowly, holding the rifle in a high-ready position.
  
  Movement in my periphery caused me to shift the rifle towards one of the buildings, and I sighted a man dragging a woman out of one of the buildings by the hair, clearly laughing at the shock and horror on her face. Frowning, I moved the optic out of the way before zooming in and checking the range with my Kiroshis. Four hundred. I wasn't that good of a shot. Although I had theoretically zeroed my rifle at two hundred and twenty-five metres, my first shot of the night was a metre off target, and it was windier now.
  
  If that happened again, I could easily shoot the captive lady. Wife of the crucified man, mother to the crucified boy? I'm not sure why, but my mind always tried to wonder and fill in details like this, but in this case, I didn't care because, wrong or not, it made me want to murder these people all the more.
  
  Sighing, I shouldered my rifle and triggered the stealth system, and just started running flat out, trying to cover as much distance as possible before the man dragged the lady back inside or just violated her right here in front of her dying family.
  
  'This is a bad idea, this is a bad idea,' I kept thinking as I ran in the direction of the two buildings; now I noticed that it was more like a compound, as I could see some chain-link fencing, too.
  
  Skidding to a halt, I panted as quietly as I could while I checked the distance again. One ninety. Wow, I ran over two hundred metres quite quickly. That would have been an Olympic-level sprint in my old world, and it was mostly to do with my Kerenzikov. Although the implant sped up my reflexes and sense of time by three times, it didn't speed up my movement by that much - that said, it did speed it up a lot just from the fact that it took a lot less time for the movement signal to traverse the spinal cord and reach the extremities, which allowed me to run and move very quickly.
  
  Glancing around, I deactivated my stealth system and shouldered my rifle again. The man was waving a handgun at the woman's family members and unzipping... no, that wasn't going to happen tonight. At least, not again.
  
  I didn't try to take a fancy shot; I wasn't good enough to go for a headshot at this distance. Instead, I carefully placed my reticle over the centre of his chest after clicking the distance down to two hundred metres. I let out a breath and squeezed the trigger, then quickly reacquired the target after working the bolt action, gratified to see him on the ground and the woman glancing left and right before grabbing the man's pistol and a long knife off his belt. Ah, she was going to cut down her family... well, maybe, but apparently not before stabbing the downed man over and over again. In the dick. Good for her.
  
  Now that I was closer, it looked like they hadn't actually nailed them to the cross, merely tied them to it using ropes. I wondered why, but internally I was quite pleased that I wouldn't have to treat a number of no-doubt infected puncture wounds and bone fractures, assuming I didn't get my fool self killed with this stunt.
  
  As the lady moved to cut down her family, I, however, stayed motionless but instead used my eight-times zoom to scan the area of the compound for any movement. They had to have heard the shot, but it wasn't actually that unusual for a random gunshot to be heard even out here, I assumed.
  
  Fuck, it was too much to think that nobody would check it out. If they were Scavs, nobody probably would have. However, another man stepped out the door, some sort of carbine in his hands, and I quickly acquired and shot him with my rifle. If the damn woman had been faster with cutting down her family, he might not have saw anything. He came out of the other mobile home-type building and didn't have a direct line of sight on the first guy's body, but he definitely saw the woman trying to get her husband down. She had already freed her son, who wasn't looking too good while writhing on the ground.
  
  That did it. I think they were all alerted now. So much for the sneak mission. If this was a video game, then I wasn't going to get the Unseen Spectre rating on this mission anymore. I saw movement in one of the windows and quickly fired, then saw another guy leave the first building, and it took two shots to bring him down, as I missed with the first shot.
  
  The last shot I took hitting a man that came around a detached garage area. It looked more like a small hay barn or a hangar, actually, but it had a few vehicles in it, so its purpose was pretty obvious. I didn't have multiple magazines for the scout rifle, as I mainly intended to use it as a telescope on this gig. I didn't actually intend to have to fire it at all. I had a bunch of loose rounds in one of my pockets, but instead of trying to reload it, I carefully set it down, triggered my stealth system and began another sprint directly for the small compound.
  
  I yanked out my monowire as I got close, but instead of throwing it at the steel of the chain link fence, I sliced up a small wooden post that it was attached to at one of the corners and then leapt through the small gap in the fence that it created, in time to see the surprised face of an armed young man that was likely not much older than myself coming out of the building, half-dressed. He had likely seen the wooden post disintegrate and might have even seen the invisible outline of my body as I leapt through the small gap, as my stealth wasn't perfect when I was moving.
  
  Not thinking about it, I lashed out with the monowire and took his head off in one quick, smooth motion, his surprised expression not changing while his head and body went in different directions. I glanced down at the piece of shit Budget Arms submachine pistol and quickly discarded the idea of picking it up. Instead, I reeled the built-in weapon system back into my wrist and pulled out my pistol.
  
  Instead of my normal Militech Omaha, today I was carrying a Constitution Arms Unity, in 10mm. I picked this calibre specifically because it was barely subsonic, and the sound of the Unity's action was relatively quiet too. With the suppressor, which I had screwed onto the threaded barrel, it would have made an excellent sidearm to a theoretic sneaky mission, but at the moment, I was wishing I had the Omaha, which had a much larger magazine capacity and unparalleled penetration and stopping power, or even a Lexington with its three round burst or automatic fire options. I had thought about it and picked this pistol for a good reason, but sometimes you out-think yourself, though.
  
  I still had over four minutes on my stealth system, so I moved quickly. First, I jogged to the front, just in time to see a man in slow motion start to raise a shotgun to shoot the woman. My arms snapped up, and I fired three times on the bounce, quick reflex shots from retention and hit him in the upper chest twice. He wasn't quite dead yet, so I shot him once in the head before holstering my pistol and grabbing his shotgun. It was a Constitution Arms model as well, a fairly nice pistol-gripped pump action shotgun.
  
  I glanced around and picked the corner of one of the mobile-home buildings, out of sight of any of the exits and windows and deactivated the stealth system. I didn't see anyone else moving. Had I really shot everyone?
  
  Something told me I had not, but I had likely shot most of the stupid ones. I triggered the augmented reality mode of my cyberdeck and glanced around for any networked items, finally finding a terminal in the garage which I picked to launch the simplest and yet one of the most useful quickhacks for me right now, Ping.
  
  Glancing around as the quickhack bounced off a number of other items, including people still on the subnet, I identified five more people, including one that looked like he was hiding right behind my line of sight behind one of the Wraith-painted vehicles. Sighing, I turned on my stealth system again and darted out to woman who was still in front of the two crucifixes, attempting to help both males stand up. I snuck up on her.
  
  "Fucking stay down," I said to her, right next to her, causing her to stumble and wildly try to sweep my general area with her pistol's muzzle, which I ducked inside of before deactivating my stealth system and pushing, forcing all three of them back on the ground. As she started falling onto her butt in slow motion, I casually kicked the pistol out of her hand so she wouldn't accidentally or on purpose shoot me when she hit the ground and had a clear shot at me. I was actually more worried about her shooting me than most of the Wraiths here because she was so wound up.
  
  Her pistol clattered a half metre away at the same time her butt hit the dirt; she glanced at me with wide eyes, but she wasn't stupid. Her eyes narrowed, and then she said, "You're the one who shot them, aren't you?"
  
  Crouching down, glancing left and right, I nodded, "Yes. I need to know if there are any other captives or if it is just you three here." If some or all of those four dots in one of the buildings were captives, it would drastically change how I intended to proceed. I glanced at the two males and judged they likely had been hanging for hours, which was why they were so noodle-legged. The Wraiths hadn't been Biblically accurate here either, as I was pretty sure they smashed the person's legs with hammers after putting them on the cross. I couldn't quite remember where I read that from, though it definitely wasn't the Bible.
  
  She shook her head, "No, it was just us. They captured us earlier today, stole our car... and..." I waved a hand, dismissing her before she started talking about all the unspeakable things they likely did to her. I wasn't specced as a therapist at the present time, nor did I particularly want to hear it - I had already made my decision to kill everyone here after all.
  
  "Okay, that's all I needed to know. Stay down, stay low. Maybe try to get to the garage, and see if any of the vehicles have their shards inside, on the off chance they manage to get me. But there is at least one of them hiding in there," I told her and activated the stealth system again before she could say anything else, leaving her sitting in the dust.
  
  I snuck close to the building that had four dots in it. From my minimap it appeared the dots were all in the same room, the living room area. That was fortunate and was where I was next to.
  
  I started to hear a few voices from inside the building, but I couldn't make them out except for a firm voice saying, "Stay here. There's only one entrance into this building; we'll light up whoever it is when they walk through the door."
  
  ' Yeah, no, you won't,' I thought as I set my pilfered shotgun down briefly, then I grabbed two spherical fragmentation grenades from my belt and carefully pulled the pin on each of them. The window to this building was already shot out, and I was crouched next to and underneath it.
  
  Carrying a grenade in each hand, I released the spoons simultaneously but held onto them for a full one-Mississippi count before tossing them both through the shattered window into the living room, amongst the four dots who thought, smartly, to ambush me.
  
  I ran a few metres and threw myself to the side, landing prone on the ground with my hands over my ears as I wasn't entirely confident about the ability of these cheap motorhome walls to stop shrapnel. Rather than two distinct explosions, I heard just one large boom and felt a wave of hot air of the shockwave pass over my head.
  
  I could hear a couple of groans from inside the building, but they didn't sound very healthy. Still, I would explore that building last to give them a chance to, hopefully, bleed to death. Grabbing my shotgun, I sprung-up, still invisible and ran to where the garage was, noticing the last dot start to move rapidly.
  
  Fuck, he was backing out in one of the cars, a shitty-looking Thorton Galena. There was no cell or data service out here, and I was hopeful that even if they had a network connection using directional antennas or satellites, it was limited to data terminals, and they hadn't been able to call in any assistance, but that could change if one of them drove off.
  
  The Galena looked like shit. Still, it had an aftermarket Crystal Dome environmental protection system installed instead of a windshield, so I didn't know if the buckshot I presumably had loaded would penetrate. Instead, I took careful aim and shredded each tire on the right side with a single shotgun blast apiece as the driver shifted the car into gear and started a straight shot out of the compound.
  
  I didn't know if they had run-flat tires, but even run-flat tires won't help you against eight double ought buckshot pellets hitting it. Both tires exploded, flying off the wheel rather spectacularly and causing the vehicle to veer to the right and slam into the building I had just thrown two grenades into.
  
  For a moment, the driver attempted to put the vehicle in reverse and back up, but that wasn't accomplishing much. Finally, he leapt out of the driver's side of the vehicle while I stayed completely still, holding the pistol-gripped shotgun close to my chest to ensure it stayed within my stealth field. He waved a submachine gun in my general direction and fired off a burst without looking, thankfully missing me by over ten metres. Well, that was stupid of me. I expected he would have shown me his head so I could blast it, and I wasn't expecting stupid wastes of ammunition like that. He could have easily hit me with that if he was lucky, so perhaps it wasn't as stupid as it looked.
  
  As he lifted his weapon to repeat the action, I darted off in a tangent to his arc of a possible fire, moving more or less perpendicular to another long burst of fire he let off without looking. Continuing my vector, I darted past the rear of the car he was hiding behind before turning and bringing up the shotgun and shooting him in the back. I went to fire again but stopped myself. Once was definitely enough at this range.
  
  Kneeling down next to the car, I deactivated the stealth system as I had less than thirty seconds of charge remaining and just remained still, listening and repeating a Ping quickhack on the garage terminal. I didn't see any people still connected to the subnet, and the only thing I could hear was the woman and her family in the distance where I had left them.
  
  I carefully sat my stolen shotgun down and just shook silently as I came down from the adrenaline spike I had been working on for the past few minutes. I grabbed something from one of my pockets and quickly took several bites out of a chocolate bar, my medical sense telling me that the simple and complex sugars would help a lot.
  
  I finished half the chocolate bar before I stood up and yelled, "I think that's all of them." Grabbing the shotgun, I checked it and only had two more shells, so I set it aside and grabbed the submachine gun from the guy I had just shot. It was a Militech Saratoga, which was pretty nice, and the dead guy had two full magazines, which I took, dropping the mostly empty magazine out of the weapon and replacing it with one of them.
  
  I didn't know for sure that they hadn't gotten any communications out; that was just my hopes and my guesses based on where we were located. So I couldn't waste a lot of time here, on the off chance fifty Wraiths showed up pissed to all hell. Still, I intended to loot. I mean, this was a dangerous and foolhardy exercise that I came out of alive; of course, I was going to loot.
  
  I started moving with a purpose, half-jogging to the building I hadn't thrown grenades in as I figured I'd start with things less likely to be broken by shrapnel. However, as soon as I grabbed the doorknob and started pulling it, I felt myself get punched in the chest several times. Growling, I leapt over the handrail sideways and rolled out of the line of fire as another three or four-round burst shot through the door. I backed up, now out of the line of fire, as I gingerly touched my chest. I didn't feel like I was going into shock, and my biomonitor wasn't reporting any penetrating trauma, so the rounds likely either hadn't penetrated my vest or my skin. I couldn't really tell which at the moment.
  
  How fucking stupid. If that was an assault rifle instead of the submachine gun it likely was, I could have just died or at least been grievously wounded. I was acting as though everything was already over, and it nearly got me killed. I fucked up more the longer a mission went on, it appeared.
  
  Sighing, I raised the Saratoga but and fired a burst of my own through the walls, trying to gauge where the shooter was; then another burst above that, shattering the window. I was out of frag grenades, but I had one flashbang and one anaesthetic grenade left. I selected the flashbang, pulled the pin and tossed it inside, through the shattered window and closed my eyes firmly. Even out here, the explosion caused my ears to ring a little. Instead of rushing through the door, which was being shot through, I just crouched and used all of my strength to leap straight up, activating stealth and rolling through the window I had just thrown the grenade through.
  
  As I hit the floor, I saw a single man firing wildly in the general direction of the door. I didn't think he could see much, but I didn't give him a chance to observe me and shot him in the head and neck with a quick burst, which put him on the ground with a sick gurgling sound that, thankfully, did not last very much longer. I guessed that he either didn't have an operating system or he had it carefully set to accept no network connections, even from this trusted subnet. Some paranoid people, like me, did configure their systems that way, after all.
  
  I had less than fifteen seconds left, so I deactivated the stealth system again. I could use it for a similar quick tactical use, maybe once more, before it would have to recharge.
  
  But hopefully, I wouldn't need to. This time, I carefully cleared each room of this building, trying to be as safe as a single person doing the job that was meant for four or five could, and then did the same to the garage and the other building. Only then did I relax a little. I was trying not to beat myself up too much, but I had almost gotten myself killed in a really stupid way just now, so it was kind of hard not to.
  
  I ran back to the family, and said, "Okay, now it really is clear." I could see that the two males had started getting the feeling back in their legs and were standing on their own power now. The woman had recovered her pistol but didn't look like she would sweep me with the muzzle this time, so I didn't disarm her again.
  
  "Sis! We can get out of here, now!" said the younger male, causing me to frown. In my head, I had this boy be her son. But at least the story I had concocted, which got me to do something incredibly stupid, was close. I glanced between them and was still thinking the older man was their father.
  
  I handed the father the shotgun I had used after reloading it, and he took it gratefully, and then I handed the woman the Saratoga I had been using. She nodded at me before glancing at the younger boy, who looked expectant and sighed, handing him her pistol. Well, that was their business who they trusted with firearms, so long as they didn't point any of them at me.
  
  I had already found a lot of loot, including four carefully packaged drones. I still hadn't found how they had downed them, but it clearly wasn't a machine gun. I was leaning towards them being hacked somehow. They were kind of pricey, so I was going to take them with me, along with some implants, which I would spend a few minutes extracting. I found a safe with a little over two thousand eurodollars in it, but more importantly, it had the owner shards to the two other cars inside. One was a Colby like I owned, except with a Wraith paint job and a fully customised CrystalDome system. It was nice, but the other was even better; it was a Quadra Type-66 with similar modifications, including oversized off-road tires.
  
  I didn't think I could take both of them, so I would give this family the Butte. Both cars only had two seats, so some lap-sitting would have to be done for a while in either case, so I was going to keep the nicer car. I found the family inside the garage trying to hotwire the Colby.
  
  "I got the shards for both of those cars, but I'm going to keep the Type-66," I told them firmly, "You don't need to hotwire them."
  
  The woman said, giving me a glance over her shoulder as if I was a very special person who didn't know anything about cars. Which was true, for the most part, "We're not hotwiring them; we're disconnecting the tracking system."
  
  Oh. That would have been embarrassing if I drove this back to my home and was tracked down. "Would you mind doing the same to the Quadra? I'll give you the shard for the Colby in exchange."
  
  The father smiled, "We'd do that for free and more as thanks. We'll also use some spray paint to paint over the Riffen shiv tags, it won't look great, but at least they won't shoot you on sight if you roll up to the city. Still, we'd appreciate the shard for the Colby. Was there a shard for the Galena? We're going to take that too."
  
  I blinked at him. While that thing wasn't completely wrecked, it was sans two tires, at least. I glanced around the garage and did notice a number of tires. Could this family take off two wheels, replace the tires and put them back on quickly enough that they felt confident about not being here if and when the Wraiths came back? What were these guys? NASCAR?
  
  As if reading my mind, the man chuckled and said, "It won't take long at all. When you live in the wastes, you have to be quick with these types of things. I've been working on cars for decades, and my daughter is better than even me. I don't suppose our family hired you to save us? I didn't even think they'd have realised we were taken yet. Normally, the Riffen Shiv would ransom us back after committing sufficient atrocities." Ransom them back?! Were the Wraiths insane? Machiavelli said 'Never do an enemy a small injury.' The idea was because that would just piss them off. You either killed enemies or left them alone. Personally, I felt that applied to 'raping your enemy's daughter in front of them.' From the anger simmering in the way the man had said that I thought that if they did ever release this man, he would have made a Quixotic-quest to murder them all.
  
  Still, it made sense that they were nomads too. I guess there would be a ton of mechanics in a nomad family. I shook my head, but I wasn't willing to break operational security and tell them about the gig. That was one of the biggest rules in Morgan Blackhand's guide. Secrets were for keeping, "No. I'm not at liberty to discuss why precisely I am here, but I adjusted my mission parameters when I saw what they were doing. The Galena's shard is probably on the guy who was uhh.. trying to drive it away. I'll get it for you. If you guys want to loot anything else, feel free. I've set aside everything I'm going to take. I'm likely going to leave right now, but if you could do me a favour before you leave?"
  
  "Of course, anything!" said the woman, with a lot of emotion, after finishing the work on the electronics of the Colby before walking over to the Type-66.
  
  I glanced at the barrels of CHOO2, "After you fill your tanks, if you could please use the remainder of that to burn each of these buildings to the ground?" I thought I would get the bonus for "stopping" these guys, but I still didn't know precisely how the drones were intercepted so was best to be thorough here. Burning the entire compound to the ground was warranted.
  
  "Absolutely," said the man with deep emotion.
  
  Smiling, I darted away. I grabbed the Galena's shard from the dead man and gathered the things I was taking, using a few minutes to chop a couple of arms off here and someone's head off there and dumping them all into a duffle bag. Kind of gross, but I had gotten desensitized to that sort of thing in the six months I had been working for Trauma Team. It took me two trips to dump everything I was taking in the Type-66's modest trunk, glancing at the new "paint job." It was definitely rushed, but at least it didn't scream psychopathic nomad too much now. The kid was the one spray painting each of the cars, while the father and daughter team already had the Galena up on jacks and one wheel off.
  
  I handed the two shards to the kid and got in the Type-66, backing it out of the garage. I stopped by the Galena, and the man gave me a smile, "How long do you think we have? It will determine how much we try to steal."
  
  "I don't know. I couldn't detect any type of satellite or point-to-point communications equipment, and there was no signal here. But I just don't know. You might have all night. Alternately, they might have gotten the word out as soon as I started shooting them," I said honestly.
  
  He nodded, "We'll go with that more pessimistic guess and try to be out of here in thirty minutes. We'll have most of the things worth taking bundled away by then, for sure. We've already found a heavy machine gun, and the boy is going to man it. In the off chance a Wraith car shows up, he'll riddle their cherry asses full of armour-piercing rounds toot-suite."
  
  Was there an HMG? Well, I didn't really want one of those. I was already turning into a trope without becoming a literal gun bunny. Besides, if a weapon was too large, it would stick out obviously from my stealth field. I nodded at him and felt that their chances were pretty good. I wasn't going to remain to guard them, though. I had done my good deed, stupidly, but I functioned mainly as an ambush predator. I couldn't function as well if the bad guys knew to expect me somewhere, "Good luck then."
  
  With that, I drove out of the compound and directly towards my rifle that I had left behind. I almost ran over it but got out quickly and placed it in the passenger seat. Then I drove to where my car was parked and emptied it of anything that could identify me. Frowning, I wondered if I should drive it further away. Theoretically, I could be identified by the registration and plate number. Nodding, I drove my Colby a good four more kilometres away from the Wraith compound, hiding it in an even better spot before running back to my new, fancier Quadra.
  
  As I got behind the wheel of the Quadra and drove to the nearest road, I saw a crappily painted Colby and Galena driving as a convoy straight to the east. That made me smile. When I got back home, though, I was planning on going over the numerous ways I fucked up. I wanted to live a long life in this world, after all.
  
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  I knew you were into that weird shit!
  The drive back to the city in the Type-66 was very interesting and, dare I say it, fun. The inside of the vehicle looked like an airplane's cockpit or spacecraft, and I almost had to get the Nomad boy's assistance in just starting the engine until I realised there was an actual checklist printed out and placarded onto the middle console, apparently for forgetful Wraiths. It was a multi-step process that included starting the fuel boost pumps first with a little old-fashioned switch before starting the engine.
  
  The CrystalDome system was pretty amazing too, but on the drive over, I found out that the engine had been replaced by an even beefier modified motor that had a max power of over nine hundred horsepower. I would be lucky if I got a hundred kilometres for every twenty-five litres of CHOO2. This was going to be expensive to fill up at the pump, but the speed was amazing, even on the dirt roads of the Badlands.
  
  The NCPD forced me to get a temporary registration before letting me back into the city but didn't hassle me other than that, which I found surprising. However, the law with regard to Nomads was not very good from the perspective of the Nomads. Everything they had was presumed to be stolen goods. And since there was usually no way to know who it precisely belonged to originally, it was perfectly legal to keep it yourself.
  
  I didn't think that sounded in keeping with their civil rights, but it worked for me in this instance, and it also explained why nomad families reportedly travelled in incredibly well-armed convoys and packs, even law-abiding ones like the three I had saved at the compound. They were basically outlaws, but in the old feudal sense of the word, namely, they were outside the protection of the law, at least here in Night City.
  
  "Hmm... looks like just over twenty-nine hundred kilos. We'll call it twenty-five, though, considering fuel and cargo weight. That's good enough for government work," the bored cop said to me, tapping away on a tablet absently. Apparently, my car was considered customised enough that it needed to be weighed. I was quite thankful that they didn't insist I unload all of my loot from the vehicle as they weighed it, especially since some of that loot was severed heads and limbs of the Wraiths. Although, they might have already detected them when they scanned the car for "security threats" and just not commented on it.
  
  Twenty-nine hundred kilograms on a two-seat car was immensely heavy, and I started to believe that the CrystalDome system they installed really was using armoured plates instead of just thin steel. The idea of "bulletproof" was really more of an ideal or something to aspire to rather than a guarantee, but I would say without reservation that this massive beast was, at the very least, impact resistant. I think people would need to bring out anti-material weapons to stop it head-on, and perhaps that was worth the increased fuel consumption.
  
  I thanked the copper before clearing customs and getting back on the road. Customs was set a few kilometres away from the actual city centre, and it seemed like every three or four years, they pushed it further towards the Badlands whenever Biotechnica built more farms in the Flats, and each time they did so, the NUSA complained heartily and made threats.
  
  The very fact that Night City called the entry a customs checkpoint infuriated the NUSA government, which considered Night City nothing more than a semi-autonomous zone in its own country. Honestly, I was sure that was why they called it that.
  
  Even now, this part of the border was more of a temporary construction featuring a lot of semi-mobile cement blocks, chainlink fencing, sensors and automated weapons than an actual wall built into the ground. It'd stop civilian vehicles like mine for sure, but not an Armoured Battalion, so I thought Night City needlessly taunting the NUSA government was kind of stupid if they didn't have any way to stop the former from rolling across like Night City was Poland.
  
  My lead foot was kind of coming back to bite me in the ass, as when I stepped onto the accelerator when I got onto the highway, I nearly lost control and almost collided with a poor bastard in a MaiMai who looked on at the armoured bulk of my "sports car" coming to crush him like he was a Nicola can in abject terror. As I passed him, the terror shifted to outrage, and he laid on his dinky little horn at me, but his engine could barely keep him at the minimum of seventy-five kilometres an hour that you needed to maintain to stay on the highway, much less catch up with me.
  
  It was kind of nice; a lot of cars just changed lanes when they saw me approach from their rear to let me pass. It kind of felt like what I imagined having one of those giant pit bull dogs would be like if you ever walked it on a leash. Even the Merchants would have given me a wide berth if I did that back in the Bay.
  
  Pulling into my Megabuilding's parking garage, I parked in my space. It took three trips for me to bring everything back with me to my apartment. I needed to visit the building's management office, but they wouldn't be open for another six hours, so instead, I doffed everything I was wearing, carefully setting my form-fitting suit aside.
  
  Looking in the mirror, I had three good-sized welts on my chest. It looked like the rounds penetrated my outer vest but not the armoured bodysuit. That was pretty close, then, as the outer vest was the most armoured of the two.
  
  I had already dug the rounds out before I ever got back to the city, but thinking about it now, I grabbed the submachine gun that had been used to shoot me and ejected the magazine. There were only a few rounds left, but they were of a steel-core armour-piercing variety. Rather an unusual load-out for a nine-millimetre sub-gun, I thought, but it wasn't like I was a grizzled veteran at this mercenary business.
  
  I was lucky; even AP ammo in nine millimetres wasn't super effective due to the geometry of the projectile. There were other submachine guns, like my Kang Tao, that fired a smaller, faster, pointy spitzer-type projectile that had significantly better armour-piercing capability, to say nothing about carbines or full-sized rifles.
  
  Sighing, I just shook my head and stood under my hot shower for some time, thinking about it while composing a brief message to Wakako telling her the details of the gig, including both the information about the Nomad family as well as my personal intelligence about the contaminants in Laguna Bend.
  
  As for my own personal performance, I wasn't going to beat myself up over it. Perhaps it would have been safer if I didn't involve myself, but honestly, I felt that I had done a good thing.
  
  I didn't know anything about the culture of Nomads, and the three seemed to suggest that those Wraiths might not have killed them, but I was learning there were a lot worse things than death. Besides, I was still convinced they probably would have received the ransom payment and killed them anyway if their family didn't have some way to ensure they didn't do that. A scorpion would always be a scorpion.
  
  After I put on my pyjamas, I sat at my workbench and absently removed cybernetics from the body parts I had brought home with me. I had about three sets of limbs and as many cybernetic eyes of middling to decent quality. It was something I could do on automatic while I mentally reviewed everything I did. Some of the mistakes were obvious, like assuming my Ping would uncover all enemies. But there were a lot of little things I could improve on as well.
  
  Although some might have said my preparations exceeded those that were necessary for a simple observation job, at the same time, they kind of fell short too. If I had several more magazines for the rifle, then I might have been able to stay back and pick off more of the enemies from a range, although perhaps not. Another way to scale chainlink-type fencing would be useful, too.
  
  I could jump a lot higher than one would think just looking at me; my muscle and bone lace had significantly increased the strength of my legs. However, I'd never tried the complicated acrobatics necessary to jump, climb up half a fence and then leap in an arc over the barbed wire on top.
  
  I didn't even know how I would practice that. How did corporate ninjas get the uncanny agility and grace that I saw on fictional TV shows? It couldn't all be made up. Maybe they took gymnastics classes? However, there were other options. There was an extremely tear-resistant lightweight fabric based on monolayer graphene that I could buy. They were used as tarps in applications where weight was a consideration, like aviation and in cargo spacecraft, and while a little bit pricey, I could keep one in my car. They could then easily be tossed over barbed wire to make it simple to climb over safely.
  
  Past that, the only problem I could see was that I was alone for what should have been a team mission, but there was not a lot I could do on that front.
  
  I could make all the plans in the world, and while it was great to have some backup, things could go wrong even on routine jobs. Things could go wildly wrong just driving to work or going out to the store in this city! The only thing I could do was stop accepting to do any solo jobs as it was possible any of them could turn into a cockup, but that wasn't something I was willing to do.
  
  Using the multiple tools on the ripperdoc's glove, I finished extracting the last cybernetic eye out of the previous owner's skull, humming softly as I did so. Placing it into a small cryogenic storage cylinder along with the other of the pair, I loaded them into the stock-keeping system. After that, it was just fifteen minutes of cleanup, disposing of all of the "medical waste" in speciality red biohazard bags, cleaning up my work area with chemicals, and tossing the disposable nitrile gloves in with the stack of heads.
  
  Tying the bags closed, I set them aside to dispose of later this morning. Then, instead of getting into bed, I just sat in my comfortable chair and put the sleep inducer on my head, rolling the dial all the way to a full three-hour cycle and pressing the activation key.
  
  I added a three-second delay to the device so that I could place my hands in my lap before I-
  
  "You found it?" asked the building manager, unbelievingly, looking at the obvious painted-over Nomad gang markings that you could still somewhat see on his garage security system.
  
  I nodded, "Yes, I found it." I then smiled and continued, "I'll need to rent a second parking space for at least a few months. I may keep both vehicles, but I might get rid of one of them." There were a lot of reasons to get rid of the Type-66. Truly, filling up the tank of CHOO2 once was already quite painful. It was no wonder the Wraiths were pirates; you'd need to steal an oil tanker on the high seas to not be bothered by the fuel prices when driving it. The aftermarket engine was an even worse fuel hog than the normal Quadra. However, I really liked it, so perhaps I would just keep both vehicles.
  
  Although, I'd check to see if Gloria wanted to buy my old car today. She was rolling around in a Galena that looked as old as I did.
  
  The Japanese man stared at me for a few more seconds while I continued to smile in a friendly way. Finally, he just sighed and shrugged, "Alright. A second parking spot will be fifty eurodollars a month." That was twice as much as the first one, but I supposed that made sense as few people actually had two cars, so it was a luxury price point. There weren't empty parking spaces next to my current one either, so I elected to select two new places so that they could be right next to each other, even if they were slightly farther from the door.
  
  As I left the office and started to head back upstairs, I got a call from someone I hadn't spoken to in a few weeks. I picked up and said, "Hello?"
  
  The cheery voice of the young doll greeted me, "Hello, Taylor! How are you doing?"
  
  "Uhh... I'm good! Is something the matter?" I asked her, thinking that perhaps someone needed urgent medical care; however, I was wrong.
  
  She moued prettily, with a towel wrapped around her head. It looked like she had just gotten out of the shower. Then she shook her head, "No! I just wanted to talk and maybe invite you to get some breakfast. It's been a while since we've hung out, and it's important to keep up with friendships. Otherwise, people drift apart!"
  
  Wait, were we friends? I thought about it for a while. Although I'd been here for almost two years now, I was still defaulting to the idea that I didn't have any friends. I distrusted people who were too friendly to me, as it had been a common practice for Emma to get someone to pretend to be my friend for a week or so and then later say or do something horrible to me. Still, at least I realised how silly that was.
  
  Still, it was a difficult thing to be so utterly betrayed by your best friend. Especially at the age it happened to me. It might not have been as bad if I was a boy, as I felt that a best friend-style relationship with young boys was shallower than it was with young girls.
  
  It could be that that was just my impression from looking at boys' friendships from the outside, but it was my opinion that a real "best friend forever" relationship between two young girls was as close as being just shy of romance. You shared everything together, and there were things I had told Emma that I had not even told my parents, and she used all of it to utterly destroy me.
  
  I internally shook myself out of my reverie, as I didn't like thinking about that part of my life too much anymore, "Hmm... okay. I could eat, I suppose. What's the plan?" I asked her, fidgeting with my hands out of the video pickup range.
  
  She grinned, "A bunch of us are going to Hotcake Heaven for breakfast. If you want to come with us, meet me at my place in Clouds in less than a half hour. I gotta go!" With that, she disconnected the call.
  
  I hummed, nodded, and picked up my pace to return to my apartment. I wanted to change clothes, although I wasn't entirely sure what was appropriate to wear for a "breakfast with friends." The Hotcake Heaven was a pretty popular breakfast place downtown, and it was similar to the Waffle Wagon or the International Pancake Pit from my old world.
  
  However, it was a slightly higher class here because, to some extent, pancakes had to be comprised of at least some "real food" in terms of refined and processed cereal crops. I was sure all the eggs, bacon and sausage I might eat was likely to be scop, and I doubted very much any maple syrup originated from a tree, but that had stopped bothering me ages ago.
  
  Stepping into my apartment, I rushed to my private area and frowned at my clothes options. Whatever I wore, I would stand out in the company of dolls who were selected almost exclusively for their physical beauty. If I was going to be the black swan, I may as well lean into it a little bit.
  
  I quickly doffed the casual clothes I had on and changed into what I privately called my "librarian outfit." It featured a dark, charcoal grey pencil skirt, mirror-shine black pumps, dark pantyhose, a white blouse and a complimentary casual dark open-front jacket.
  
  It was dressier than business casual, but not by a lot. The casualness of the open-front jacket and simple white blouse made it much more approachable compared to the version of the outfit I could wear with a full-on skirt-suit.
  
  After I selected the outfit and put it on, I stepped over to where I kept my accessories and frowned in consideration. This wasn't an outfit where you wore an out-and-out holster like I usually did these days, so I would have to leave my Omaha at home. I think it would have to be the subcompact Lexington today. Furthermore, the tight pencil skirt wasn't realistic in using a stocking holster, and I didn't really like wearing those anyway.
  
  Although eight out of ten times, this type of holster would be used for the femme fatale character in some of the BDs I liked to watch, the truth was it was quite a pain to get at your weapon. Honestly, I didn't know why I bought a holster of this type anyway, as I have not left the house in a full-on dress, ever.
  
  Nodding, I selected a simple concealed holster that I could wear at the small of my back. The back of the jacket I was wearing would hide it. Wearing a pistol at the small of your back wasn't the best either in terms of how quickly you could pull it out, but I had practised the move a fair bit, and I was very quick, to begin with.
  
  With my main accessory decided, I settled on a pair of simple studs as earrings and an understated lady's watch, the latter of which was almost entirely a piece of jewellery in Night City. Nobody that had a watch would need to look at the watch to determine the time. However, there were still a lot of watches on the used market - selling your parent's stuff after they died and the like, so they were still relatively common to find at both pawn stores and used clothing stores, so it was a very cheap way to really class-up an outfit.
  
  Looking at my face in the mirror, I frowned. I didn't normally wear cosmetics at all. Most of the cosmetics I owned were several years old, the stuff Alt-Mom had owned, and Alt-Dad had packed up in boxes. My own mom had passed before she could really teach me how to do it, and although there had been about a year between when we were twelve and thirteen when Emma was learning and sought to teach me, what would be suitable for her wasn't suitable for me. Her skin was smooth and jade-like, bright and pale, and her hair was bright and colourful; it wasn't a wonder why she ended up a model. If only she was as pretty on the inside.
  
  I decided on just some red lip gloss. It was enough to give a little colour to my lips without actually giving the impression I was wearing any cosmetics. Plus, now that I had the knowledge of a hundred dermatologists in my brain, I essentially never got any blemishes, as I would notice them and correct them as soon as I noticed something wrong with one of my pores. If you had very clean, smooth skin, you didn't need much makeup.
  
  I was about to head out of the door when I stopped. I pulled out the little subcompact Lexington, as well as the spare magazine and considered. Then I quickly emptied the two magazines and refilled them with the same armour-piercing ammunition that gave me bruises on my boobs, emptying the submachine gun's magazine to do it.
  
  Normally, I always carried hollow points when I used the Lexington for extra stopping power on random street toughs, but I honestly wasn't too afraid of people who didn't have body armour or subdermal armour anymore. I honestly doubted a nine millimetre could penetrate the torso of someone with subdermal armour, but I could go for head or throat shots.
  
  I could consistently hit a slow-moving head-sized target at twenty metres with my duty pistol, being in the top five of any clinician in Trauma Team Night City. I even got a small little plaque and a small bonus for my performance on the quarterly weapons qualifications. I doubted very much I could achieve the same accuracy with the much shorter barrel of this pistol and without the tactical heads-up display in my Trauma Team helmet, but I was still a pretty good shot.
  
  After filling the two magazines, I slid one last round into the chamber through the open slide, then thumbed the slide release with a satisfying clunk noise and replaced the pistol in my holster.
  
  Glancing down at my watch for fun, I saw I needed to set its time. It was an antique watch, so it was amazing that it still worked at all, so it wasn't surprising it didn't exactly keep accurate time. Pulling out the stem, I casually set it to the current time before leaving my apartment.
  
  Turning to the left, I walked straight into Clouds. Surprisingly, I wasn't alone in their intake alcove today. I had to go through the path that was manned by one of the hostesses, as the other side was automated and wouldn't let me in unless I wanted to Evelyn in her professional capacity.
  
  There were two men in front of me, one was finishing up with the hostess, and the other glanced at me as I stepped into the alcove. He did seem quite nervous, but he wasn't the "neckbeard" type that I had envisioned in my head as the "typical" Clouds patron. That was an unfair stereotype I had, probably. He was a little older than me and clearly had money from the way he was mistreating his Jinguji casual wear. It looked like he slept in it or maybe just put on the same clothes he had worn for the past couple of days.
  
  After one of the hostesses walked away with the first man, a new hostess slid in to assist the next person. He glanced at me, and I smiled in a friendly manner, and then he glanced back at the hostess and stammered, "Uhhh... you can go first."
  
  I smiled. At first, I thought it was because he didn't want me to hear any of his kinky fantasies, but that wasn't really how Clouds usually worked, so I guess he was just being nice. Nodding, I slid in front of him, and the hostess recognised me, "Ah, Taylor-san. You can go ahead on back..." she glanced down and then frowned, "... except you'll have to leave your pistol here, of course."
  
  Ah. I had forgotten that. Clouds was a pretty high-security place. Although I couldn't see them, I imagined there were at least two or three security guys very close when someone walked in packing. I reached behind myself and pulled out my pistol and had already reversed it, holding it out to the pretty Japanese hostess grip first when she froze briefly and then said, "Ah, apologies, Taylor-san. Jin-sama has authorised you to carry your pistol on the premises." She seemed a little perplexed, probably because I wasn't an obvious Tyger Claw or one of the employees. However, I guessed Mr Jin trusted me to protect his workers when we were out on the town.
  
  The man behind me had his mouth hanging open, which I noticed in my peripheral vision, and since I was feeling saucy, I glanced over my shoulder as I slid my pistol back into its holster and gave him a little wink, then did my best "sashay" back into the non-public area of the brothel unescorted.
  
  I had been to both Himeko and Evelyn's places a few times, and I was always happy that liberal soundproofing was employed on the walls of all of the rooms. I would have been mortified if I had walked past Himeko's room on the way to Evelyn's and heard lewd noises or something along those lines. I had accepted what they did for a living in the intellectual sense, but I still didn't want to be reminded about it too often.
  
  I pressed her doorbell, and after a moment, the door opened, and I stepped in. Frowning, I saw Evelyn in a mostly naked state. I didn't see her in the gym, but it was clear that she had to go, just likely not at the same time Himeko and I did. I imagine if you were a doll, taking care of your body was a business imperative. I wasn't frowning because I was a prude, but because there was no way we would meet the "thirty minutes," she had told me before. It had taken me twenty minutes to get ready myself, after all.
  
  She glanced at me and must have noticed my expression as she said, "Sorry, it was taking a little longer than I thought!" She paused for a moment and looked at me up and down and then gave me a thumbs up, "Looking good! If a bit stuffy, but classy-stuffy. I like it."
  
  Although I wouldn't have called the look I was going for "classy-stuffy" myself, I guess it was a pretty accurate summation of what I was going for. Her room was pretty small but about the same size as my first apartment in this building. I sat on one of her chairs and waited, saying, "It's alright. Who all is coming with us?" It was, too. I didn't really have anything else to do today besides go get my car in the Badlands.
  
  She was wearing pants that were tight enough that she had to lay briefly on her bed to wiggle into them, which caused me to smile in amusement. My cooling suit was just as tight, but it had the benefit of being made of slightly stretchy material all over. She glanced at me and said, "Me, you, Himeko, Amy and Anders." The last name was unfamiliar and sounded like a man's name, which threw me for a loop for a second, although I didn't know why as, of course, there had to be male dolls, too, even if females were much more common and popular.
  
  After getting dressed, she spent a few minutes putting some cosmetics on and made a viola motion, asking, "How do I look?"
  
  "Pretty, as always," I replied, and with that, we both walked out of her room.
  
  She redirected me away from the front area, saying, "No, no... We're leaving through the back door. One of the security guys is driving us all in a van." Well, that explained how we all were going to get there. I was going to offer to drive Evelyn, but my car only had two seats after all.
  
  The others were waiting by a back entrance that I didn't know anything about, as well as an obvious Tyger Claw wearing a suit that I supposed was our security. I waved at Himeko and Amy but almost tripped when I saw Anders. Not only did he look like he should be on the cover of a bodice ripper novel, with long flowing blonde hair, but I recognised him.
  
  Specifically, I recognised him from some "special" BDs that I bought. They weren't X-rated; those types of BDs weren't special at all and could be bought pretty much anywhere. The ones I bought were speciality products only sold online and were of the genre "wholesome romantic." For example, a walk along a beach while holding hands, a dinner date, and the like. The lewdest they got was perhaps a kiss on the cheek. It said something about this world that these types of products were more niche and, to some extent, harder to get than XBDs. This Anders was the main actor in the series of BDs that I had bought! Oh god, this was mortifying. I can't let him know.
  
  Himeko introduced us, "Taylor, this is Anders. Anders, this is Taylor."
  
  He smiled prettily at me and said, "Hi, Taylor!"
  
  "H-hi, Maximilian..." I said, and then I wanted to die immediately and have the earth swallow me up. I had just used the name of the character on the BDs that he acted in.
  
  Both he and Evelyn grinned, although Himeko and the other woman looked a little confused. Evelyn said excitedly, "I knew it! I knew you would be into that weird shit!"
  
  Weird shit?! Was hand holding weird shit?! It actually was in this world. Oh god, just kill me now.
  
  Maximilian... err, Anders chuckled and looked pleased, "This is the first time I've met someone who was a fan! You've got to tell me all about what you liked and what you didn't!" Oh, no, please, no.
  
  Thankfully, they noticed my discomfort and didn't tease me much more. We all got into the back of the nondescript black van, and the Tyger Claw man drove us to the restaurant. I asked curiously, "Do security people always escort you if you leave the building?"
  
  Evelyn shook her head, "Nah, but they offered since it was four of us all going to the same place. They do recommend we only go to a few places though if we leave Japantown, but it is not mandatory or anything." Okay, that made sense. I would take the free security, too, if I were them.
  
  Almost on cue, I got a call on my encrypted phone app from Mr Jin. Tilting my head to the side, I answered it, "Hello, Mr Jin." The four of them looked interested in my conversation, as they clearly knew who ran the business. He hadn't hired a new professional manager yet, and was actually quite popular with the dolls, from what Evie and Himeko had told me.
  
  "Hey, Taylor! I just wanted to thank you for going along with Evelyn and Himeko... oh, and one other thing," he said, possibly misunderstanding precisely why I had come into his building armed. Or maybe he didn't, since he knew I would if I could, protect them. However, the last thing he said had a sly, amused tone.
  
  I told him, "Oh, it's no problem. But what's the other thing?"
  
  "Just a job offer if medicine or mercenary work ends up not working out for you. I think you have awoken something in the gentleman in the lobby today," he said, very amused. Then he told me a little bit about what he meant without violating too much client confidentiality. He said it was actually a pretty common fantasy, but I frowned as I disconnected the call.
  
  I wasn't sure I wanted the answer to the question, but I still asked Evelyn, "What is a 'dommy mommy boss fantasy', and why would I have awoken it in one of your clients while waiting for the hostess?"
  
  That caused all four of them to crack up briefly.
  
  Despite all of that, the breakfast was very fun. I had strawberry and cream pancakes, eggs and bacon. It was the best breakfast I had in months and was only about twice the price of my normal breakfast. Perhaps I would go here again.
  
  It wasn't as awkward as I thought it would be with Anders there, despite him being an Adonis in human form. It was actually... fun to be around people like that. It was similar to the time I spent with Kiwi, Ruslan and Jean, even if we usually only hung out before or after a gig.
  
  I declined a ride back to the Megabuilding, as I wanted to do a little shopping in the downtown area and figured I'd take a taxi back or maybe just get on the NCART.
  
  As I was window shopping aimlessly at a large electronics store, I got a call from Wakako. I stepped into a more private and less popular area of the store before I answered, "Hello, Mrs Okada."
  
  "Taylor, I received your report about the gig, and I have some questions. Firstly, did these guys owe you money? Or perhaps seduce your sister and then not call her afterwards? You went scorched earth! From my and the client's perspective, that is great and all - you're getting a double bonus, but it seemed a little out of character," she said, using a very amused tone but also a curious one.
  
  I see how it was. It was making fun of Taylor day. That's fine, that's fine. I'll remember this, though. I sniffed delicately and offered a haughty tone, "I thought they were crucifying two people, including a boy that was maybe five years younger than me, and I was in a position to stop them while still accomplishing the mission objectives."
  
  "Mmhmm," replied Wakako, "You're not trying to be a hero, are you?"
  
  I'd like to be, but I wasn't stupid, so I told her honestly, "I don't think there are any heroes on this whole planet, much less me. Still, fuck those guys."
  
  She nodded, "Indeed. I appreciate the tip about NC Dams, too. I had some similar information, so this is a good confirmation. In exchange, I have some advice that you asked for: I wouldn't recommend trying to short their company unless you have at least a million in liquidity and are willing to risk it. Anything less than that, and I think they'll stay afloat long enough to cause you to lose money overall. It is likely that they'll hang on for at least another six months. It's possible you could make some eddies if you try it five months from now, assuming I'm right. Just my opinion, though, and I am not your investment analyst."
  
  "No, you're much better than that," I told her honestly, but I was curious, "Why are the powers that be working to keep the stock price up?"
  
  She got a shrewd look on her face, "I can't say exactly, but if I had to guess, I would, perhaps, say that the market makers and initial investors are keeping the price up until such a point that they also have secured themselves a net negative position on the company so that they can minimise the amount of money they lose. This might take some time if they want to do so without drawing any attention."
  
  Something told me that was a very good guess. Something also told me that I would likely need to look under my car for a long time if I was stupid enough to try to call Network News 23 and give them a tip about this company. So, I would keep my mouth shut.
  
  "Lastly, the drones. Client is willing to buy them back from you at a thousand eddies a pop. Interested?" she asked.
  
  I hadn't bothered doing much research about this model of drone, so I asked, "Is that a good price?"
  
  She shrugged, "Fair, I'd say. It isn't a good price if you have a use for drones like this, though, but it is a fair price for liquidating them when you didn't expect to get them in the first place. You can buy them used for about four grand per unit. One thousand is a fall off the truck price. He's trying to avoid having to pay more to replace them."
  
  That was fair, I suppose, especially since that was basically how I acquired them if you included the fact that I murdered everyone on the truck and then set it on fire afterwards.
  
  I couldn't see any use for medium-sized CHOO2-powered aerial cargo drones. Especially ones that had to have been hacked somehow to down them, so I nodded, "Yeah, that's fine. I'll have them couriered over to your office today or tomorrow morning at the earliest." I might even deliver them myself. RCS would charge almost a hundred bucks for the job, and Wakako didn't live so far away from my place. A hundred eddies was a hundred eddies, after all.
  
  "Excellent, Taylor. It's always good to do business with a pro. As far as the other matter, I have secured a number of testers, and you should expect some good news in just a few days, a week at the most," she said brightly.
  
  A pro? I didn't feel like a pro. Still, I took the compliment with good grace. Before she disconnected, I asked her, "Do you have any contacts for a body and paint shop? I want a complete re-spray done on my new car."
  
  Her eyebrow rose perceptibly, and she nodded, "I'm not surprised. And yes, I'll send you the deets." With that, she disconnected. Wakako was never one for much small talk, after all.
  
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  I Want Peking Duck!
  It was a rainy night in the big city, the rain falling down in sheets onto my form-fitting hydrophobic bodysleeve. Over a secure net connection, I told my partner in crime, "Don't worry, the security here is a joke. Only motion detectors and maybe a laser grid. I'll be in and out."
  
  Her face popped up on the corner of the vision, the attractive female netrunner smiling sultrily, "Well, get to it then, toots. We have to have the data tap in place before the target comes home in the morning." The target was the leader of an international terrorist organisation called the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and we were being paid to secure proof that this terrorist group was colluding with a local corporation.
  
  Eyes rolling, I triggered my stealth systems and vanished from sight, running gracefully through the open area right before the tall glass of the Corporate tower. Leaping off the ground and spinning through the air, I hit the side of the building, using suction cups attached to my hands and feet to quickly scale several floors. Once I got to the correct floor, I hung precariously from the glass as I took a small object from my belt and attached it to one of the suction cups. The device featured a telescoping attachment which I pulled out to its full length, the whole construction looking like the spoke from a bicycle, absent the wheel.
  
  Pressing a button on the device caused a visible bright red laser to strike the glass face with a hiss as I rotated the device in a full three hundred and sixty degrees around the suction cup, slicing out a large circle of glass. After the glass section was free, I deactivated the device and replaced it on my belt, then lifted the entire section of glass out of the hole before leaping through it, carefully bringing the section of glass inside the building with me and setting it aside. I had to align the circle of glass carefully while I was in mid-air so that it would fit through the hole, but it was not at all difficult.
  
  "I'm in," I tell her across our tacnet theatrically.
  
  Her face nods in the corner of my screen, "Okay, take the third left, right, left, left; then the next right will be the fibre optic junction."
  
  I dart down through the corridors as directed until I arrive at a nondescript door. I say, obviously, "It doesn't look like much."
  
  "Maybe not, but all data traffic in and out of their data fortress goes through this junction. The code should be 8-2-4-5-8-9-9-9," my netrunner said, which caused me to nod and quickly enter the code on the pin pad before opening the door.
  
  The next room was large and filled with humming computers and the noise of heavy-duty HVAC cooling systems. The entryway was guarded by several dozen lasers that appeared to move up and down and left to right, changing angles and position seemingly randomly. Deactivating my stealth system as I felt I would need to see my body for this, I then took a few moments to limber up. I used the grace of a ballerina to bend in and out of the lasers, a leap here, bending entirely backwards there and missing each laser beam by centimetres. I almost made it through, but my prodigiously sized breasts managed to occlude the last beam, and instantly an audible klaxon started blaring.
  
  "Shit! You've done it now," my partner said.
  
  I sighed, shaking my head and pulling out my pistol in one hand and monowire in the other, "Oh boy, here I go killin' again...." I was going to need a cool, refreshing Nicola Classic after this-
  
  I suddenly found myself back in the AV-4's cabin listening to an altogether different-sounding klaxon. "PLATINUM. SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE."
  
  I sighed and verified that the braindance had stopped so that I could resume where I had left off. This was episode six, and I had been consuming this series religiously since I discovered it a few months ago. They came out with one episode a month, and although it was cheesy in the extreme in some respects, and I usually had to fast forward through at least one sex scene, usually of the lesbian persuasion, per episode, it was still very entertaining.
  
  I didn't know why I liked it. Half the time, the protagonist got caught in the act and had to use her feminine wiles or sheer luck to get out of the situations she got herself in. The rest of the time, she used implausible combat abilities, which I found very amusing. In the last episode, she diced an aircar into pieces with her monowire while she was inside it several hundred metres in the air . It would be really nice if that were possible, and it was cinematic as hell to have her barely manage to save herself in the free-fall afterwards, but it was implausible. But it was that very implausibility that made it so hilarious.
  
  Rather than the usual of throwing us off our perch, the aircraft went to maximum power and started a high-speed high-rate climb out to the south. That was a sign the patient wasn't in the city.
  
  I pulled up the data on the patient. Not surprisingly, it was a trauma. Surprisingly, it was on the edge of the Badlands, as I was guessing. We didn't often pick up Platinum clients out there - they were rich enough not to need to leave our normal service volume. In this case, though, the client was a mid-level Biotechnica executive. He was high enough up the ladder that he had a Platinum membership but low enough that he still had to go to dangerous places; in this case, he was near the Biotechnica Flats but technically outside the border of the city. They were probably looking at areas of expansion or making examples of poorly performing employees or some other nonsense.
  
  I glanced at the Senior I was working with today, and he was already frowning. The beacon was still transmitting, but the bio-monitor was not providing any updates after the initial ping for widespread penetrating or kinetic trauma, which wasn't a good sign. I wasn't working with Dr Anno today and probably wouldn't for a few months. Although I did work his normal schedule, he was working alongside a new hire as he did with me in the past.
  
  Mercy came on our net, "We're expecting heavy combat on this run, so we're probably going to stay back and spray everything that moves with the Gatlings before setting down. Pilots think it is Nomads, but we can already see some burning vehicles and heavy machine-gun fire from here; twenty-five klicks out on the infrared, and that is bullshit."
  
  Mr Mercy, as the Senior Security Specialist, was in command theoretically until we made patient contact; although the pilot was in command of the aircraft, he basically did and went where Mr Mercy told him to go, which was why the Senior Security Specialist was often tied with the Senior Med Techie as the highest paid employee on the AV, and the only way you could be qualified for that job was if you had significant leadership experience in actual military forces, with a focus on small unit tactics. For example, Mr Mercy was a former Captain in the NUSA Special Forces, as Alt-Danny himself had been.
  
  I switched to the stream of the long-range zoom FLIR pod and frowned as I, sure enough, saw heavy machine guns and light cannon fire back and forth between vehicles, some of which were fleeing while others were pursuing. Triggering the pilot's net, I could hear their discussion.
  
  "Doesn't look like Nomads to me, Bill," said the co-pilot and gunner wryly.
  
  The pilot sighed, "Yeah, yeah, don't bust my balls. Alright, fence in, gadget on."
  
  The co-pilot shifted to an all-business tone, "Targetting radar online, we have confirmed Biotechnica IFF. New picture, range one niner, two groups azimuth two-zero-fife, track south southeast, south group azimuth two one niner, track southwest. Gadget is calling the first group three ATOMs, not BMPs, as I thought, and the second group a mix of SUVs and technicals, radiating Biotechnica IFF. Groups will merge soon."
  
  "Label first group hostile, second group friendly, set gates, max power," the pilot said a lot more calmly than I was feeling. Then he said formally, "You are cleared hot on the IFVs."
  
  One would think that as a passenger in the back of the AV, I would have felt it when they launched actual missiles, but the missiles we used were pretty small. I felt it much more when the pilot went full throttle and started diving, with the airframe shaking and all of the turbines screaming loudly.
  
  The AGM Kite was not technically an anti-tank missile, although it could get mission kills sometimes from what I read online, but it was designed to wreck SPAGs and other small, lightly armoured targets, as well as headquarters elements. The reason Trauma Team used it, other than the fact that it was relatively cheap, was that it had excellent guidance and minimal collateral damage. You could stand just a few metres away from one if it hit a vehicle, and the Kite's explosion wouldn't injure you - although secondary explosions might.
  
  At the same time, I saw three rockets separate from our aircraft on the infrared feed. I heard the co-pilot say dispassionately, "Rifle, ATOM times three. Spinning up the Gancz now, we can skip the high-speed pass with the gun, we probably can't defeat the armour with it, but let's swing around in front in case they have any infantry, we can hose them down, or they can cook; their choice. Range now zero niner, Kite terminal guidance starts in one zero seconds."
  
  The pilot-in-command said, "Agreed," and just a short time later, I saw the three little specks that had been the missiles we fired radically climb into the air and then fall down almost vertically, each one striking the top of one of the armoured vehicles. The explosion was fairly subdued, but almost immediately, fires started on all of the vehicles, billowing out of the hole the missile had made. The missiles didn't strike them soon enough to save one of the SUVs, which was demolished by the thin cannon each of the armoured vehicles had just before the missile impacted, but six survivors kept fleeing to the south.
  
  The engines were pulled back to almost idle, and we were pushed into our seats by positive G-forces as well as centrifugal force as I saw us circle the downed infantry fighting vehicles at high speed. Sure enough, one of the large doors opened, and I was aghast as the pilots just sprayed the miniguns into the crew compartment of the vehicle. I mean, that was certainly... effective, if a bit ghastly. I didn't think those guys were really a threat anymore, but I supposed the guys up front didn't want to be surprised while we were working on the patients after we caught up with the fleeing Biotechnica vehicles. We were the first AV on the scene, but I assumed there were multiple subscribers on the ground, even if only one of them was a Platinum member.
  
  One other vehicle got the same treatment, but when we dipped to the south and the engines spooled up to their max power again, I stopped monitoring their feed and started getting ready to get out. Mr Mercy had us double-check our weapons, and then we sat down, in front of a group of about six SUVs, with Biotechnica security forces spilling out with guns pointed in every direction except ours.
  
  Mr Mercy guided the Senior and me over to the vehicle that had our subscriber in it, and we stopped just short of it. I tilted my armoured helmet to the side, and Mr Mercy said over the intercom, "Well, that's your problem right there..."
  
  Our client was missing his head and most of his upper torso. He must have gotten shot by one of those autocannons on those wheeled armoured vehicles. I assumed while he had disembarked from his convoy, and I couldn't help but be impressed by the marksmanship with the autocannon by the crews of those armoured vehicles we had just killed.
  
  I was surprised that they had brought his body with them, but then I realised they probably knew we were responding, and if they had left it on the ground where he got hit, we would have just gone there. By taking it with them, they, in a way, forced us to defend them in their escape. Smart.
  
  Still, I tried hard not to snicker at Mr Mercy's quip and instead stared disapprovingly at the giant of a man, who shrugged and said, "Alright. The client is DoA, and if the clinicians pronounce him, we will shift to secondary clients. We have two gold and three silvers. Other AVs are five mikes out."
  
  I glanced at the Senior, as it was technically his job to pronounce death in a client; he sighed and said, "Time of death was... a lot sooner than now, but let's say 2315 Zulu."
  
  Our systems were monitored for phrases like that, and the beacon we were tracking automatically shifted to the gold subscriber with the most acute injuries, and I turned to look at a man in a nice suit that was missing his left arm from the elbow down. You'd think that he or someone else would have applied a tourniquet or something and not just stood there bleeding to death. Well, that was why we were here, I supposed. This was going to be a milk run from here on out, at least. Small mercies.
  
  Anytime a client died on a run, especially when it was a Platinum subscriber, there was automatically a peer review by other Med Techies chaired by one of our local medical directors. It was clear that this time was pro forma, as the medical director asked on the conference call wryly, "So there's nothing you could have done?"
  
  The Senior I was working with, who was a doctor in his own right, just flipped the woman off, which got everyone chuckling. She said, "We'll record that down as a no, then. Well, as long as we're here, let's pull up the gentleman you did transport. Now, Clincian Hebert, if you could, why don't you walk us through your thoughts when you made initial patient contact..."
  
  Internally, I groaned but went along with it. I hated, absolutely despised, being the focus on peer reviews because some of what I occasionally did to save a patient's life was outside the official Trauma Team Patient Care Guidelines, which got me dinged in the peer review - however, nobody could really argue with my results. I hadn't had one patient die that wasn't, basically, dead already.
  
  It made me spend hours and hours every week devouring medical journal articles, using my Trauma Team credentials to get free access to most of them, just so that I could have ammunition to explain why I occasionally went outside the PCGs. I even got a couple of the PCGs changed as a result of what I have done since what I had done had such superior outcomes for the patients in those particular situations. It wasn't that I was learning new things, although occasionally I did, which always caused me to feel a flush of pleasure; the primary reason I was doing it was to understand what was considered acceptable medical practice in this world.
  
  My medical encyclopaedia was, I thought, far broader than state of the art in Brockton Bay, as I found a bunch of things that were considered state of the art here to be considered by my medical sense as the equivalent of using leeches, however randomly I would find something new that delighted it. So I constantly had to hold back, utilising less effective medicine for conditions simply because it wasn't discovered yet. If I just went with what was natural to me, I would have been discovered a year ago or more; I had to constrain my patient care to at least what was known to science here if it couldn't be obfuscated somehow.
  
  As such, despite my distaste for the peer review process everything went smoothly.
  
  On my next day off, I had a contract that was going to take most of the first part of the day, so I invited Gloria to work in my clinic for the whole day, and since our days off, for once, aligned, she happily agreed. Plus, I got to see David, who was shooting up like a weed.
  
  "How is kindergarten, David?" I asked the boy, who scowled.
  
  He shook his head, "It be stupid, Auntie Taylor. The games are kind of fun, but the other kids don't even know their letters yet." He had the voice of a child who had a very hard life, according to him. I kind of liked that he called me Auntie, and he had been managing to say my full name for a while now, although I kind of missed the days he called me "Tayr." That had been adorable while it lasted.
  
  "It is stupid. The present subjunctive is not the correct tense for that verb," I corrected him automatically, as I generally did whenever he said something that used incorrect grammar.
  
  The little shit rolled his eyes, I saw him do it right in front of me, then he ran off to watch television or play video games in my private area, and I let him go.
  
  Thinking about what he said, I wasn't entirely sure they would teach them their letters at all.
  
  The current state of pedagogy seemed to indicate that reading was an arcane skill with universal optical character recognition, plus with most optics providing universal speech-to-text providing subtitles caused motivated people to teach themselves to read basically by the time they were fifteen. So, only ten years past when they normally should have learned that skill. As a child of an English Professor who was reading, even if they were simple, books before I ever went to Kindergarten, this was unacceptable.
  
  Language was the kernel of sapience, I thought. It was only by developing language that children developed consciousness. Both my own opinion and my medical sense agreed with this assesment. Language was what separated a human from, say, a clever orangutan or dolphin. Literacy wasn't as huge a developmental milestone as verbal language skills in children were, but still, postponing literacy in children would only stunt their cognitive development, I felt.
  
  It wasn't a good idea unless your goal was to have the average person end up maybe five per cent dumber than rich children who got an actual education. Five per cent didn't sound like a lot, but on the tail ends of a standard distribution, it would tend to make most real world-changing geniuses be from a certain and similar social stratum. Perhaps I was a conspiracy theorist, but I thought that this might be intentional. It wasn't like people didn't know the same things I did. The science of cognitive development in children was pretty well studied in this world.
  
  Gloria was humming as she set up the clinic to her personal preferences. She had bought all of my old equipment, but for some reason, she couldn't find an affordable commercial property in her Megabuilding, but she was still making a fair bit of money as a Med Techie that would make house calls. She, like me, didn't really discriminate and would treat most sane gang members so long as she had an agreement with that particular gang that she wouldn't be stiffed or turned into a stiff for her trouble. Mostly it was 6th Street and the Valetino's that were near enough distance that she occasionally got called by them.
  
  A call-out med techie was a pretty interesting niche, I thought. Still, she tended to make more money when she worked here in Japantown. Her idea had the potential to make much, much more than even I did, but it would only be possible if she got additional training and the rich people started hiring her.
  
  "So, you're sure you're not interested in buying my car?" I asked her. I had offered it to her when she took me out into the wastes to pick it up in her dinky little Galena. Honestly, I would have felt a little nervous about driving very far in the desert in that thing, and I carefully followed her back to the town instead of going on ahead, just in case.
  
  She sighed, "I'd like to, but I'm saving up to pay for my Paramedic license. NC Med will pay half the costs if I give them a two-year work-commitment, but that is still about twenty-five grand I have to put up myself. My little car is already paid off. I'm halfway there now. Plus, I want to get David into a better school. I'll have to drive my pile of junks till the wheels fall off."
  
  I nodded. That made sense. I was actually a little surprised that my old workplace was willing to pay twenty-five grand for only a two-year commitment. I think they probably had trouble finding actual National Registry licensed paramedics at the salary that they paid. Still, Gloria had been looking a lot better recently, like she wasn't on edge any more. I suspected that she had been living close to pay-check to pay-check before. Even when we were partners, just giving her one of my sleep inducers had helped wonders, although I had to provide a little bit of maintenance every six months.
  
  I had a new version now after researching a bunch into the way BDs affected the brain, and I thought the new version I was going to build might only require maintenance from me annually or perhaps even less often.
  
  Gloria hadn't changed her mind about wanting to get David into corporate schools, despite me explaining bluntly the challenges he might face as a first-generation corporate employee after graduation. I would try to prepare him, but educating him on what he could expect would essentially end his childhood. I didn't want to teach him too early to expect betrayal by those who claimed to be his friends and peers just yet. I didn't even trust my teammates at Trauma Team, and they had one of the best reputations there was.
  
  The part of me that encompassed Alt-Taylor's memories suggested I wait until he got a schoolyard enemy, especially if such an enemy got the better of him first. It would also teach him that there was a huge difference between intelligence and cunning and that he shouldn't underestimate anyone, even those he was sure he was more intelligent than. He would need both traits to survive what his mom seemed to want from him, but perhaps he would follow her footsteps into the medical field - things were a little less cut-throat in that sector, mostly because doctors, despite their expertise, were simply highly-paid servants to those who were really in power. It was only really if you wanted to rise on the ladder beyond a simple highly-paid servant that the knives would come for you.
  
  For example, I knew for a fact that Dr Anno wanted to become our next Medical Director. Right now, he didn't see me as a threat, but if I was a medical doctor with similar ambitions, well, it might get messy. He was a nice enough man, but by my Corporate background, he would see me as a threat if we were really peers.
  
  I didn't think Gloria was making a wrong choice, particularly because I didn't know any better options that he could have. It was similar to a boy wanting to be a soldier or police officer, you didn't want to shatter the delusions about what exactly such a life would consist of when they were just five years old, but it still had to be done eventually.
  
  "I've had a number of requests that your pharmacy stock certain chemicals that are mostly recreational in nature," Gloria mentioned absently as I gathered my own supplies.
  
  I shook my head, "No, definitely not. I appreciate that our clients would trust us to ensure the purity of such a product, but I am not doing anything to step on the toes of the Tyger Claws. Recreational drugs are one of their largest profit-centres."
  
  Still, I hummed, tilting my head to the side, "I know a few of the Tyger Claw dealers that sell exactly what they say on the tin; I'll leave you a couple of names that you could forward anyone who is insistent, but definitely try to discourage people from recreational drug use, and absolutely refuse to continue discussing it if they mention they want something like Lace or Glitter. There is no way to use those substances in anything that even resembles a healthy way."
  
  Before I came to this world, I would never, not in my wildest dreams, ever think the words, "Have you considered something more healthy, like methamphetamine?" would come out of my mouth, but average everyday stimulants like most types of synthetic cocaine and amphetamines were nothing compared to some of the purpose designed recreational drugs in this world. Selling things like Glitter or Black Lace to the downtrodden occasionally had me fantasising about setting fire to the Tyger Claws and all gangs like them.
  
  That said, Tyger Claws sold drugs across all demographics, and they had a lot of dealers that were more or less honest in what they sold, as they targeted a higher demographic. Still, they'd sell to anyone; it was just they were the type you had to have a referral to. You wouldn't come across them attempting to ply their wares on the street.
  
  Gloria whispered to herself, "... what the hell is a tin?"
  
  I ignored her, grabbed my own medical bag, which was really more of a stuffed backpack at this stage, and left. I didn't have too far to go; in fact, only a couple of doors down. Mr Jin had paid my day rate to give medical exams to all of the dolls, which I agreed to as long as he understood I wouldn't divulge more of their medical data than necessary. It was a promise that only had meaning to my own sense of professional ethics, as considering the examinations were conducted inside Clouds, it was undoubtedly all under surveillance.
  
  Of that, there wasn't much I could do besides telling each of my patients about it before I examined them and asking if they wanted to continue. Considering I imagined continued employment probably depended on an agreement to subject themselves to this exam, that was also more of an illusory choice, but the illusion of choice was often baked into the bedrock of this world.
  
  Instead of walking through the front door, I went through a side one after calling Mr Jin. A familiar Tyger Claw in a nice suit that was ruined by the cowboy hat and old-fashioned leather holster at his waist greeted me at the door. I stared at him and asked, "Where's your sword? What was Jin thinking, letting you around a classy establishment like this?"
  
  He grinned and nodded to the chair he was sitting at next to the door, there was a katana in a scabbard leaning up against the wall. He spoke in an exaggerated announcer tone, which actually impressed me, "When a man learns that not everything can be sliced by a sword, he takes up his gun! Johnny, the Samurai Gunman! A man with the heart of a Samurai but the soul of a gunman."
  
  I sighed, "You're Chinese."
  
  "A Chinese Samurai Gunman," he corrected, and mentally I corrected his correction, ' A Chinese weeb.' Suddenly, I realised why they had him guarding this out-of-the-way entrance that only employees used. So none of their clients would see or, especially, speak with him. I glanced down at his holster, it was new and was slung low on his waist like this was a Western, except it was still the same large-calibre Constitution Arms pistol that I had sold him.
  
  I nodded and asked him finally, "Yes, yes. Is someone coming to meet me to escort me to my work area?"
  
  He opened his mouth to answer in the affirmative but was stopped by someone opening the door; in this case, it was a much more traditionally dressed security man who smiled at me and asked, "If you'll follow me, Miss Hebert."
  
  I nodded and walked with him back into the depths of the Clouds, we passed a break area, and he led me into what was a small clinic. I was a little surprised they had one. It wasn't anything even like what I had, but they still had a number of consumable supplies that I could use and a few pieces of equipment. I tilted my head to the side, "If your establishment has a clinic, why isn't your own Med Techie handling this?"
  
  He smiled, "We don't presently have one. Are you interested in a job?" I shook my head firmly, which he took in good grace and smiled.
  
  After that, I saw a succession of some of the most beautiful people I've ever seen in my life. They were clearly of many different types; for example, my friend Evelyn and Himeko were of a "biologically pure" type, with minimal external cybernetics. But a few of the dolls were very significantly augmented. It took all kinds, I supposed.
  
  I preceded each exam by stating what I would tell their employer, namely if there was anything that would preclude them from performing the normal duties of a doll, how long it would take to remediate, and what would need to be done if they were not. I then told them that since we were in the Clouds, chances were good that everything was being recorded, though, but I wouldn't be the one to break their confidence.
  
  I thought they appreciated my honesty. They were, for the most part, in excellent health. It wasn't that long ago that Clouds spent a considerable amount of money on each doll to ensure that. A few of them had cybernetics that needed to be adjusted, and in this case, I didn't dispense prescriptions but actual medications that I had brought with me in some quantity, even the pricy stuff. I was keeping track of what I distributed and would just bill Clouds for the total.
  
  I blushed a bit at seeing the red handprint on Evelyn's posterior, partly covered by her underwear, which she noticed and grinned, "Clouds charges a lot more if a client wants to get even slightly rough like this because it makes it so I can't take other clients until this handprint is gone. Our best clients have months or years-long relationships with us, and not one of them wants to see another gonk's handprint on our asses, for example."
  
  I chuckled, rubbing the back of my neck and said, as I reviewed the readings I was getting when plugged into her interface socket, "I can see how that might be an issue. I see you did get the internal biomonitor, tech hair, as well as the Midnight Lady accessory. Have you been having any issues with any of your cybernetics? No headaches after a session like before?"
  
  "Nope. Nothing like that. A couple of the new girls have mentioned that they occasionally get headaches after a session, though," she said cheerily. I nodded, having already found one new doll that needed a significant recalibration of her doll hardware.
  
  I dug through my supplies to pull out a small pneumatic injector, "Okay, panties down and stick your butt out for a moment."
  
  She grinned, "I didn't think you were going to play doctor like thaaat." Still, she complied quickly, wiggling her panties down to her ankles, and I told her that I would give her something to cause the bruise to heal soon, unless she particularly wanted some more time off. She shook her head and gave me a thumbs up, so I gave the centre of the handprint a quick shot of nanomeds that would heal the bruise in only a couple of hours.
  
  "Alright, you're good to go," I told her and allowed her to put all of her clothes back on, "Do you have any questions?"
  
  She hummed, "What were the biosculpt treatments you recommended the last time?"
  
  "Either nanosurgeons, or an enhanced immune system. Or both. It depends on whether you are more concerned about disease or trauma. If money were no object, I would recommend everyone get both of these treatments. There are almost no downsides, unlike many augmentations," I told her frankly, "The cost if you went back to Skyline would be about eight thousand each, but there is a fairly good clinic here in Japantown that I have been going to that could drop the cost by about fifteen hundred eddies each."
  
  I supposed the nanosurgeons could possibly have a psychological impact; if you thought you could heal from most wounds, it might tend to make you more reckless, but it was probably much less than even a moderate cybernetic limb, as psychologically, people just wouldn't believe it. Fear of injury was bone-deep, buried in our genome itself, and it was difficult to overcome with mere intellectual knowledge unless you've been injured and healed by your nanosurgeons many times.
  
  Plus, even if you knew you could be healed, it didn't stop the pain. Even though I knew my nanosurgeons could heal my hand if I placed it on the hot burner of my stovetop within eight hours didn't make me more likely to do it, as that would have been incredibly painful.
  
  She grinned at that, "Awesome! I had saved up enough for both of them. Do you think you could take me no introduce me to that Ripper later? I'll buy you dinner!"
  
  "Of course," I told her, although I was pretty sure it was the same one that Clouds recommended these days. Still, Evelyn and Himeko and the others in her peer group probably wouldn't trust their recommendations for some time, so it wasn't surprising for the girl to ask for my recommendations.
  
  She nodded, "Great. Now, what do you know about longevity treatments?"
  
  A lot more than anybody else on this planet is what I wanted to say. Instead, I was a bit more ambiguous, "A lot. What are you more interested in, actually living longer or just looking younger for longer?"
  
  She blinked for a moment, "Both, of course."
  
  I nodded, as that was the correct answer, in my opinion, "It's much cheaper to start these treatments when you are still relatively young as you are now. It's also more effective. The really wealthy begin longevity treatments as soon as they start puberty. I'm guessing you would have to budget at least five thousand Eurodollars a year for an acceptable treatment plan. I can give you recommendations for clinics that I would trust if you want."
  
  If she were a decade older, the price would have been five times as much or more.
  
  When I became an actual doctor, I could become an official supplier of these treatments too, although I intended to probably utilise my own formulas for the most part and claim to my patients that they were standard treatments. Without paying the wholesale prices for the medicine and genetic treatments, it would be incredibly lucrative for me; I'd just have to pay the various corporations enough so that they didn't become suspicious. If I became known for providing excellent rejuvenation treatments but barely bought anything from them wholesale, they would investigate for sure.
  
  She didn't have any questions after that, and the male god, Anders, was my next patient, and I steeled myself to be completely professional as I pulled up the medical record provided by Clouds and was surprised, "Your actual name is Anders? I thought that was just your nom de plume." I didn't know the polite word for "Stripper name", so I used the quickest approximation I could, namely the name an author used if they wanted to write a book pseudonymously. In his case, the name on his file was Theodore Anders.
  
  He chuckled, "It's my family name. I kind of don't get along with my father. He has a long-standing problem with the people I choose to date, and it amuses me to use my actual last name as my doll name. Unfortunately, I don't think he actually cares."
  
  Fuck! Were all the good ones gay?! "What a dick, a lot of people are gay...." I tried to comfort him, and he looked at me like I was speaking Greek, then he chuckled and then transitioned into a full laugh.
  
  "Gay? No. I mean... what year do you think it is? Nobody, not even MY dad, would really care about that. He wanted to set up what amounted to an arranged marriage," he said in between laughs.
  
  That caused me to blush in embarrassment, but internally I was curious, as arranged marriages were a lot older than even disapproval of homosexual marriages, and that implied he was from a rather important family. That followed as he had impeccable body mods and top-of-the-line everything as far as cybernetics was concerned, including a security suite that, while wasn't as good as mine, was still pretty expensive.
  
  The youthful rebellion of a rich boy by playing as a doll and BD star? Well, I would still buy his releases; they were some of the best in the genre.
  
  My blush had gone away by the time I finished my exam, "You are in perfect health," I told him, which caused him to grin and give a thumbs up.
  
  After finishing with the last doll, I packed up all my belongings and catalogued all the medicine I handed out for the invoice I was making for Clouds. Then I had a brief meeting with Mr Jin in his office.
  
  "Taylor! Thanks for this; we're making it a standard thing every six months if you're interested in a continuing arrangement," the man stood as I entered the room and didn't take his seat again until I sat in front of him. I doubted he was an actual gentleman in his line of work, but he could pretend to be one pretty well.
  
  I nodded, "Sure. Overall the health of your employees was very good. There were a few issues, and I have a list of a few dolls I'd like to see on a follow-up basis. I did notice a few of them had some malware, but it seemed to be of a relatively ordinary type that people often get; I didn't find anything suspicious about it at all. I cleaned all of the infected systems."
  
  He looked happy at first, but when I mentioned some of them had malware, he looked quite upset, "That's a pretty sensitive subject lately, as I am sure you're aware. Did you take copies of them like last time?"
  
  I shrugged and nodded, sliding a data shard across his desk, "I did, but as I said, these were pretty tame pieces of software. Why don't you have your doll server running a security suite, anyway?"
  
  "What are you talking about?" he asked.
  
  I sighed and shook my head. Non-technical managers were the worst sometimes. Still, that's why they paid specialists like myself, "I ran every doll through a quick doll-chip diagnostic, so I know exactly what make and model of server you're using. That company offers an optional security suite; it's part hardware and part software. I'm sure you're aware that when a doll is running a session that the doll server has incredible access to the doll's system, yes?"
  
  He nodded, so I continued, "Well, the security suite uses this temporary access to scan each doll's system during a session and, if necessary, clean and quarantine any malware found on their system. It's obviously not perfect, and some zero-day custom rootkits might get by it, but for the most part, it is pretty thorough, and it is a lot cheaper than, say, buying each doll ICE, for example."
  
  He groaned the groan of a man who had just realised he was an idiot and put his face in his hands briefly before asking me, "Do you know how much this system costs?"
  
  I hummed, "I think about twenty-five grand for the system module itself, then there's a per-doll annual license of one or two hundred Eurodollars a year."
  
  He groaned even louder. "Taylor, can you do your good friend Mr Jin a favour?"
  
  "I don't grant blanket favours like that anymore," I told him cautiously.
  
  He chuckled and sat back up, "That's wise of you. Can you pretend that I have had that system all along? I'm going to buy it today, that is very cheap. It is also something I should have known about after the last incident, so I don't want you to mention that we didn't already have it to anybody."
  
  "If Mr Inoue straight-up asks me, I'm not going to lie to him, but sure, I won't volunteer it or mention it again. Besides, you can say honestly that I said that your doll's cybersecurity was remarkably improved from last time in total honesty," I told him, trying not to smirk too much.
  
  He chuckled and nodded, "Thank you, that I will mention. Can you send me the net address for where I can purchase this?" I nodded and sent him both the net address for the product page as well as the net address for the sales manager of that corporation, as I had called and asked for price information between exams.
  
  "Thank you. This will help a lot. If you'll excuse me, I have to go beat our sys admin about the head and neck. He should have already been on top of this and had this recommendation for me after the last uhh.. incident," he told me in a friendly manner, but the way he popped his knuckles audibly and rotated his neck, limbering up, made me think he was actually being literal here.
  
  I stood up as he did and said, "Of course. I'll send you the invoice. I run on a net30 billing schedule, of course." He waved that off, and we both exited his office, and I quickly departed Clouds before I had to hear some poor system administrator squeal as Mr Jin set upon him.
  
  Mrs Okada has rented out one of the private rooms at The Golden Duck for the meeting she asked me to attend, and I took that as a good sign. I quite liked this restaurant, after all.
  
  The pretty Chinese girl acting as a hostess ushered me into a back room, and I was surprised to see Wakako already in attendance, along with a few of her gorillas. Given how valuable her time was, I was expecting to have to wait a significant time for her and had already planned on what to order.
  
  "Taylor, Taylor come here and have a seat," she said with a grin. I did as she asked, although I wasn't too comfortable in the room she had picked. Although The Golden Duck was a Chinese restaurant, this was clearly a Japanese-themed room which wasn't that surprising given that we were deep in Japantown. I had to sit seiza -style on the floor on a cushion in front of the table, which made me feel both slightly uncomfortable as well as underdressed. It was a room for tea ceremony more than eating, but I didn't care and planned to eat the most of a whole Peking duck here, no matter how uncouth it seemed. I was hungry.
  
  Still, I smiled, "I take it by how pleased you sound that your own investigations bore fruit?"
  
  "Yes! Not that I doubted you for a second," she lied smoothly, for politeness' sake.
  
  I chuckled and nodded, "What did you do to confirm that the drug worked? Did you get some MRSA cases from local hospitals, as I suggested?"
  
  She shook her head, "No. That was a nice but naive idea. The miraculous cure of a number of hard cases would have been noticed. Instead, I decided on the opposite approach." She slid over a few actual Manila folders on the table and then, as I leafed through them, started to make tea.
  
  Opposite approach? Wouldn't that be infecting known-healthy people and then trying to cure them? I nodded; sure enough, that was what she had done, and she had used a number of bacterial infections to do it, from staph to VD to...
  
  I gaped like a fish, "A fucking bioweapon, Wakako?!" First of all, how did she get weaponised anthrax? Did I want to know? No, I probably did not.
  
  She shrugged, looking not at all upset, "You said it could cure any bacterial infection. Sure, the MRSA was pretty impressive, but I needed something to knock the socks off my Biotechnica contact."
  
  I supposed that definitely would. And although weaponised Anthrax here was a lot more dangerous than even the weaponised Anthrax of my previous world, it was still fairly difficult to spread bioweapon. It wasn't like a virus that could spread out of control even under careful bio-safety security controls; bacteria just didn't work that way.
  
  I sighed, "Were there any problems with the microfauna replacement therapy?" There didn't seem to be based on their file, but not much was mentioned except a private doctor administered the therapy and monitored the patients during recovery.
  
  "Not at all; that went as normal. And yes, I definitely paid all of these volunteers well, or rather we did since we're partners in this venture," she said smugly.
  
  That was true; the profit split was after expenses. I'd no doubt see exactly how much she paid them when I looked at the books.
  
  I sipped my tea and then said after a while, "I want a Peking duck; I'm hungry."
  
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  We're the Neon Angels!
  Rather than look annoyed with me for wanting to turn the meeting into an actual dinner, Wakako just shrugged and called the petite hostess girl back into the room briefly and spoke with her quietly. The hostess nodded rapidly and departed the room.
  
  Wakako sat back down and sipped her tea, and said, "So, for our next step, we will need a larger sample of the chemical, and I'll need to forward it to my contact at Biotechnica, but he's on temporary medical leave. Apparently, he was wounded in the line of duty recently and had to get a replacement arm."
  
  I nearly snorted my tea, which caused Wakako to raise an eyebrow at me. Anything I saw at work was to be confidential, and I could be terminated for disclosing anything, but I figured that Wakako was the type to not throw intelligence sources under the bus, "I responded to that call at work. There was some kind of an organised and disciplined mercenary force attacking a Biotechnica convoy. The mercs had three Soviet armoured vehicles, which we demolished. His boss, I assume, was DoA when we got there, but I ended up transporting, I presume, your guy with a severed arm below the elbow. He was quite lucky, actually, was hit by one of the HMGs and not the fifty-seven-millimetre high-explosive shell firing autocannon like his boss."
  
  Still, now, by chance, I knew her contact's full name. I didn't know if that would be useful, but I expected Wakako to insulate both sides of the transaction as much as possible, but now I knew at least one side of it. If her guy tried to fuck me over, I could try to get some sort of revenge. That was defeatist talk, though.
  
  Our order arrived so quickly that I was very sure that they had redirected some other person's duck to our table, and it was the same girl bringing it in. She smiled at me as she leaned down and practically bent over to place the duck on the very low table, and my eyes were briefly drawn, inexorably, to the gap in her kimono that was on display and the smooth pale skin hiding underneath it. It seems like it was true, and you weren't supposed to wear foundational garments while wearing a kimono. I had read that online, but I didn't know that I believed it. I spent a moment thinking about that while she walked off, half-staring at her retreating form as she departed.
  
  In any other neighbourhood, it would be kind of weird for a hostess at a Chinese restaurant to wear a kimono, I thought, but in Japantown, it was pretty common at all of the higher-end places, regardless of what kind of food was served. It was the same at Famous Linh's Pizza, which was nearby, too.
  
  "... so what do you think?" Wakako's voice brought me out of my reverie.
  
  I blinked, "Uh... what? I'm sorry; something distracted me. What did you say?"
  
  I'm not sure if Wakako's smug smirk was excessively smug or not because, honestly, she always had that sort of expression on her face, but she said, "Somethings, clearly. I was saying that due to my contact recovering and his new responsibilities, it might take two or three months at the minimum before we hear back. Is that going to be a problem?"
  
  I hummed. I didn't want to give them an infinite amount of time because it was theoretically possible that they could try to string us along while attempting to engineer a novel synthesis for it. I wasn't under any illusions; the very first thing they'd do would be to put the sample under a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer to get its chemical composition and start working backwards from there.
  
  But I nodded, "That probably is fine, but we're going to have to think about number two or three choices if it's much longer than that. Do you think your contact got a promotion, then?" I wondered if he was behind the attack; a dangerous-looking but ultimately simple-to-repair wound like losing an arm would be the perfect way to make people believe you weren't involved.
  
  She snorted, "I doubt it. He'll have, for a while, an increased responsibility but without any of the power his predecessor had. A terrible position for him, and I doubt that he'll get his boss' job, which for our purposes is ideal, I think." I tilted my head to the side curiously at that, and Wakako noticed and shrugged, "We'll ask a small enough sum that he could have financed it before this; I'll ask for five million but might allow myself to be negotiated down to four or four and a quarter. That is a deal that he could have authorised before his boss died, and with no boss to take the credit, he will be definitely motivated to seal the deal with alacrity. It'll be a shot in the arm. His precarious position will entice him to make a swift conclusion to our deal once he is in a position to realise the worth of the transaction."
  
  I nodded slowly, taking a bite of some of the crispy skin of the Peking duck. A lot of people made a mistake and tried to eat the skin and the meat at the same time, but it was really a better experience to eat them separately. They were a different experience, and it was better not to comingle them too much. The Golden Duck were artists in making what was undoubtedly scop mimic the taste and texture of actual Peking duck, as it tasted very close to what I remembered the one time my parents and I had eaten it in Brockton Bay.
  
  An increase in responsibility without the increase in pay or power to ensure such responsibilities were performed adequately was a perennial nightmare for middle management at most corporations. It was a fairly common situation to find oneself in, actually and the most common analogy I could think of was if you were a line supervisor at a burger joint and your boss quit without notice. For a time, you'd be responsible for the times your employees called out of work, but you didn't have the power to either punish the ones who needed discipline or reward the good workers. You were responsible for staffing the shifts but couldn't do anything to actually ensure the workers came in.
  
  The nirvana of a Corporate manager was power without responsibility, and it was an aspiration that almost none of them would ever achieve. If that was their nirvana, then their hell was responsibility without power. I said carefully, "Just so long as he isn't so precarious that he sees it a better idea to make a swift conclusion to us. " Specifically, me. I didn't think that, regardless of what happened, Wakako herself would risk anything personally. That wasn't how she did business, certainly not for so little a sum.
  
  She sighed and nodded, "That isn't an impossible scenario, even if it is an unlikely one. We will just have to show enough strength to make it seem an unwinning proposition if an in-person meeting is ever required. Also, I'd definitely have him murdered if he tried to betray us."
  
  That last bit would have shocked me a year and a half ago, but now it just seemed obvious. I did believe her, too, not that it really filled me with that much security. I did believe that if he betrayed us that she would have contingencies for it. She'd have to in order to keep her reputation. But that wouldn't prevent me from dying, even if I was "avenged."
  
  These days, if I had the choice between revenge and living a long life, I would pick the latter every day. Sometimes it pained me to admit, but I was no longer Edmond Dantès, even if Winslow High School had been my Château d'If. I felt that if I hadn't been transported bodily into a brand new world with a brand new start, things might have been a lot different, though. I would have definitely tried to throw myself into a heroic identity using my power to try to prove all of them wrong. But here, I had nothing to prove. It, once again, made me feel bad for Alt-Taylor stuck there in Brockton Bay.
  
  I had dreams of changing the world, of course, but I wanted to selfishly prioritise my own freedom, first of all, and that meant I had to live as long as possible. I was such a shitty person sometimes. I knew that I could probably revolutionise parts of the world, and If I really was that interested in improving things, then I should be hoping a Corporation with a very large budget kidnapped me. It'd do more than anything else to accelerate my plans, even if I didn't get much of the benefit of it.
  
  I had ideas about carbon-sequestering, oxygen-producing cyanobacteria that you could release into the ocean that could slowly, over a decade or two, bring the atmospheric conditions back to somewhere close to what they had been before the last Corporate War. That would cause an increase in arable land in the range of a hundred million hectares or more globally. Biotechnica would be the ideal place to set such plans into motion, but I definitely, absolutely did not want to go down that path if I could avoid it.
  
  I tried to rationalise it away because I also had ideas that could see true bio-indefinite mortality be achieved, even if only on a small scale initially, a true halting of senescence instead of the rejuvenation treatments that were the current state of the art, so I could afford longer-term plans. However, that ignored all of the people whose lives could have been immeasurably improved in the interim.
  
  Still, if there was one thing that has changed more than any other about myself since arriving in this world, it would have been my selfishness. If you weren't at least a little bit selfish, I didn't think you'd survive here.
  
  Finishing my duck, I pushed the plate forward slightly and fished a small clear baggy of off-white powder out of my pocket and tossed it in an arc over my decimated duck to plop next to Wakako's tea. I was suddenly glad that I had sealed this bag extra well, as it would have been really embarrassing if the baggy popped open and discharged a cloud of the drug into Wakako's face. She might have had me killed if she didn't make it to a private and sound-proof toilet in time.
  
  I said, "That's two and a half grams. Considering that the normal dose is about three hundred and fifty micrograms to the kilogram of body weight, this should be enough for almost a hundred uses. More than enough for Biotechnica to run an abbreviated RCT."
  
  Although I said RCT, I dearly hoped that they wouldn't utilise an actual control group if they followed Wakako's idea of infecting known-healthy people with various bacterium. Since they'd no doubt test using known, standard bacteria, it is very unlikely that they'd need a control group. There are multiple ways to verify infection took place, and it wasn't like they didn't know what the infection process looked like.
  
  If they duplicated the anthrax infection in a standard clinical double-blind, well, that would just be murder. They likely wouldn't. Corporations were amoral, but they weren't wasteful, but honestly, nothing would surprise me.
  
  Wakako smiled at me and slid the sample into her pocket. She glanced at the duck that I had decimated, "Did you like it?"
  
  I nodded and said absently, "Yes. The Golden Duck does a really good job; it tastes almost indistinguishable from the time I had an actual Peking duck in the past. Not sure how they do it, but I don't think it involves actual ducks at all."
  
  Wakako nodded, "I'm rather curious where you had actual Peking duck, but I suppose it could have been anywhere given your parents. I had to bring in the chefs directly from China, and I pay them more than Trauma Team pays you. But it's worth it."
  
  Oh, she owned the place? Interesting. That explained why she thought it was fine to speak here. And I probably shouldn't have mentioned that the duck was so close to the real thing, as I doubted there were more than a few hundred places in North America that still served actual ducks in decades, although paradoxically, there were still rural people that might as often as not offer to pay you in chickens or a duck instead of currency.
  
  I didn't know what she meant precisely with the quip about my parents, except Alt-Danny had often gone out of the country. Before he worked for Militech, he had been in the NUSA State Department, but that was when Alt-Taylor would have been a toddler.
  
  Wait a second... if she owned the place, did that mean there was probably a claymore mine underneath my pillow or that the teacup was a grenade or something? I thought she was loosening up, inviting me to a meeting outside her strong place. Well, baby steps, I supposed.
  
  I finished the rest of my tea, kind of wishing that I had ordered a Cirrus Cola to go along with my duck, but I didn't want to defile the "tea room" more than I already had.
  
  "Is there anything else we need to go over?" I finally asked a little surprised she had budgeted so much time for the meeting in the first place. Although, I supposed she made time since she was looking at something in the neighbourhood of nine hundred to a million eurodollars profit on our joint venture if everything went well.
  
  She shook her head, and we both stood up at the same time, which was a good thing because my legs were starting to get the pins and needles feeling from sitting with my legs folded underneath my body. I wondered why cats could loaf for hours with no appreciable effects but internally ignored my medical sense trying, happily, to tell me why, which mostly was the square-cube law. It was mostly a mathematics lesson, but in the specialised ways that a mathematical principle impacted biomechanics.
  
  It was the same reason ants could lift ten times their body weight, elephants could not jump and why some larger dinosaurs would have probably died if they fell over from standing.
  
  My power had always been very interested in dinosaurs and didn't understand the concept of a rhetorical question, not at all, so in some respects, it reminded me of the slightly autistic boy I used to play with in elementary school before his family wisened up and moved out of the Bay.
  
  I used this to my advantage and kept a list of things I noticed it seemed interested in, and when the urge to tinker with things or people got especially strong, I'd conduct free-form research on one of the topics, although it was getting harder to avoid
  
  "Thank you for the duck," I told her, despite the fact that I was probably the one essentially paying for it. However, now that I knew she owned this place, I was going to double-check the accounting and have a word if she tried to charge the venture retail price.
  
  We both left the tea room, but I departed the front door, and she went further into the establishment. If I had to guess, she was killing two birds with one stone and had combined our meeting into a likely no-notice inspection of her business.
  
  I awoke suddenly to my phone ringing. I had a simple "artificial stupid" social program screen my calls when I didn't recognise the number, but to interrupt and wake me from the middle of a sleep-inducer cycle meant that firstly, the person had to be someone I knew, and they had to tell the computer that answered my phone that it was urgent and time-critical that they speak to me immediately.
  
  Fuck, I was going to be really upset if someone abused that privilege, as terminating a sleep cycle early caused me to be very drowsy and out of it for several minutes. It was very uncomfortable.
  
  My vision was a little bleary, like I still needed glasses, except that the caller-ID was crisp and high-resolution as usual since it was drawn directly onto my optic nerve. It was Jin. I groaned but answered, "What is it, Jin? I am going to be most wroth with you if this isn't very important."
  
  "Oh, you answered! It's literally life and death, Taylor. I know I told you we wouldn't ask you to chip random chrome in and out of random, sketchy people, but I am hoping, very much, that you will make an exception this time," Mr Jin said, and his tone was unusually intense and slightly emotional.
  
  I fumbled with the sleep inducer on my head and settled for tossing it in the chair as I stood uneasily on my feet. Life and death? I wasn't expecting it to be quite that serious. As I talked, I walked into my bathroom, disrobing as I went and turning on a cold shower to wake me up, "I'm not a Ripperdoc, Mr Jin, so I don't see how I will agree to this, nor how it could be possibly life or death. There are a couple of twenty-four-hour cybernetics clinics in town."
  
  "Just listen. One of my friends and peers in the organisation has had his daughter kidnapped. We don't know where they've taken her, but we've found the... I guess you could say the facilitator that was responsible. However, he has proven somewhat resistant to interrogation. We did get enough info that the data we want is on an embedded data storage nexus, and thankfully our netrunners had already disabled all of his cybernetics, so he couldn't delete it. We are very sure that if we don't find her by sometime this morning, we won't ever find her," he said, speaking very rapidly.
  
  Standing under the cold shower, I woke up more completely as I listened to his plea, "And you think I can dig it out of his skull?" That explained why they didn't go to one of the reputable twenty-four-hour clinics. I could, of course, do exactly that, but there had to be at least one Ripperdoc on Jig-Jig street awake, "There's got to be at least one Ripper available in Japantown that won't ask questions. Dr Tanaka?"
  
  "There really aren't. It's two thirty in the morning on a Sunday, Taylor. The only Ripperdoc we really know is available gives that german Doctor we had issues with in the past a good name. I vastly trust your expertise more than that - we would stick a gun under the nose of one of the docs downtown before we did that. That is, in fact, our next step, but that is asking for all kinds of other issues if we have to do that," Mr Jin said in a more patient tone.
  
  Turning the shower off I towelled off. I didn't want a real shower to clean myself, just enough to wake myself up. I was quiet on the phone for a long moment, and finally, I said, "If things are as you say, I'll help you. But I don't precisely trust your organisation. It's clear that this is important to you, but it just occurred to me that someone with a psychological profile of me might come up with a story very similar to this to get my help. You need to send me info right now so that I can verify through someone that isn't you that this guy you're going to drag into my clinic is a Very Bad Man. Otherwise, no deal."
  
  He blinked for a moment before nodding, "That won't be an issue. I can send you his dossier right now; it includes all biometrics which you can no doubt confirm when he gets to your place. Do you have access to any kind of background investigation site? Any of them will pull up his record, and it will be very obvious that he is, as you say, A Very Bad Man."
  
  I quickly approved a file transfer, my Zetatech ICE quarantining the file in an isolated virtual machine just in case. It did have everything he said, and as I started to gather something to put on, using my toes to grab my pyjamas and toss them into the hamper, I paid for a simple background on my gumshoe site, using the attached name and biometric data.
  
  The information came back, and it was more or less the same but much less detailed. Even the cheap background I had paid for included a rap sheet that was longer than my arm, including a number of pending charges that included kidnapping and murder in a number of jurisdictions on this coast ranging from LA here to Seattle.
  
  "Why are you so sure you won't be able to recover her? Is this guy a Scav?" I asked as I wiggled into a pair of pants.
  
  I heard Mr Jin make an ambiguous noise and say, "Ano... not probably like you are thinking. It's more a human trafficking type of operation, we believe. If we can't get her before they transport her out of the city... well, it will become very hard, and I personally would rather just be disassembled if I was a pretty fourteen-year-old girl." That was the first time I had ever heard Mr Jin use the common Japanese disfluency "ano." It was kind of like the Japanese version of the English "uhmm." Also, ugh. It did sort of match the guy's rap sheet, though.
  
  "Okay, so long as this is the guy your men drag into my clinic, I'll do it," I reiterated, downloading both versions of the man's dossier I had onto my non-emulated drive after scanning it six ways from Sunday for malware. Both versions included some biometric data. I couldn't do rapid genome sequencing, but the fingerprints would be good enough. My optics had enough resolution to take a person's fingerprints just by staring at their fingers, and I had an app to compare someone's fingers to a provided exemplar set.
  
  There was no way they could have gone to the complicated nanosurgical process of faking the guy's fingerprints and then be on a time crunch for me to remove data from his cybernetics.
  
  "Okay, they're on their way. You just have to promise not to destroy the data. If you think you can't handle it, tell the guys, and we'll move to plan B," he said very seriously. I supposed plan B was putting a gun under the nose of a real, certified Ripperdoc.
  
  I was not too concerned, but I tried to express that I was humble, "Don't worry. I'm not going to let some little girl be sold off to some brothel in Timbuktu or something."
  
  "Probably Dubai, given this guy's previous work," Mr Jin said angrily. That wouldn't be very good. It wasn't exactly surprising, but when oil dried up in the Middle East in the late nineties, the region quickly spiralled into madness, with regional nuclear exchanges by multiple sides turning most of the Middle East into an impoverished, uninhabitable hellscape.
  
  Some people, like the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis, had long ago diversified enough that they weren't rendered into paupers when it happened. Still, it had only been in the last ten years that the former gleaming jewel of the Arabian Peninsula had been widely resettled, but it was still considered kind of a lawless zone where anything and everything could be traded. There had to be more than a single girl taken if Mr Jin thought that they'd actually ship them that far. It wasn't like there wasn't a market for such things closer to home.
  
  They were polite enough to ring her doorbell at least, and I said, "They're here. I'll tell you how it goes." Then I hung up, switched to the intercom and said, "Come on in. I'll be out in just a moment," before triggering the door to open.
  
  Drying my hair, I grabbed a scrunchie and tied it up in a simple curly ponytail to keep it out of my way before I stepped out into the clinic. They had dumped my "patient" into the combination operating chair and biobed, and I blinked at him as he was missing both of his legs, some of his fingers, and his eyes. And he was unconscious, although I thought it was likely not from anaesthesia.
  
  Well, clearly, the Tyger Claws had not gotten the memo that torture was not really an effective way to extract information. I'd have to stabilise him before I could operate. At least he had enough fingers that I could actually check his fingerprints. Otherwise, I didn't know what I would have done. I mean, he sort of looked like the guy but not enough that I would have said with any amount of certainty that he was.
  
  There were three Tyger Claws in here with me; two were of the dumb brute variety, but the third... I glanced at him, noticing the cyberdeck installed at the base of his skull, "Were you the netrunner that disabled all of his cybernetics? If so, please send me everything you have about his system and what software you installed."
  
  The skinny man of Japanese descent stood straighter as if I was his Drill Sergeant and said, "Hai!" and immediately started transferring me a number of large files over wireless. My Zetatech started blaring as it heuristically identified several of them as malware, and I narrowed my eyes until I realised he was sending me exact copies of the deployable attack programs he had used, not their malware payloads. Well, that was interesting. I'd keep those after I made sure it wasn't some kind of double fake-out with extra malware installed on the executables. For now, though, they could stay quarantined.
  
  Gloria often told me I was one of the most paranoid people she knew when it came to system security, and it was because the idea of something directly connected to and possibly affecting my brain would have been incomprehensible to me three years ago. I didn't think I was paranoid; I thought everyone else was too used to the risks that cybernetics, especially the type I had, posed and weren't cognisant enough of the risk, but that was just a difference of opinion. There were people that thought as I did, but they were either all netrunners themselves or a particular type of doomsday prepper.
  
  The type that might have called themselves a "Sovereign Citizen" back in my old world, but, surprisingly, that subculture didn't precisely exist here, at least anymore. It had in the past, but the NUSA once publically declared that anyone who called themselves such, well, the NUSA would accede to their demands and treat them as Sovereign and deal with them the way that two Sovereign entities always settled disagreements since time immemorial: armed conflict.
  
  There was famous footage of the government using cluster bombs filled with napalm and white phosphorous on a compound filled with several dozen so-called Sovereign Citizens and their families. It was horrifying. When journalists claimed, stupefied, that such actions were war crimes, the White House Press Secretary, appearing perplexed, had simply stated that the Sovereigns in that compound were not signatories of the Geneva convention or any other convention that covered the ethical restraint in War, and, therefore, the NUSA government did not need to conduct hostilities against them as it would against treaty signatories.
  
  As horrifying as that was, I didn't think there was a single person that claimed to be a Sovereign Citizen after that.
  
  "What are you doing?" asked one of the grunts, curious, as I stared at the man's fingers, bringing them fairly close up to my eyes.
  
  The app confirmed that this was the guy. I didn't think that Mr Jin would have lied to me, but I couldn't say precisely that he wouldn't, either. I glanced at the muscle, "I was verifying his biometrics. I am only willing to do this because this guy is a monster, and I would have been very upset had you tried to sneak in some random gonk."
  
  "Oh," he said, nodding. It seems it was just curious. As I set up my equipment, connecting him to the cardiac monitor and starting an IV in his arm. Perhaps not surprisingly, this guy was not in very good shape. Something told me that they weren't entirely as surgical as I would have been if I had needed to perform multiple amputations on him. His blood pressure was shit, and he was in V-tach that might, possibly, cause a sudden cardiac arrest at any moment, and I was pretty sure he probably had as much blood out of his body as he had inside of it at the start of this whole thing.
  
  Sighing, I stuck some single-use defibrillator pads on him and connected those to the cardiac monitor as well. The netrunner looked interested and must have recognised the pads, "Oh, nova. Are you going to shock him?" He held his hands up and rubbed them together in the universal motion of lubricating the pads of an ancient-style defibrillation machine. I was surprised he hadn't said, "Clear!" as that was what everybody expected. I was also amazed that this gesture was still in the public consciousness, so much so that on medical shows they often used archaic devices because it was more dramatic.
  
  "We haven't used that kind of defibrillator in a hundred years," I told him, shaking my head, "And no, I am doing what is called a synchronised electrical cardioversion, or rather I will after I get some more fluids into him. It is a little similar, but you use cardioversion if their heart is still beating, but you want to reset it to a standard sinus rhythm." I didn't mind chatting with him because medical topics interested me.
  
  It was like someone who loved trains getting asked a really uninsightful question about the differences in gauge on steam locomotives; they'd probably still be pleased to answer and chat about the subject, even if it was a silly question or comment. I was the same way.
  
  At first, I almost decided to skip giving him any blood products, as it wasn't as though this guy was going to be allowed to get better, but I changed my mind because he did really seem anaemic, and I would have to conduct some surgeries myself, and I had already identified the type of cybernetics he had.
  
  It was a bit of an unusual piece of chrome, and one of the options was to configure it to automatically write zeroes to the storage medium in the event it detected the individual it was installed in died or that it was removed. They were common implants for low-tier data brokers, people who were hired to take data nobody trusted to send over the net and deliver it in person. A type of data courier, in other words.
  
  I supposed it was also common in people who were connected to international human trafficking operations. I started another line, this one a central venous catheter that I would give him two litres of normal saline under a pressure infuser, with his normal IV pushing some synthetic blood products.
  
  I talked to the runner for a while longer, and once his blood pressure started to rise, I hit the preconfigured button on the cardiac monitor and easily converted his heart rate back to a normal rhythm. The runner looked disappointed, and glancing at him sideways, he finally said, "I thought he would rise up off the bed." He arched his back to emphasise what he meant, and I just sighed and shook my head.
  
  I called Jin, and he answered on the second ring. I told him, "Alright, I can take the implant out. It's a ten-year-old data courier model from Zetatech. It's probably configured to delete itself if it is removed, but I am very confident that I can get around that. However, I have to emphasise this if you want me to save the data on this implant, this man is not going to survive the operation. Not on so little notice, anyway. I don't think that is a big deal for you, but I wanted you to know before I started."
  
  He nodded, "So long as you're sure, and yes," he chuckled, "the data is the most important thing here."
  
  I nodded, "Okay, give me about thirty minutes," and with that, I disconnected the call. Truthfully, I probably could save his life, but I couldn't think of any reason that I should. So long as the data is recovered, the only thing I would be saving him for is a long and painful death at the hands of a vengeful father. There was also one other reason, as I wanted to salvage his brain. I had urges to continue the research into hybrid biomechanical robotiforms, such as the arachnid designs I had in my cyberdeck, but it wasn't like I ran across free brains every day.
  
  I had been very irritated that I hadn't had the equipment necessary to stabilise brains when I had to kill all those Wraiths. I brought a number of heads home with me, but their brains were mush and not salvageable by the time I got back. Hypoxia-based brain damage can be reversed through sophisticated nano treatments, but not only did I not have that equipment but the longest someone has ever been revived had been an hour post-death, and it was about two by the time I got back. Their crappy brains weren't worth the candle. This guy's fresh brain, though?
  
  Waste not, want not.
  
  I had been irritated enough that I had built a specialised life-support chamber designed specifically for brains. From the outside, it looked kind of like a matte-black cylindrical hatbox, and it was filled with a nutrient and oxygenation fluid as well as numerous electronics. The idea was to take it with me in my car if I thought I might end up having to kill someone so I could quickly salvage their brain. However, the thing looked rather sinister, and that was before I scooped someone's brain out of their skull like it was Baskin Robins, so I immediately nixed the idea of taking it along with me on a job with Kiwi and the boys.
  
  I didn't want them to get the correct opinion about me. Dr Frankenstein was still remade every few decades in this world, so I could just see Kiwi teasing me by hunching over, yelling, "It's alive, it's alive!"
  
  Now though, it could be useful. I dragged it over onto a nearby table and started getting the rest of the tools I would need for brain surgery, humming the tune of the latest earworm from that Korean pop girl group. They were called Neon Angels, and they had songs in English, Korean and even Japanese. The chorus to this particular song had been stuck in my head for a while. I sung/whispered to myself, off-key, as I gathered my neurological rotary power saw, " We're the Neon Angels, flying high, living fast, never gonna die, in this world of chaos and strife, we're the ones who come alive. " The lyrics were insipid and stupid, and I thought them inaccurate, too, but still, the combination of them and the melody must have been designed by an AI for maximal earworminess.
  
  The chorus of the song was especially terrible, with the lyrics going, "In this city of neon lights, Where the future's always bright, We are the Neon Angels, Living life with all our might."
  
  I changed the lyrics, instead sing-humming as I got everything together, " In this city of utter shit, it's easy to not care a bit. Where it's hard to do what's right, don't worry, I'll saw with all my might ." With the last line, I tested the rotary saw, which was essentially a power tool, getting a high-RPM "vrrrm vrrm vrrrm" sound out of it, similar to a Dremel-style machine, because that was basically what it was.
  
  Satisfied, I turned around, seeing the two Tyger Claw grunts seem a bit uneasy and the netrunner looking a little green. "Uh, you guys can wait outside if you want?" I offered. All three of them shook their heads, and I assumed they were under some sort of obligation to see this through. Whatever it wouldn't take too long.
  
  "Why brain in jar?" the most curious of the two grunts asked when I was finished, looking at the floating organ submerged in the hatbox from above.
  
  I pointed to the small piece of cybernetics that I had been very carefully rewiring that was still attached to the brain. I had to drop into a half-fugue to finish the operation as the implant was a little more complicated than I had initially thought, "This piece of cybernetics is not only configured to erase itself if it senses the brain is excessively damaged as I thought but it is also encrypted."
  
  The runner shook himself out of his reverie, looking upset, "Encrypted? What cypher?"
  
  I finished connecting a standard interface socket directly to the device; I had just salvaged one of the sockets from the man's brain, "It's a standard and robust quantum-resistant cypher with a ridiculous amount of bits for the key... however, Zetatech got a little too cocky with this system." I said the last smugly, walking over to wash my hands.
  
  Turning to glance at the netrunner as I did so, I continued, "The encryption key is derived from a continuous neural map using a complicated mathematical formula I don't precisely understand, but it basically boils down to small changes in the neural structure over a set period of time will result in the same key, allowing decryption. But large changes? Like managing to put the implant in someone else's brain? The valid key cannot be derived."
  
  I glanced at the two grunts, remembering the state of the guy's face, "Large changes could have included the traumatic brain injuries often caused by concussions, too, guys. You were lucky. Oh, and his pain editor was on when your runner locked his implants out, so he didn't feel any of this." I waved my hand at the abused body of the man.
  
  I was pretty sure he had pretended he had, possibly hoping they would give him a concussion or two in their further attempts, which might effectively scramble the encryption key and render the data irretrievable. That was actually a pretty clever idea to effectively self-delete the data, even with locked-out cybernetics. Paradoxically, the fact that they had so little time meant they likely jumped completely past the repeatedly knock-them-around stage of torture, though, which saved the data's encryption key.
  
  I didn't know why this guy had gone to such an extent to protect this human trafficking operation, except perhaps being much more scared of someone else than they had been of the Tyger Claws.
  
  The two guys audibly gulped, and I motioned towards the interface socket, "From a user perspective, it is a very intuitive system, and its security was higher than I thought due to that encryption method. But from the user's perspective, so long as the brain is alive and is the same brain, the data is automatically unencrypted. To the user, it looks unencrypted all the time. You should be able to download it all right now." I didn't tell him that I had already passively downloaded a full image of the drive, just out of curiosity's sake.
  
  He seemed to follow my explanation as what looked like understanding blossomed on his face, and he hurried over to the brain-in-a-jar, connecting quickly. It didn't take him long to say, "This is exactly what we needed. Thank you, Taylor-san. We need to leave quickly."
  
  He turned towards me and briefly bowed formally, the two grunts quickly doing the same. Ugh, I hated social situations like this. I didn't particularly want to reciprocate because I didn't feel like bonding with these people, but it would be awkward if I didn't, so I did, just to get them out of my shop.
  
  As long as they rescued the girl, I would feel as though I had done a good deed, mostly. A lot of clinicians from my previous world would have been aghast, deeming everything I had done a violation of the Hippocratic oath, but firstly, I had never sworn that or any similar oath. And second, I disagreed with it on a fundamental basis. I agreed with the idea that if a doctor said they would heal a patient, then it would be wrong for them to then hurt them, but that's it. I never considered Mr Brain-in-the-Jar, my patient, and I certainly hadn't lied to him about what to expect from me.
  
  All three of them left rapidly after that, almost running, and I sent Mr Jin a text explaining that the procedure had been a success. Then I blinked and growled, "They didn't even take the body with them, though."
  
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  The meeting of two great entrepreneurs
  Opening my eyes from a bizarre dream, I stood up and stretched. Now that I was feeling much more rested, it occurred to me that the man whom I had floating in a hatbox might be in some distress, mentally. Immediately after cleaning up and setting his body aside, I sat back down and resumed my sleep cycle. I didn't even take off my clothes or change back into my pyjamas.
  
  Placing the sleep inducer back into its protective case, I walked into my shop area while considering it, coming to the unusual conclusion that I didn't precisely know. There had been some research into sensory deprivation, of course, in this world. As I assumed, there had been in my last one, but not as much as I would have thought here, considering how easy it would be to reliably induce it in test subjects with modern cybernetics. Doing a few absent net searches, I found that there were a few experiments conducted to see if therapeutic sensory deprivation could be used on cyberpsychosis exemplars, but it invariably made their psychosis worse.
  
  Sensory deprivation had been reported to be relaxing but also to cause hallucinations and even psychedelic-type experiences, but these were all in subjects that knew what to expect. I drew on some of my psychological knowledge and combined that with the knowledge of the events that had occurred and winced a little, stepping a little quicker to walk over to the hatbox that was plugged into mains power, lifting the top and peering down at the liquid bubbling like it was a Beta's fish tank.
  
  From his perspective, he was being tortured and lost consciousness and possibly woke up to nothing, no sensory inputs, no pain, just his own thoughts. Even a rational person, which I didn't really consider this man to be, would not really be faulted if they jumped to the conclusion that they had died and now were trapped in some sort of purgatory-like afterlife.
  
  It would be quite difficult to have a good grasp of how much time had passed even now, and he might be wondering if his personal hell was just unending solitude forever.
  
  Rubbing my face, I sighed. I might have, on accident or rather through negligence, tortured this man more effectively than the Tyger Claws had. Popping open the lid, I gathered some tools, including some sterile electrodes. I wanted to test his brain's activity to see if he was awake. Unfortunately, I couldn't perform an fMRI while he was in the hatbox, as the magnetic fields would wreck the hatbox and the little helmet-based military-surplus MRI machine I had, and while the man's data storage implant was still installed and it had brain imaging systems built in, it only scanned for physical changes and not ongoing electrical activity.
  
  Humming, I looked at the current oxygen-usage rate of the hatbox and felt that, indeed, his brain was using enough oxygen to plausibly have higher-order brain functions being active. Then I dipped two of the sterile electrodes into the liquid, directly touching different parts of his brain with them briefly. The electrodes were thin and long, with a small electrical conductor tab on the end, and kind of looked like a dentist's mirror.
  
  Glancing at the map of electrical activity I had built through this method on my deck, I sighed, "My bad." Backtracking the oxygen usage rate, I came to the conclusion that he was probably only conscious for a little over an hour. That's not too bad as these things go. In fact, perhaps he thought it was restful after his ordeal. I didn't believe that, though.
  
  I had two basic options, I could try to render him unconscious while I put him into storage, for now, or I could kill him. I wanted his neural tissue as, essentially, a biological computer. I had ideas for using parts of his brain for different things, for example, the spider robot I had sketched out, and I also had ideas for using the entire thing for a robotic surgical assistant, which is what I thought I might proceed with for this first brain.
  
  It was true that I had been itching to build a couple of the spider bots for ages, but this would help me more. But, for sure, the second brain I acquired would be destined for some cute arachnid robots.
  
  The surgical assistant, however, would be installed in an overhead robotic assembly, with sensors and mechanical surgical tools looking down at my biobed, rather than in any kind of mobile robotiform. My idea was something like a cross between that bright light dentists use combined with an overhead pot rack that hung above an island in a kitchen, except instead of pots, it would be a half dozen small flexible armatures with surgical tools.
  
  Now, there was no way I was going to place a psychopathic murderer's brain in charge of surgical tools that would be so near my head or be used to operate on myself, no matter how many novel mechanical overrides I could think of installed in it that would prevent it from hurting my patients or me.
  
  And I had ideas for a lot of those! But that would be even worse than this. Trapping someone inside their mind, fully conscious, while they could see but not act so that I could use their brain as a squishy computer was not something that good girls did.
  
  So this guy was going to die. Consciousness was an emergent property, and I might not be up to creating new conscious life (yet), but I certainly could end consciousness very easily while maintaining the vast majority of the brain still useful for my purposes.
  
  However, I kind of wanted to figure out a way to rig this guy's brain into my brain imaging helmet, or rather to the guts inside the helmet. Rather than use the contact transdermal electrodes, I could directly connect electrodes used in deep brain stimulation directly to the computer of the device. I wanted to do this both because I was curious if it was possible and also because I thought he might have interesting information.
  
  I had briefly reviewed the same data that the Tyger Claw netrunner had taken, but only for about ten minutes of objective time. Even in his secure storage, a lot of things were referenced by codes that I assumed he knew, and there were a number of numbered bank accounts listed, as well as addresses that I assumed were safe houses, although I didn't know. I presumed all of those addresses would have been hit by angry Yakuza by now, so they were useless.
  
  Most of the bank account numbers were useless, too, as I was sure the Tyger Claws would hoover them up, but there were a couple that were of a type that required an additional passphrase to access to make any transactions, which was missing. Maybe his personal accounts, and he had the code memorised? These I could probably take if I could figure out his passcode.
  
  Also, when I was sawing the top of his skull off, I had noticed that he had a seriously reinforced skull. This was considered a radical alteration, but by testing it for electrical conductance during the operation, I found that it would have been a remarkably effective defence against this type of brain imager. And it was a lot more effective than my insulative layer of skin and a lot less complicated than the one I had come up with before, using complicated neural-network-based software.
  
  I was pretty sure my "solution" would work reasonably well, but compared to the simple elegance of a heavily armoured skull, it reminded me of a Rube Goldberg machine. The armoured skull obviously wouldn't stop someone from doing exactly what I had done and saw his skull off, but the number of people willing, capable and having the expertise to do that merely for interrogation was... limited.
  
  There were plenty of other reasons someone might want to reinforce their skull, but combining this alteration with his brain drive and pain editor for torture resistance made me think the three implants were related. That meant he obviously knew interesting things that I could know them too if I was patient. I didn't expect a fortune or any shocking revelations, but every little bit helped, plus it was kind of interesting, like solving a puzzle.
  
  So, he would "live", for some definitions of the word, for now. I knew a lot of ways to render someone reliably unconscious, and I would be utilising three of them as I carefully made alterations to my hatbox while it was in operation. I could briefly turn it off for a few minutes at a time with no ill effects, but not much longer than that.
  
  The first change was electronics to induce a sleep-like state. It did the same thing as my sleep inducers but operated on a wildly different principle since this one worked via direct electrical stimulation and was a lot simpler to build. The second was a way to, without causing hypoxia-related brain injuries, limit the amount of oxygen the brain was consuming.
  
  Obviously, if a brain didn't get enough oxygen, it would die, but it could receive enough oxygen to prevent cell death, but not really enough to fuel the energy that a fully active brain required. That would limit consciousness because there wouldn't be enough energy to run the energy-intensive high-computational areas of the brain that thought deep thoughts like, "Am I a brain in a jar? I don't like this! HELP!"
  
  Lastly, I installed a metred drug dispenser in the oxygen-bubbler, stocking it with the special Tinkertech chemical I produced in the past that caused anterograde amnesia. Instead of guessing at the dosage, I just ended up using the standard correction factor for full-borgs for psychoactive chemicals, and it was stark - you barely needed any. The same amount of the chemical that I used on that mercenary leader for an afternoon would last Mr Jar for two weeks.
  
  That made sense since he didn't have a complete metabolism anymore, only a simplified oxygen-glucose brain economy, and the only real losses were when some of it got filtered in the suspension fluid.
  
  At the same time that I pulled out the same contact electrodes and started carefully placing them against several parts of his brain inside the hatbox, I called one of the little kids that lived in my Megabuilding. He was an entrepreneur of sorts and, for a small fee, would go, buy and deliver me meals if I didn't want to leave my apartment. Since I was mostly a homebody, and he charged fairly inexpensive rates I often had made use of his services. I believe he had a bunch of minions about his own age that also helped him with this business. He didn't only did food, either, as I had met him for the first time when he kept coming into my clinic to buy a variety of prescription drugs.
  
  He even had different rates for how far away he had to travel and everything, although he would only deliver to Japantown. For a twelve-year-old, he was rather precocious, and I understood the irony of myself calling someone that.
  
  I was ordering an omelette and French toast, and he confirmed my order before telling me it'd probably be about forty-five minutes since Hotcake Heaven was in the downtown area.
  
  Glancing down at my modified hatbox, I nodded happily. "Sweet dreams, then," I told the brain inside before closing the top up again and carefully putting it on the bottom of one of my shelves in my shop, hiding it in plain sight. His brain activity was minimal now, similar to what one would see while a patient was in an induced coma. I could morally forget about him now until I was ready to start building something using his neural tissue. I'd need to order a bunch of things like heavy-duty servos and stepper motors first, anyway, as well as settle on the design of the flexible armatures.
  
  There was a lot that was terrible about the world, but one of the cool things about it was you could easily make three-dimensional shapes on your computer and pay a small fee to have someone make plastic or metal objects that were to your specification really cheaply, shipped straight to your door. You could even buy your own "3d printer" and do it yourself, although those could be pricey, especially if they were built to fabricate metals.
  
  I intended to purchase one of these systems eventually because customising the shape of many pieces of cybernetics, especially second-hand prosthetic limbs, to the body size and shape of a patient often necessitated the use of such technology.
  
  Otherwise, you had just to have a bunch of different sizes and pick one that worked "well enough," and there was no way I would be satisfied with that level of mediocrity if I opened up my own practice years down the line.
  
  Of course, most new cybernetics came with some proprietary, usually single-use, way to adjust things perfectly within a set range, or you ordered it from the manufacturer with the end-user in mind, and it came customised, but even high-end cybernetics clinics also had a pretty lively trade in used cybersystems, either stock they kept themselves or cybernetics a customer brought in to them, to say nothing of the necessity to repair cybernetics. For many people, a "Ripperdoc" was their primary care physician as well as their surgeon.
  
  Only the most low-tier of Ripperdocs didn't have any capability for metal-shaping, even if it was an old school machine-shop that was attached to their clinic like I assumed some Scav doctors utilised, by way of seeing some of the ridiculously retro implants they had in some runs at work.
  
  I took a quick shower, carefully setting the clothes I had been wearing on the bed I hardly used so I could put them back on, standing under the hot shower a lot longer than I normally did. That was another nicer thing about this world, but it probably was only a function of living in a large Megabuilding, but there was as much hot water as you could afford. The hot water at my house in Brockton Bay would run out after ten minutes, and it took forever to fill back the ancient and barely operating hot water heater in the basement. Like the broken step on our front porch, it was just another reminder that my dad had stopped caring about everything after mom died.
  
  Then, I spent a little time putting the man's body in a body bag and hid it in a corner behind a table. I intended to take a few more things out of it before I dumped it as medical waste, but I didn't want the delivery boy to see a dead body minus a quarter of his head when he delivered my French toast. I had already cleaned up and disinfected my work area before I went to sleep last night, so there were no unsightly blood stains on my biobed or the smooth floor beneath it. For people in the healthcare sector, assuming you weren't a Scav or in Maelstrom, cleanliness was close to godliness.
  
  I was in a much better mood by the time my doorbell rang. I had added additional cameras in addition to the normal door cam on the outside of my front door. The door cam only had a very narrow field of vision, and if you were about to be home-invaded the nar-do-wells could stand thirty degrees off to either side, waiting to rush in as soon as you opened the door. I didn't think that was particularly likely in this building, but I added two cameras that watched each end of the hallway.
  
  The building management didn't mention it, despite the fact that it was a clear violation of my lease agreement. However, Mr Jin had asked me to make sure that neither camera could directly observe anyone walking into Clouds for their client's privacy, which I felt was a very reasonable request.
  
  I buzzed the kid in but did a double-take when I saw him. He had new chrome, specifically some cybernetic optics, as well as a basic operating system. That was pretty normal. Kids were about twelve when most of them got their first set of optics. Any younger and you'd have to constantly be replacing the optics as the child's ocular cavity grew. Twelve was a pretty good age, so they could use a single "child size" set of optics, and then when they got too small, upgrade into adult sizes a few years later.
  
  It did mean that, usually, child-sized optics were utter shit quality, though. I recognised the ones he was wearing as a BioDyne model called the FunColor™, using my own Kiroshis at max-zoom to inspect them briefly. They weren't the worst on the market and had all the base features that parents looked for in optics, such as automatic subtitles, speech-to-text transcription, the ability to pair with a phone and optical character recognition.
  
  Plus, they also featured "cool" features that kids would like, such as the ability to change the iris patterns and colours, and Hiro had his set on the golden slit-eye of a cat. Although exotics weren't that common anymore, there were still some people who liked to use radical biosculpt to resemble anthropomorphised animals.
  
  It was kind of like the opposite of what the boostergang the Animals did. They were more about turning their personalities (although they'd say spirit) into a primal, almost shamanistic totem caricature of an animal rather than putting cat or dog ears and a tail on their body, and as such, the Animals usually beat the crap out of exotics when they saw them.
  
  Still, there was a small number around Japantown as it was a subculture that seemed to be a little bit more popular in the Japanese and Chinese areas. Surely, not little Hiro, though?
  
  I asked him sweetly, "Hiro-chan, why are your eyes' iris pattern set on 'furry'?"
  
  This caused him to scowl and swear up and down, "Fucking gonk Ripper; I told kaa-san we shouldn't have gone there. Not only does looking at things close up make my head feel bangin', but the fucking software on these things is all fucked up! I can't answer my phone as I should, and I can't change the iris patterns; that was the only cool part about these stupid eyes. When I try, the whole system freezes and reboots."
  
  I took in everything he said and asked for clarification, "Clarification. Bangin' means bad, right?" Because I was pretty sure I had heard the term also refer to things in a positive way in different contexts.
  
  "Yeah, bitch! I mean, yes, Miss Taylor, sorry my head hurts," he said, then quickly changed his tune at the narrowing of my eyes.
  
  I sighed and took my breakfast from him, setting the meal on my worktable for a moment and slapped the seat of my biobed, which was currently in its normal "chair" mode, "Hop up, let's take a look, then."
  
  I glanced at my food wistfully, but I had a number of ironclad rules when it came to my workroom and among the most important was "Eat elsewhere." I often did some chemistry out here, and I felt that any chemist that didn't have that rule for their laboratory didn't have a long life ahead of them.
  
  I had come a long way from the girl who had made her first batch of drugs in the kitchen inside the same pot Alt-Taylor used to make Mac and Cheese. I had purified and filtered the end product several different ways since then, but I was curious if Biotechnica would be able to detect the essence of cheese sauce in the sample I gave them and, if so, what they would think.
  
  He waffled a moment in what I thought was either some kind of misplaced male ego thing or fear, saying, "It's not a big deal; it doesn't hurt that much."
  
  I slapped the seat of the chair harder this time and said simply, "Chronic headaches post-ocular implantation could be a symptom of brain damage." That was true if you considered, as I did, that the optical nerves were just a functional extension of the brain. In either case, it could cause permanent damage that was very expensive to fix.
  
  That caused him to gape, and he finally nodded and hopped up onto the chair. I put on some disposable nitrile gloves and plugged a diagnostic cable into the interface socket at the base of his skull, frowning at the inflamed, red skin in and around the newly installed cybernetic system.
  
  Rolling back in my little stool chair, I glanced at the readouts on the Meditech displays, frowning again, "You have a fever and a surgical site infection. Considering this surgery was a transcranial procedure, and both your operating system and optics have direct access to your brain, this is bad." He might have gotten better on all his own, but then again, he might not have and eventually have been rushed to the ER. Still, I had caught it soon enough that it could easily be treated with conventional antibiotics, which I had a number of. I wouldn't have to break out my special sauce version.
  
  He blanched and was suddenly a lot more cooperative. "Stick your arm out; you are also quite dehydrated. I'm going to start an IV, and you're going to sit here while I get some fluids into you. Also, I want to head inside and eat my breakfast real quick. You don't have anywhere to be for the next half-hour, do you?"
  
  He shook his head rapidly, which caused me to raise my eyebrow, "I'd figured you'd have a lot of deliveries to make."
  
  He snorted and said as I quickly started an IV and connected a bag of saline, "I have people for that, Miss Taylor. I still do your deliveries personally most times because you're an important client. But it wasn't like I walked to Hotcake Heaven; I had one of my people do that and just did the drop-off. For important clients, it is important to maintain face-to-face relationships." He said the last bit as though he was quoting someone, and I had to stop from giggling at him, as he was cute as a button. In fact, I nodded at him, lips twitching and turned around, walking over to my medicine cabinet, so he couldn't see me fight it off. I'd seen his "people"; they weren't any older than he was.
  
  Turning around, I carefully compounded some antibiotics, dissolving some sterile powder into saline and then using a disposable syringe to add it to the bag that was running on the boy. I'd send him home with some oral antibiotics as well. I tapped a few keys on the Meditech hardware and triggered a full-systems diagnostic, which would force the entirety of the cyberware installed on the boy to do self-tests and diagnostics, which might take a few minutes. Nodding to him, "Alright, just sit there; I'll be back in a few minutes."
  
  He dug out his phone from his pocket and asked, "You got wireless here?" Sighing, I gave him the password to the public network I had set up for patients before I grabbed my breakfast and took it into the apartment area. Glancing at the food, I nodded at finding the order correct. Sitting down, I destroyed it rapidly, savouring the combination of savoury omelette and sweet syrupy French-toast flavour.
  
  Glancing at the time, I coughed a little at how little time I had spent eating. I was quite hungry. Cleaning up the trash and washing my hands again, I re-entered the front area in time to hear the conclusion of some phone conversation Hiro had.
  
  "..alright, I'll have one on the way, probably not more than an hour from now," he said in his business-tone before disconnecting. Glancing at me, he asked, "Miss Taylor, do you know where I could buy a gun this early in the morning?"
  
  I blinked at him, deducing that someone had called him for a delivery job. I asked him as I put my Ripperdoc-style glove on, tone still slightly aghast, "You're a gun runner, too?"
  
  "No, Miss Taylor... I really just walk; it's better not to stand out to everyone on the street when you're carrying things like that," he said earnestly, educating me like I was stupid. I stared at him for a good ten seconds, trying to see if he was taking the piss with me, but realised the term "gun runner" was very archaic in a city where BudgetArms had gun vending machines.
  
  "I take it you mean an actual, good gun, then, if you're not running to the BudgetArms vending machine?" There was one of those on this floor, too. It was right next to the Nicola vending machine. He didn't even dignify that with a verbal response, only a scoff and nod.
  
  I frowned. Most gun shops didn't open till ten or eleven. I was sure there were some twenty-four-hour places in this town, Night City being what it was, but I certainly didn't know any. However, I had been accumulating guns like nobody's business. I had brought about a dozen home with me from that Wraith encampment, for example, and left even more than that because they were crap or in bad condition. They had a fully-stocked armoury. I asked him, as I popped one of his eyes out of his skull, "What kind does your client want?"
  
  "He just said a good pistol that had select fire," the kid said. That was simple enough, I supposed. I had about ten full-sized Lexingtons from all the ones I picked up, plus Danny's collection. All the full-sized Lexingtons had either a single-shot or fully automatic fire mode, although I honestly didn't think much of that mode unless you had augmented strength and could use muscle to keep the weapon on target. I was strong enough to just barely keep an adequete grouping on the range, so I honestly preferred the three-round burst that the smaller Lexingtons had.
  
  Was it ethical to sell a twelve-year-old boy a gun, I wondered? In this world, it probably was. Plus, I could see the kid was packing already, which I wasn't going to give him shit over. I wouldn't deliver things to people's homes without a gun in this city, even if he screened his clients well and presumably had the protection of the Tyger Claws. I assume he kicked them up a percentage of his take, as I did.
  
  Finally, shrugging, I asked him, "I could sell you a Militech Lexington in 9mm, single-shot or fully automatic, for six hundred eddies." A brand new Lexington had an MSRP of about a thousand, so six hundred eurodollars was a pretty good price for something I got for free. It was probably cheaper than what he could get from a gun store, too.
  
  He stared at me with his one eye, suddenly all business, "It's in good shape? I take my reputation seriously." I strained hard not to roll my eyes at the boy, which would probably have offended him because I understood what he was saying.
  
  "I wouldn't sell it to you if it was in bad shape. It's barely been fired, and I cleaned it myself, oiled and everything. It's almost like new," I assured him truthfully.
  
  He nodded seriously as I took the eye to bits on my workbench, carefully but quickly refurbishing it. The lens was fine, but the aperture was in bad shape, so I wasn't surprised that he was getting headaches when he tried to focus on things close up, assuming those headaches hadn't been mostly caused by his untreated incipient bacterial infection.
  
  I bet his vision was blurry, too, but perhaps he didn't notice if he had naturally had myopia before he got these installed. I think he tried to use the fact that I was preoccupied with repairing his eyes to haggle with me, as he said, "Five hundred, and you include an extra magazine and a holster."
  
  I snorted and riposted with, "Five hundred, but only one magazine and no holster. Five fifty if you want the extra mag and holster." I did have a bunch of holsters, too, and magazines of this type were a dime a dozen.
  
  He said, "Lemme see if my guy wants to pay extra," and started texting on his phone quickly, and after a moment, nodded, "Deal, but the extra mag has to be the 30-round extended version."
  
  This little shit. I did have some of those, and I had little to no use for them as they made carrying the weapon very uncomfortable and impossible to conceal. Still, they were interchangeable with some Militech submachine guns, though, like the Saratoga, which I had a few of as well. Still, I liked the kid's moxie, so I said, "Fine. I'll bring it out when we're done."
  
  Finishing up with this eye, I repeated the procedure on his other, which was in a little better shape, before downloading and reflashing both the optics firmware and the operating system with the latest versions, doing a complete format of his storage as well, after he assured me that he didn't have anything on it worth saving. Both of the implants were second-hand, I was sure, and not only was their software out of date but who knew what the last person left on there.
  
  Glancing at the empty bag of saline, I nodded and sat three pill bottles, one of which was a lot larger, on the little table next to him, "We're about done. How's your vision now?"
  
  "It's great!" he said, which caused me to smile a little.
  
  I nodded, "Good. These first pills are antibiotics. It is important, very important, that you take them as directed. Once every eight hours. So three times a day for five days, OK?" He glanced at me and nodded, seeming to take my statement seriously.
  
  "Next is just some naproxen. It's an anti-inflammatory, standard over-the-counter stuff for fever and pain. Lastly, however, are nanomeds for the shitty installation of your chrome. Every day for sixty days..." I paused, "However... the antibiotics, naproxen and the checkup, I can give you on the house because I like you, but these are kind of expensive. For sixty days, this will cost you about twelve hundred eddies, but I assure you that it is vital that you take them. How do you want to pay?"
  
  This infuriated him, with him cursing at the shitty Ripperdoc that put his implants in again for a moment. Then he sighed and said, "They're really important?"
  
  I nodded.
  
  "I'll give you a two hundred eddie bonus if you accept payment in 'store-credit'," he offered, but I noticed he did use his phone briefly. I assumed he did a net search on the nanomed name, as he even looked in the bottle to make sure they looked like a legitimate product. The fact that he didn't trust anyone made him seem cuter, and I wanted to pinch his cheek.
  
  I considered that. Both the food and his delivery fees had cost me about seventy-five dollars for breakfast, and I did use his services fairly often. I'd probably run out of credit before he ran out of nanomeds. Finally, I nodded and held my hand out to him to shake, "Deal."
  
  He grinned and shook my hand, and I stood up, taking off the Ripperdoc glove and setting it on my workbench for the moment. "I'll go get the pistol. It'll just be a second," I told him and went into my apartment to grab one, an extended mag and a holster. I threw in a small reusable bag that I used for groceries, so he wouldn't have to walk around with a bare pistol. Rather than free plastic bags that you would throw away, most places offered heavier-duty plastic or fabric bags that you could reuse for a eurodollar. A few upper-scale stores had started doing that in Brockton Bay as an environmental measure, but here I felt it was just because petroleum and other plastic feedstocks were scarce.
  
  Handing him the bag, he glanced inside and nodded, sending me the money, using his optics to do so, grinning, "Sweet, they pair fine with my phone now." I noticed his eyes had shifted to a bright blue, which wasn't his natural colour, but they looked nice. He waved and left in a hurry, and I sat there wondering. Already, a lot of people just came in to buy drugs from me to the extent I expanded the products I bought wholesale to things like toothpaste, soaps and other toiletries that people often forget when they're at the store. They were all on one shelf by the entryway.
  
  Could I expand into guns? I definitely had enough initial stock, and I no longer felt that they were an immoral product to sell to the average person. I've had a few people try to offer payment in guns, but offering me a gun was like trying to sell an Inuit person in Alaska ice.
  
  Before I could decide one way or another, the doorbell rang. I assumed it was Hiro and that he had forgotten something, but it turned out to be Mr Jin and a young girl. Was this the girl that was kidnapped? No, looking closer, I saw that it was his daughter. If it was his daughter kidnapped, he would have told me. I let them in.
  
  "Taylor, it's nice to see you. I, and my daughter, wanted to thank you for your help last night. We were able to rescue the girl, along with about a half dozen other young girls and boys. Those, we just dropped off at the NCPD," he told me.
  
  Then he nudged his daughter a little, who took a step forward and bowed, saying in Japanese, " Thank you very much! Yui is my best friend! "
  
  I felt much better about reciprocating the gesture with her, compared to the Tyger Claw goons last night, and said, "Oh, I'm very glad she was rescued then." And I was; it made me feel a lot better, that what I had done was not only necessary but came to a good conclusion.
  
  Mr Jin shooed his daughter off, who left after giving me another large smile. I supposed he wanted to talk business. He said, "I can't thank you enough. They have been friends since she was a toddler. What can I do to repay you?"
  
  In a different person, I would have felt that was a semi-rhetorical question, but I thought he was being very literal. I had already thought about this, I didn't need just money, and honestly, I didn't really need anything right now. Not in a pressing way, so instead I asked, "If you don't mind, how about a favour in the future?"
  
  He scrunched his face up in consideration, but it didn't take him long to nod, "I can't say that whatever you ask for will be fulfilled, but I will do my best to see that it is. Is that good enough?"
  
  "Of course, I won't ask for the world, but I can't help but think that a favour from your organisation might be worth a lot more than just some extra money," I told him, honestly.
  
  He chuckled, "I agree. You'll probably have her father come around to thank you himself, as well. Maybe not today, but this week sometime. He is something of a peer to me, and he manages a couple of hundred people in... well, I guess you would say more traditional activities." Traditional gang activities? Probably street-level Tyger Claws, then.
  
  We spoke a little more before he apologised about having pressing issues to attend to and excused himself.
  
  I was interested in this girl's father owing me a favour. I'd know who to call if I ever needed someone rubbed out, then!
  
  Oh, who was I kidding? If I wanted someone killed, I'd probably be invested in doing it myself.
  
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  Absolutely nothing will go wrong!
  "Run for your lives! It's Boom Girl!" cried one frantic man, a civilian who turned and started running away. He would call the police if he got out of my sight; it was just how this worked, so I frowned and narrowed my eyes behind my mask. Then, before he could get too far, a small explosion went off right in front of his face, causing a grievous wound and making him slump over and start gurgling grossly, so I sent a couple of more wasps over to finish him off with subsequent explosions.
  
  I didn't like the name the NPCs, and a few players had given me, but I suppose it was my own fault for not picking out my own "cape name" before I got well-known. It was just that the number of appropriately heroic names for bug controllers was limited. And, if I was being honest, I wasn't exactly playing the hero role anymore. That hadn't lasted too long. I ended up joining Total Terror, but lately, I have been playing with Ruslan and Jean, who told me they played this same game as well.
  
  I had gone in a weird direction with my powers. As you got better with them, you could develop them along certain paths; for example, I could have strengthened the number of total insects I could control, or I could have worked down a path so that I could control larger animals, as well as about a dozen different paths of advancement that the game's AI developed independently for each power. How the game managed to be balanced at all was a wonder, and honestly, parts of it were not. Although there was pretty much always guaranteed to be a way to counter certain powers, you weren't anywhere near guaranteed to have that counter be available to you, so some types of powers, especially Brute ones, ran roughshod, especially in the earlier parts of the game.
  
  However, I worked down a path where I could issue commands to single insects. I didn't, obviously, have the multi-tasking ability to do so simultaneously, but the game gave me assistive technologies like; for example, I could set up control groups for certain insects and could issue a command to the total group or just one insect in the group, I could even give certain commands with some preconditions - and I assume it used a simple AI to assist me in this. For example, "attack anyone who attacks me" was a command I always gave my wasps.
  
  After that, I spent most of the rest of my power points on an interesting passive ability. It seemed useless at first and was very inexpensive to buy, but it was a passive buff to the ability of any minions had on their carry weight. It wasn't a bonus to their strength they could use in combat, just how much they could carry. Eventually, it got to the point where my wasps could carry twenty grams of weight and still be as fast as they were normally. This was a lot of weight since a wasp weighed much less than a gram in the first place.
  
  I, of course, used this weight to put twenty grams of high-explosives on each wasp. The game engine saw what I was trying to do and thought about it for a while before converting any wasp I did this to a differently named "Wasp (Hymenboomtera)" creature. This was great because I didn't even need to include things like a detonator or anything; the wasps could explode on command, which was not realistic at all. It wasn't realistic, but it was very fun.
  
  World of Heroes was set in the late 1980s timeline. I assumed this was selected so that they could keep it much easier to simulate, as there were a lot fewer computers at this time. There were simulated computers, and as far as I knew, they even ran something similar to the operating systems that were common in the eighties, but their processing power was minimal-things like spreadsheets, word documents, and clunky command lines.
  
  As a result of the era, though, all I had access to was regular plastic explosives, not the more serious metallic-based explosives that could be made in the 2060s, but that was still sufficient. Twenty grams of high explosives wasn't a lot; in fact, a hand grenade had over seven times that amount. But twenty grams exploding right by your eyeballs? It was sufficient. Especially considering I usually had at least two thousand wasps surrounding me most of the time.
  
  And that's how I got my name. I wasn't sure if it was one of the players or the NPCs, but now I would see articles in the newspaper with headlines such as, "Boom Girl strikes again!" It was a little annoying, as I had finally settled on the cape name "Ephemeral," based on the fleeting nature and beauty of explosions, but I got stuck with "Boom Girl."
  
  As I sent a couple dozen or so wasps to crowd near where I knew the hinges would be on the other side of the armoured door, but then I jumped in surprise as Ruslan's character sidled up to my side. In the game, he had a seriously overpowered ability; it was a Stranger power. It made it so people would not recognise him as a threat, almost until he attacked them. NPCs could see him attack someone else, and they would assume he had a good reason or that it was a misunderstanding. It was very similar to the power that I thought Nice Guy, a famous serial killer villain in my old world, had.
  
  Obviously, it couldn't work that way on players, so instead, it just changed his avatar into a different one if you lost line of sight on him, and it wasn't random either; it usually picked an NPC avatar that you would be unlikely to want to attack, like a policewoman in this case. It also always made him look like he wasn't carrying a weapon, even if he was, so he could walk up to a player, pointing a pistol at their head, and they wouldn't know as the game faked plausible arm and hand motions, although always with empty hands. It was a really strong power with how long he had spent levelling it up, especially against NPCs. It was strong enough that the NPCs hadn't ever given him a nickname because they mostly never realised he was there.
  
  "You ready?" he asked, his voice not sounding right from a small Asian woman's body. I guessed he hadn't gotten his power to the point where it mimicked different voices, as I was sure that was an option.
  
  I nodded, though, "Yes." The big issue with my power was that I used up explosives and wasps every time I used my ability. I had lots of areas in the city to get wasps, and thankfully for game-balance reasons, they all froze in time when I was logged off, acting like they were in my inventory, but explosives were a bit harder to get. That's why we were raiding the National Guard armoury today. Ruslan could usually use his ability to steal small things with impunity, but we were taking a truckload today. Literally, we had already stolen the military truck.
  
  He wanted a lot of explosives, too, as he wanted to see if he could sneak in enough explosives, a little at a time, to blow up the equivalent of the local Protectorate headquarters, which was in a skyscraper downtown. I didn't think it would work, personally, and even if it did, they would have it repaired in a week, but he wanted bragging rights.
  
  Jean's ability was a pretty straightforward Brute power, and it made him super strong and pretty much invulnerable unless these guys had a Carl Gustav. He was going to run through the door as soon as I "opened it." I made a stylish flourish, and the door to the armoury blew off its hinges.
  
  We ended up stealing over two tons of explosives and automatic weapons, but we almost got caught by a responding hero. Thankfully, it was an NPC Hero, and while Jean and I were hiding behind a wall from the hero incinerating us with some sort of pyrokinetic ability, which unfortunately cooked any of my wasps that got near, Ruslan casually walked next to him and shot him in the head with a fifty calibre anti-material rifle.
  
  Once we got away clean, I logged off and got dressed in one of my semi-professional outfits. Mr Jin wanted me to go to his office to meet his friend, whose daughter I had helped save. It had taken a week, after all. Apparently, he wasn't out of the country and couldn't fly back until a couple of days ago, and after that, he spent his time with his daughter. Not unreasonable, I thought.
  
  Leaving my apartment, I walked the short distance to Clouds and was let in unescorted to Mr Jin's office. It seemed like I was becoming more of a fixture there. Knocking on the door, he bid me to enter, and I saw him, not behind his desk, and sitting on a couch in the corner of his large office next to another Japanese man who looked about his age; they were clearly in the middle of laughing when I walked in, several cans of empty beer on the coffee table in front of them.
  
  I raised an eyebrow; it was clear these two were friends. "Taylor, Taylor! Come, sit! This is Kobayashi Daiki, Yui's father. Sorry, we go way back and have been looking back on old times."
  
  I looked at the new man as I walked over to a comfortable chair catty-corner to them. He didn't precisely look like what I was expecting a manager of a bunch of gangsters to look like. He was in casual but high-quality clothes, not the suit that Mr Jin was wearing, and he didn't have flashy hair or jewellery. Before I could sit down, he rose up and held out his hands and grabbed mine, saying, "Ryuichi told me what you did, I can't thank you enough for helping save Yui-chan. She's all I have!"
  
  I felt a little uncomfortable. Honestly, I didn't think they would have been successful at extracting the data that I had done, even if they had secured the support of one of the better surgeons in the city. The brain drive was designed to resist such efforts. It was possible I was wrong, but in either case, I didn't really want to make a big deal out of it. I nodded, "Of course. I was able to help a little bit, but I imagine it was your people who did all the heavy lifting."
  
  He seemed to realise what I was saying and didn't push it too much further than that, letting me sit down. Mr Jin was smiling and said, "Kobayashi here is an honest-to-goodness Miyadaiku, so he actually has to travel extensively for his job. He wasn't able to come back until the day before yesterday. Otherwise, he'd have seen you sooner."
  
  At first, I was expecting that unfamiliar word to mean assassin or something, but the auto-translate system subtitled the word as "traditional Japanese carpenter." Wait, what? When Mr Jin had said this man was involved in "traditional activities," I had an entirely different idea in mind. I brought up a screen with an encyclopedia article about Japanese carpentry while I floundered a bit, "Uhh... when you said traditional activities, I thought you meant traditional Tyger Claw activities..." I stammered out and continued, "I was expecting him to have a crew of two hundred leg breakers or something. Surely there can't be that much demand for traditionally built shrines and the like in North America that he would need a team of two hundred... right?"
  
  From what my encyclopedia said, traditional Japanese carpentry used a lot of interesting joineries that minimised or entirely eliminated the need for fasteners like nails or glue. I guessed because while trees were pretty common in ancient Japan, iron was not. It looked very complicated and pretty labour-intensive, and I thought that the only reason it might still be done was aesthetic and bragging reasons by the ultra-rich. Certainly, today, the bottleneck would be wood and not metal fasteners.
  
  Mr Kobayashi laughed heartily at my misapprehension and shrugged, "I mean, I did a little bit of that in the past, and it's true we have a number of no-show jobs for our brothers or sisters who just got out of the system, the ones who have a parole officer anyway." Well, he was just quite up front, now, wasn't he?
  
  He chuckled, "But you'd be surprised at the demand for traditional architecture; I have been working non-stop in Pacifica and Watson lately... high-end tea rooms, mostly, but you're right. I only have about twenty actual helpers and apprentices. I guess I'm also a supervisor of a number of more legitimate businesses that we run, as well." He just shrugged, "It is what it is."
  
  I looked at him oddly and let something pop out of my mouth that I immediately regretted, "Don't you ever feel bad for all the terrible things the Tyger Claws do?"
  
  Mr Jin blinked, surprised, but instead of seeming offended, instead, he seemed amused.
  
  "Uh, not really. Not in the way you seem to be implying, anyway. There are a lot of things that I believe we shouldn't be involved with, but as a whole, I think we're doing much better than the alternative," Mr Kobayashi said quickly and looked at me as if I was a little weird. Then he shrugged and asked, "Who do you suppose is our, the Tyger Claws, biggest competitor?"
  
  I tilted my head to the side, glad I hadn't offended him at least. "The Valentinos are the biggest gang in the city," I said, curious as if the answer was obvious.
  
  He grinned, obviously having expected my answer, "For as intelligent as you seem to be, you have a pretty big streak of naivety, Taylor. Our biggest competitor is the same as the Valentino's biggest competitor- the government. That's all a gang is, a group of people illegally offering the same services that a government might." He then tilted his head in the same way as I had, staring at me, "Ryuichi has told me about you. Do you suppose your dad felt bad about being associated with the NUSA government? I assure you our organisation doesn't hold a candle to all the terrible things they have done. Part of downtown is still a radioactive hole in the ground thanks to them, and that is not even close to the worst of what they've done." That was true; although it was supposedly Militech that had done that, there wasn't all that much difference.
  
  Honestly, I did think Alt-Danny felt that way, as he had conversations with Alt-Taylor about how she should definitely not trust anyone, especially Militech or the NUSA government, although he wouldn't tell her precisely why. I thought that was why Militech or the NUSA didn't feature more prominently in his post-death plans, "I see what you're trying to say, but yes, actually. I happen to know that he detested a lot of the people he used to work for. You're saying that at least you're doing a better job than the NUSA government, but that is a pretty low bar, isn't it?"
  
  He smiled and nodded, "That's true, I suppose. My own father explained all this to me when I was a little younger than your age, but it was stated a bit differently, but a lot of the conflict between our organisation and the government is just competition, not involving morality at all. I can guarantee you that the Tyger Claws give you better odds of winning at our casinos than the state does in the various lottery systems that have been set up."
  
  What was he, some kind of libertarian gangster? It still felt like excuses to me, as I was pretty sure some branches of the Tyger Claws engaged in similar human trafficking that his daughter just recently escaped from, but I had to admit that the Tyger Claws did act as kind of a local government in Japantown and one that was more effective and more approachable too.
  
  Perhaps I would have scoffed at this idea if I thought that the voters, either in Night City or the NUSA, had anything to say at all about what the government would decide to do. I didn't think that, and Alt-Taylor would have laughed in my face if I asked her if she thought, either. Also, I knew that my Tyger Claw taxes were a lot less than my Night City taxes, that was for sure.
  
  Still, to me, it seemed a bit like whataboutism, like just because the government was ultra shitty doesn't give you the right to be slightly less shitty, but I wasn't going to push it, as I relied on a somewhat tranquil relationship with the Claws, although I knew that was being a bit hypocritical.
  
  After that, he invited me to lunch with him and Mr Jin, which I accepted, and the rest of the afternoon was quite amicable. I would have liked to have seen his daughter, but apparently, she was still under a doctor's supervision and her mom, who had also been out of town, wasn't letting her out of her sight. Although they hadn't harmed her precisely, they had kept her and about a dozen other children in a drugged stupor for a period of time. For her, it was just under a day, but others were longer.
  
  This fact made me want to see her even more, just because I hardly trusted the quacks that called themselves doctors around here, even if I knew that Mr Kobayashi would likely spring for the actual, decent physicians. And although I had, theoretically, all the knowledge on psychology that I could ever want, the truth was I was a very subpar therapist, and I suspected that it was mainly post-traumatic stress that the doctor was treating her for.
  
  He once again thanked me, exchanged contact numbers and claimed if I ever needed anything that he could provide, all I had to do was ask.
  
  A month later, I was working on the brain in the jar. I had already interrogated him over the past few days, getting as much information as possible and cross-referencing it with what I read from his data. He had three password-protected banking accounts. The first one, it turned out, wasn't a banking account at all but a line of credit- and already shut down by the time I used several dozen proxies across North America to log into that banking account.
  
  The second account, at a different bank, contained just over twenty-eight thousand Eurodollars, which I siphoned into an anonymous numbered account, which I would keep separate from my other money. Assuming the bank didn't claw it back in a couple of days, I would see if I could convert it into something I could use or cash. I didn't precisely want to just have a link directly to my bank account to this guy's account, but I could likely withdraw the total amount in cash through automated teller machines in a day or two if I tried.
  
  In this world, cash was of two varieties. There were the actual physical notes, which were mostly untraceable, as well as the digital equivalent. You could have a sum of Eurodollars on a data shard or transmit the money digitally to other people without having to go through a bank to do so. Cash on these "digital wallets" wasn't untraceable, but it was irrevocable, namely that a bank could not void a transaction conducted this way or claw back money; it was the same as actual cash that way in that once it was out of your hands it was gone.
  
  It was only the work of a couple of seconds to set up a random "digital wallet" to accept or send cash this way, and that was how I sent most people money. Most phones and implants had apps for this built-in, which was why the majority of people didn't have legitimate banking accounts. That said, I would still try to acquire the funds in physical cash, which was still very popular. Alt-Danny had once said that the government would shift to a completely digital currency the day that politicians stopped accepting bribes.
  
  The last bank account was something that I couldn't access, yet. Apparently, you could only move money out of the account in person with the correct bank account number and password. I had both of those, but I didn't have time for a trip to Europe right now. The bank was based in Spain, and the balance was over a hundred thousand Eurodollars. Perhaps I could hire someone to pick it up for me, for a share of the proceeds.
  
  I didn't find anything earth-shattering in his files, but I came to the conclusion that he worked for a number of people and was something a specialist on person retrieval, in general, in addition to his human trafficking. There wasn't anything listed about who he worked for, precisely, although there was a fair amount of information about who worked for him, so it seemed like he worked using what I recognised as a cellular structure, so compromising his operations, such as getting tortured by the Tyger Claws for abducting the wrong person, couldn't compromise anything but his own team of people.
  
  That was a sign that his organisation was probably, a larger one, which I didn't like the sound of. That first account, which was some kind of line of credit, also led me to that belief as well. From what I could tell, the only thing I could think of was that account was supposed to be used to charge business expenses.
  
  That line of credit would have been the next step if I wanted to continue my investigation, but I didn't because I could see no way of doing it that wouldn't expose me to a potentially murderous group of criminals or, worse, a corporation. So, a little unsatisfied, I decided to stop there and killed Mr Human Trafficker. His brain, though, was still useful.
  
  I decided to go with a hybrid cybernetic solution. It was very easy to permanently end any consciousness the brain might have, and I also carefully excised large portions of his prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia, replacing the connections of this area with specially designed cybernetics based on commercial off-the-shelf memory modules that I had bought.
  
  The memory storage modules were all standard and cheap, but I created a semi-novel neuron-machine interface that would emulate the natural memory access process. It was different from normal data storage implants as those were designed to interface only with other electronics, specifically with an operating system; this was both a simpler and more complicated direct neural interface.
  
  It would allow me pretty much direct access to the unit's "memories", though, which was important as I trained its neural network. There were chemical and biological ways to either remove or create memories in the brain, of course, but they were a messy biological process, something akin to controlled brain damage and not something you'd want to do continuously.
  
  It might seem weird to have bought these storage modules instead of reusing the existing data storage implant that, until recently, had been installed on his brain, but not only was that a very expensive piece of wetware which I had set aside, but it was also not really optimised for this purpose. Sure, it had tons and tons of storage, which I needed, but its complicated security and cryptographic modules just got in the way. I would have needed to disassemble it anyway, and that would have been a real shame.
  
  "Tomorrow, we'll see if you can move the arm on the waldo and maybe see out of the optic sensor," I told the cybernetic brain excitedly as I set my surgical tools aside. Rather than interface with the optic nerve directly, like most cybernetic eyes did, I was experimenting with direct access to the sensory cortex. I thought that maybe, the brain might be able to learn to see using numerous, not just two, optical sensors.
  
  There were a number of similar experiments in this world testing full-borgs in a similar way, but their results were mixed, with attempts at three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision and the like being failures. I thought it might be due to the individual already being habituated to binocular vision, though; perhaps if I built this neural network from the ground up it might work for sure, but it wasn't like I was starting from scratch here, either. I didn't have the equipment for cloning experiments, and I wasn't entirely sure I could build it from scratch either, so it was a good thing if I ever wanted to branch out that it was a relatively mature technology base here.
  
  It was interesting to see the edges of where my power was considered not entirely in keeping with my speciality, too. I could think of ideas for therapeutic cloning systems that would only duplicate, say, a person's limb or one of their organs, but thinking about how to create traditional clones was just on the edge of what my power wanted to help me with. I got the feeling that it was flexible, though, and that I could probably convince it to help me in time. I wondered if it just preferred me taking brains from people, as I did get the impression it got excited whenever I got into fights.
  
  I wasn't sure if I could succeed with interesting vision experiments where others before had failed as although this brain had no memories anymore, it still had all of the connections it had built up in its previous life, including the same optimisations in its visual cortex for binocular vision. I had added daily neuro-plasticity treatments to it's tank, though, but I wasn't sure that would be enough.
  
  We'd just have to see, I supposed. Standing up, I carefully put all of the equipment I was using in my autoclave to sterilise and noticed a sound coming from my apartment, a soft pecking sound. Mrs Pegpig often pecked at the door when she wanted to get my attention, so I walked into the back to find her, indeed, pecking at the door, standing precariously on the doorknob. Even if she had the knowledge of how to open the door, and even if she was a super strong pigeon, well, she was still a pigeon and couldn't open it.
  
  She warbled at me and jumped off the wall to land on my outstretched hand. She lifted up her cybernetic foot to me, and I automatically zoomed in on the limb. My eyes could barely be called Kiroshis anymore; I added so many aftermarket features to them. They were really the thing I had made that I was most proud of, as I couldn't just add things without either optimising something else or removing it, as the size was fixed. In this case, I added a very tiny gyroscope for stabilisation on the upgraded sixteen times zoom, twice the zoom that Kiroshi's came with by default. To do this, I had to actually remove some of the other electronics in each of the eyes and relocate them to my orbit, devising a near-field communication protocol so that the electronics could be split up.
  
  It did mean that I had to perform surgery on myself again, reducing my sinus area somewhat in the process. As for Mrs Pegpig's peg? There was a malfunction in the actuator, and it didn't close all the way anymore. It looked like it had suffered something akin to battle damage. Who did she think she was, some kind of raptor? Who was she fighting out there? She was missing a couple of quill feathers in her tail, too.
  
  I made a tsk noise and then started fixing it fairly quickly, but a call from Wakako interrupted me. I answered while continuing to work on the leg, verifying the encryption was on, "Hello, Mrs Okada."
  
  "Hello, Taylor. I have news. I heard back from my contact, and he wanted to know if I was, ahem, fucking with him. So I take it that to mean he has just seen the packet I sent him," she began with a cheery tone.
  
  I smiled, "Well, that is good, I suppose. It probably won't take them that long to verify the efficacy. I assume you followed the plan to discourage dragging their feet?"
  
  "Naturally. I suggested that if I didn't hear anything else within a month or two, we would sell everything to one of their competitors, and I gave him a price of five million eurodollars. He hasn't started to haggle yet, but he did mention that for a price in this range, he would likely need an in-person meeting with the seller, which I will very much try to discourage," Wakako said.
  
  I shook my head firmly, "I would really rather not do that either. I would prefer a total digital exchange," I said, frowning, "Any in-person exchange just provides them with... excessive temptations."
  
  "Yes, however, it might be unavoidable, at least partly. I am sure they will have a technical person on staff who will want to review the data prior to handing over the funds. I'm sure they'd agree to a digital exchange, but only if they get the data first, and frankly, I wouldn't trust him not to stiff us both in that case," she said, then paused, "But it doesn't necessarily mean you need to expose yourself. We're still presenting this as a case of stolen technology, after all."
  
  I hummed, "Well, let's try to avoid as much as possible some stereotypical meet-up in an abandoned warehouse. I don't believe the men with free candy written on the side of their white-panelled vans, either." I rubbed my chin and thought about it more, "If they demand an in-person exchange, then we can demand a very safe location to conduct it, and we can hire mercenaries to conduct the exchange. I might take part as just part of that team, and they'd see me as only another merc. Do you have any ideas for a very safe place you could suggest the meeting take place if they insist on it?"
  
  She frowned, "They'll suggest Bitechnica Plaza, and I'd suggest somewhere in Japantown, which neither side will agree to. Maybe the Azure Plaza."
  
  I considered that. That was one of the most exclusive hotels in the city and only had been in operation since 2060. Ostensibly, it was an independent hotel and resort, but it was linked to the Arasaka-owned Konpeki Holdings, in style if not in technical owners. There were "Konpeki Plaza" hotels in numerous cities around the world. Still, in North America, there were only two, and they were called Azure Plazas and theoretically owned at least fifty-one per cent by a New United States citizen, with also theoretically no link back to the main Arasaka corporation.
  
  I wasn't sure I bought their separation at all, and I doubted anyone in Night City did either. The large Azure Plaza building started construction in the mid-2050s, as much a protest by the Night City city council to the NUSA government as anything else. The twenty or so years of being duped about the Arasaka headquarters explosion really pissed off a lot of people in Night City.
  
  It would be a good choice, though, the security was insane, and it was an internationally known name for business meetings exactly like the kind we had, where neither party trusted the other. The Azure/Konpeki Plaza employees were always trusted interlocutors between two fractious parties, though. Still, there was one issue, "Don't people already think you're a catspaw for Arasaka?"
  
  She scowled at me. Wakako didn't like Arasaka at all, and she had never really told me the reason why, "Absolutely not. And even if they did, there is no way Arasaka... oh, excuse me, there is no way the totally organic American holding company that operates Azure Plaza would take a risk to ruin their reputation on a deal as small as ours. It would be unthinkable."
  
  I slowly nodded. That did make sense, "Okay, push that, then. We'll need to secure a group of mercs and maybe some extra muscle on top of that. Do you think Kiwi's team might be appropriate?" I liked working with them, and I trusted them, so it would be nice if they were watching my back, especially Kiwi, who could likely see a double cross before it happened with her net support. She wouldn't be able to invade the Azure Plaza's subnet, I doubted, but she could set up for our infiltration and exfiltration.
  
  Wakako looked thoughtful for a moment, "I might not have thought of them first, but if you're comfortable working with them, they could work with you as the exchange team, but we'd probably need a couple of additional people. Ruslan has settled down lately and hasn't been taking as many wild risks, so it might work out."
  
  I nodded. I still saw some worrying signs with both Jean and Rus, but it was true they had settled down significantly. I no longer felt that they were circling the drain, merely treading water. I still felt that they needed therapy and probably psychoactive medication, but I couldn't force either of them to get it.
  
  "Let me handle reaching out to them, but I will do so this week or next. Suppose my guy in Biotechnica nixes either Konpeki Plaza or a couple of the other similar locations in town. In that case, I know they'll plan on double-crossing you, so we'll have to move quickly to the next seller. However, I think they'll go to the meeting there if they demand one. Even if we have to pay ten or twelve thousand eddies to rent a conference room for a few hours, it will be worth it," Wakako said, nodding.
  
  She paused for a moment and then asked, "Is there anything else we need to discuss?"
  
  Yes, if they demanded we meet them in some sketchy location or in the middle of their headquarters in town, there was only really one reason they'd do so. I really hoped we didn't have to go with a number two option, as then we'd really be on a clock. "I don't think so. I think it's just a waiting game for us now."
  
  "Alright then, I'll let you go. But I feel good about this deal, despite these hiccups," Wakako said with an uncharacteristic smile on her face.
  
  Shit, did she just jinx us?
  
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  Civic improvement
  I watched the surgical assistant proceed through its self-tests, the four articulating arms stretching out from its housing hanging from the ceiling and going through the full range of motions with a very slight whirring sound. I settled on a design for this first-generation assistant that only had four arms and six tools, three on each of the two special-tool armatures. However, it had two general-purpose manipulators, which resembled a hand with the pinky finger replaced with a second thumb.
  
  I had taken the manipulator design straight from a number of seamstress robots that were in common use. I was probably violating some sort of patent, but I didn't particularly care. The extra thumb allowed it to perform almost invisibly tiny sutures, at least in simulations. Sutures were still a common treatment, especially for people who could not pay for the better surgical-nano glue that held a wound closed and healed it with no scarring at the same time-most of my patients, in other words.
  
  I had a lot of suture techniques in my head, and with my high dexterity and vision options, I could perform almost as well as a robot in surgeries, but that didn't mean that I had muscle memories for every particular surgical technique, especially somewhat archaic ones like surgical sutures. At least, that was before I had gotten a lot of practice. These days, I could practically sew a fly's wings back on if I had a small enough needle and thread, but it didn't mean I enjoyed taking the time to do such things.
  
  I hadn't quite had an opportunity to test the suture mode on an actual person, although it had worked really well on all the physical analogues I had easily accessible. I had shifted the central processing unit into a permanent life support tank, as well, so I theoretically could collect another person's brain if I wanted to. I would need to if I ever intended to finish the arachnid-robot ideas, but my workspace out in my clinic was getting kind of full. In the current design, I had envisioned a robot about the size of a terrier dog which was the smallest form factor for a generalised robot that I could think of, but perhaps I could shift downwards to about the size of a large rat.
  
  They would be less useful tools on each spider, but I could also have many more of the individual bots and specialise them each to a different set of tools and skills. Also, a benefit was if they were smaller, I could keep their home base station in the ceiling in a corner, as they should have no difficulty walking on a ceiling or the walls.
  
  Perhaps fate was favouring me because I heard an urgent-seeming series of doorbells and knocks on my outer door. After checking the cameras, I noticed Hiro and another young man who seemed to be injured. Part of his face was cut, going down his cheek and eye, skipping a portion of his neck and continuing down part of his chest. He had a makeshift bandage covering most of the injury on his face, which occluded his eye.
  
  Despite the bandage, the wounds were bleeding fairly well. I glanced at the surgical assistant and smiled. I may get a chance to test its suture mode today. I buzzed them in, the door unlocking with a clang as Hiro pushed it in, and the two young men hurried into my shop.
  
  By the look of it, the new arrival was a few years older than Hiro, maybe three years or so younger than myself. Hiro came in, swearing, "Miss Taylor, Miss Taylor! Some fucking gonk cut-up Jeremy. Can you help him?"
  
  I motioned him to take a seat at the chair and tilted my head at them both, "Who attacked him?" But then, I focused my attention on the patient, gathering a few things I kept for traumas on hand.
  
  I connected him to my simple cardiac monitor just to be safe. He's tachycardic, which wasn't surprising judging from the wincing he was doing, especially when I removed the makeshift bandage he was using. It was clear he was trying to put up a brave front, but he was in significant pain. His left optic was damaged, as well.
  
  "Some fucking junkie piece of shit tried to rob me on a delivery," the boy told me himself. I nodded and sprayed some contact anaesthetic into all of the open wounds, getting a sigh of relief from the boy as the painkiller started working immediately. Whoever it was, they had gotten him pretty good. I would have to repair some of the muscles in his face if he ever wanted to have a symmetrical smile again.
  
  I glanced at Hiro briefly as I stood up to go get some tools. First, I'd have to debride all of the wounds, dirt and other debris that were present, "I thought you and your minions only delivered to Japantown, Hiro-chan."
  
  He scowled at me for the somewhat feminine diminutive I added to his name but nodded, "Yeah, we do. This fucking happened in Japantown. Don't worry, Miss Taylor; wae've already told the Claws." I wanted to raise my eyebrows but didn't. Why did he think I cared? Did he have the impression I was in the gang or something?
  
  "Kumo-kun, connect," I told the surgical assistant as I brought back a few tools, as well as an IV kit. Although my assistant, only presently, had four "legs", I thought the final version might have eight. Plus, he was kind of a first draft of what I might want my little spiders to be like, so I had been calling it "Kumo-kun."
  
  His two armatures that ended in hands folded down from the ceiling and grabbed the data cable that was connected to the biobed and searched for the young man's interface socket. Apparently, this was a little disconcerting to him as his eyes got wide and he tried to sit up, only for Kumo-kun's other hand to semi-firmly press him back into the chair. It might be better if I reassured him, "Don't worry, that's just an assistant robot that I have been testing out recently. You're in no danger." Probably.
  
  He settled down and let the hands put the data cable into his interface socket, and immediately the rest of the Meditech displays on the biobed started being populated with data. It wasn't anything I hadn't already guessed-he only had a basic operating system and optics, like Hiro had.
  
  I sat on the little rolling stool and rolled back over to the biobed, humming as I palpated his body, not just the parts around his injury. I asked, "Do you want Hiro to leave prior to discussing anything medical-related or receiving care?"
  
  He blinked his good eye at me and shook his head, "Nah, I mean, he's paying for half of this." That caused me to raise my eyebrow. Did Hiro-chan have something like a health insurance plan for his employees if they were wounded on the job? How interesting.
  
  Hiro just shrugged at me, so I nodded, "The lens on your left optic here is damaged irreparably. It'll have to be replaced, but I can have one fabricated locally and delivered within thirty-six hours. For that and the repair of that eye, is one fifty. You have some serious muscle damage to your cheek here; I'll have to repair it as well as your chest. One hundred. You're also very dehydrated, and I can detect you've got the incipient stages of clinically significant Vitamin C deficiency. I'll treat that, ten eddies. But it would be best if you took a multivitamin every day or watched what you ate better."
  
  Hiro shook his head, "I told you that Buck-a-Slice is not food, man."
  
  He scowled at Hiro, or at least one-half of his face did, "They're delicious! How much are multivitamins?" Delicious? I might need to perform a psych consult.
  
  "About ten ennies a day or less, but if you're on any kind of government assistance, they're included for free, but there are only certain brands you can buy and only from a few different stores. Unfortunately, my clinic is not one of them, as I do not have an actual business license. But the pharmacy and quick shop across the street are," I told him as I held his arm out and quickly started an IV before he could realise what was happening and complain about it.
  
  Hiro looked interested, "Really? I never heard of that."
  
  "It's a cost-saving measure, plus I suspect some bribery is going on. It's also not advertised. But you should be able to get them for free, as well, if you live in subsidised housing here. If you don't want the hassle, I sell them as well," I told Hiro as I started a yellow multivitamin-infused bag of saline running on my patient. I said out loud while glancing up, "Kumo-kun, light and suction."
  
  Eagerly, the two other mechanical arms unfolded down; they each had a few tools on them, one of which was a bright light, and the other was what was basically a medical wet-dry vacuum with changeable heads. This current one looked kind of like a straw and was disposable.
  
  Although the brain that made up the intelligence of Kumo-kun definitely didn't have consciousness anymore, not how I would describe it anyway, it still had something like the intelligence of a dog, if a dog had a photographic memory and a bunch of medical procedures programmed into it. It was always eager to please, too, as part of the process to train its neural network included wiring its in-tact reward centre to give a serotonin and dopamine reward if it completed a task successfully.
  
  It held the suction carefully as I irrigated and cleaned the kid's wound. When I was done, I tossed the disposable straw away and replaced it with a new one, and then began the complicated task of repairing the muscle damage to his cheek. I had to use a very tiny set of forceps to reach in and grab the severed muscle and have Kumo-kun hold it in place while I sutured it and the connective tissue back together. Kumo-kun's bright light following the entire operation was quite useful. As I was working on him, the young man suddenly asked me, "Wait, is this where the scar will disappear?"
  
  I glanced at him from behind my surgical mask and safety glasses and almost imperceptibly shook my head, "No, not unless you want to pay an extra seventy-five eddies. It will be a fairly small scar, though." I paused just in case he did want to. I'd have to go get some of the trauma nanoglue if he wanted that. I had made certain assumptions about my patient's financial means, and while I wasn't usually wrong, perhaps I was in this case.
  
  However, he surprised me by just shaking his head, causing me to gently donk him on top of the head with my knuckle to get him to stay still. He said, "No way! Chicks dig scars, and this one is one of those vertical down-the-eye deals, like Jake from Bushido X!"
  
  I tried to avoid groaning. Bushido X: Fade to Black was released half a year ago, and it was just now filtering down to the "poor as fuck demographic" who didn't or couldn't afford full price to stream it. It was undoubtedly one of the worst films I had seen in either world.
  
  I did all of the work on his face myself, but when I was done, I shifted the biobed into bed mode and said, "Kumo-kun, finish the rest of the sutures." This time all four arms dropped down excitedly, and I once again had to calm my patient. I watched Kumo-kun carefully just in case he went rampant, but he was doing a fast and efficient job.
  
  Hiro asked me suddenly, glancing at the wall of the room where I had a number of firearms set into pegs on the wall. I had gone ahead and started selling guns, too. "What's the cheapest pistol I could buy that is still really reliable, and he could carry in his pocket? It needs to be able to put down an average Scav."
  
  I raised an eyebrow, glancing between the wall of weapons and Kumo-kun carefully suturing the patient's chest closed. Now that I was selling guns, I had a lot more people trying to pay me for firearms, which I accepted if the weapons offered were not total shit. I finally pointed to the corner where a small snub-nosed revolver was hanging off the peg, "That's a snub-nose .357, five shots. Good pocket pistol, about as reliable as can be, and you don't have to worry about policing your brass, either."
  
  "Policing your brass?" asked the younger boy.
  
  I sighed. Oh, sweet summer child. I educated him, carefully and slowly, "Most modern civilian pistols have a firing pin that stamps a uniquely identifiable marking into the base of the primer, and theoretically, the police can recover the ejected brass and identify the firearm that shot it. Furthermore, most vending machine-sold ammo has its batch number printed on the brass also. Policing your brass is picking up the ejected cartridges after you shoot someone so as to stymy this avenue of forensic investigation. Revolvers don't eject their brass, so there is no need to worry about it unless you have to reload." I accepted that revolver as payment last week; it was old as hell and reminded me of a gun a private detective in a noir film might wear on his ankle.
  
  He looked suitably enlightened but asked, "What do you do when you shoot people, then, Miss Taylor?"
  
  I narrowed my eyes at him and lied blatantly, "I don't 'shoot people.'" I saw him roll his eyes and continued, "But hypothetically, if I ever had to and couldn't immediately pick up the brass, I would have long before replaced all of the firing pins I used with ones with no identifiable marks, either by carefully filing down the firing pin using a steel file or buying a standard, unmarked, firing pin from any gun store." It went without saying that every firearm I sold in my "clinic-pharmacy-gunshop" had this already done to it. It wasn't illegal; the requirement was only put in place for firearm manufacturers-it wasn't a requirement to own a firearm that it be equipped with microstamping technology.
  
  He nodded, then, and asked, "How much for that revolver? And do you happen to have a spare firing pin for a nine-millimetre Lexington subcompact? Like that kind you sold me a while back."
  
  I smirked at him, "One fifty for the revolver. It's over sixty years old but still in good condition. Twenty-five for the firing pin, thirty if you need another spring too."
  
  He tried to haggle down the total combined price of my medical services, the gun and parts on account of it being a package deal, but I only let him get a five per cent or so discount. The prices I charged were already quite low. However, I relented when he asked for some 'loner eyes' for his minion while I was waiting for the replacement lens. I had over five pairs of this model of eyes, so I just swapped his left eye with one of my left pairs.
  
  "Most features won't work until your other eye is repaired. Call me if you get a fever, aches, or there is any sign of infection at the wound sites," I told him, although I specifically left integration unfinished on the implant so he would have an incentive to return my eye to me. I wasn't a swap house, after all. I took this eye, undamaged, out of a Wraith's skull myself. I didn't want to swap it with an eye that was damaged, even if I repaired it later.
  
  One last time I checked over Kumo-kun's work before placing bandages on his chest, finding the stitches to be very neat and professionally done. While Hiro and his minion were leaving, I used a simple app I had created to rate the effectiveness of each task Kumo-kun tried to complete on a number of factors. Altogether he had performed admirably. Kumo-kun self-supervised during neural network training during simulations, and its guess as to how well it had done was in line with mine, too. Excellent!
  
  "So, what are we doing again?" asked Jean curiously, in between bites of his Chinese food. We were in one of the private rooms of The Golden Duck again, although this time, I was just eating some regular Kung Pao chicken. I had been ducked out recently.
  
  Ruslan growled at him, "We are brainstorming a strategy for the gig. The way Wakako told me, you're trading something to a Corp and are concerned they might just murder you and take it?" He scrunched up his face, "As the customer, why are you being involved in the handoff in the first place? That isn't standard."
  
  He was right. Normally, in a gig like this, Wakako would have shielded me from the mercenaries involved and shielded the mercenaries involved from me, in turn.
  
  Moreover, if safety was my real primary concern, I wouldn't be involved at all, or I would act through a proxy. The reason I was involved was in case there were technical questions, as I was presenting myself as a hired subject-matter expert that the mercenaries had hired instead of being the source of the invention. But I could, theoretically, do that through a comms net and have Kiwi pretend to be me, just telling her what to say over the comms.
  
  But... I just had the intuition that I needed to be there. If I sought to attend the exchange remotely, there was a non-zero per cent chance that the Biotechnica people would utilise a low-range but broad-spectrum frequency jammer during the meeting for privacy, and I would be stuck, and whomever or whatever I selected for my proxy would be without the benefit of my wisdom, such as it was anyway.
  
  "It isn't necessarily non-standard. We've all done bodyguard jobs before. They may have some questions about the package, in which case I may need to be present," I rationalised to him, but privately I admitted he had a point.
  
  He made a non-committal noise, and then Kiwi jumped into the conversation, "So you have three real concerns, then. Ambush prior to the meeting, betrayal at the meeting or ambush after the exchange has taken place? I presume you are receiving either money or some other easily fungible store of value and are concerned they might just take it back from you after receiving the goods you are selling them."
  
  Jean popped up, "Hiring us and, you said, another team as backup must mean this is worth a lot of eddies!"
  
  Ruslan cuffed him about the back of the head and said, "It isn't our business how much it is worth, you gonk, only how much we're getting paid, and ten thousand each for a half day's work is definitely worth it. Taylor may be our friend, but you still need to be professional."
  
  I chuckled a little, privately pleased he referred to me as a friend, but I turned to address Kiwi, "Close. I'd say there are three concerns, but a betrayal at the exchange is not one of them. We are going to insist on conducting the handoff either at Veritas Corporation's headquarters or at Konpeki Plaza. Both places rent conference rooms, and both places offer a sort of arbitration service for this type of exchange if it becomes necessary." They weren't an escrow service, precisely, but if either side of the deal tried to welsh on their terms, either the Veritas or the Konpeki Plaza arbiters could be called upon as a trusted interlocutor, with the goal of arriving at a compromise.
  
  If a Corporation had a history of perfidy to the opposite party and being unreasonable to the arbiters, its reputation in more important deals and negotiations would take a hit, so it was one of the few things we could demand that would be more important to the Corporation than us.
  
  I knew for a fact that middle managers in Corps had no authority to damage their standing with important third parties like this. That said, it would only affect the actual deal and exchange. Neither Veritas nor Konpeki's people would bat an eye if we were murdered before the deal took place, for example.
  
  I continued, "So the three main concerns are, first, as you say, an ambush prior to getting to the exchange location. Two, an ambush after leaving the exchange location, and three, us being identified during the exchange and then later being black bagged. This is more of a concern I have for myself, but it is something all of us should be cognisant of." After all, hadn't they helped me kidnap a mercenary to interrogate him about the people paying for his services just a short few months ago?
  
  She looked interested, "How should we go about preventing ourselves from being identified? We can make sure all of our chrome is locked down hard, so they don't get any identifiable R/F spillover. But that is just one way that they could identify us."
  
  "I'm going to pay for us all to get techhair implants, as well as a simple biosculpt treatment. There are mathematical ways to adjust your face to prevent any level of confidence from facial recognition software, while if a person looks at you, you will appear barely different. A different hair colour and this change will make it difficult to be casually identified," I said confidently. I was also going to wear a face mask, in addition to actually enabling my Kiroshi's camera dazzler system. These precautions, along with my temporarily straight and blonde hair seemed like they would be very effective.
  
  I also had a few different devices I had been Tinkering with that would prevent the casual collection of DNA from such things as shed skin cells or saliva, just in case.
  
  Although I was a bit hesitant about getting rid of my natural hair, I already had a specific brand of tech hair in mind for myself that replicated straight or very curly hair without an issue. The simulator on their net site had a configuration that looked very similar to my own natural hair, even if it was labelled "extreme" curliness under its settings.
  
  She nodded slowly, a hand reaching up to touch her hair. Jean did the same thing, except he was scowling because he was shiny-head bald. Kiwi rolled her fingers on the table for a moment before nodding, "In that case, I think I have a way to minimise your exposure to ambushed prior to the meeting."
  
  I raised an eyebrow, "Oh?"
  
  "Yes, insist on the Azure Plaza and pay for a hotel room for one or two nights prior to the exchange. It is most likely that their ambush team, if they have one, would be watching for people approaching the hotel the day of the exchange, especially if you set the exchange time to be in the afternoon," she said, smiling at her own cleverness.
  
  That... was a good idea. A simple double occupancy room was about three to four thousand eurodollars a night. I think a six or seven-thousand-dollar expenditure for the likely elimination of one of the threat surfaces was a cheap cost.
  
  Both Ruslan and Jean looked excited, but I put a damper on things, "This is a good idea, so Wakako and I will pay for two rooms, me and Kiwi and one and you two in the other. But we won't pay for any hotel amenities, especially of the prostitute variety, so that's on your own dime if you want. If you don't have a custom liver, then no drinking within ten hours of the meeting, though."
  
  They both nodded, and Ruslan said, "It seems to me the easiest way to ensure you won't be ambushed on the way out of the meeting is to charter an aerodyne, then."
  
  I scowled. I had thought of that, but there were serious issues with that idea, "Can't do that without leaving a trail right back to me, plus it isn't as good an idea as you think. I'm a nobody, so a flight plan out of Konpeki would have to be filed one or two hours in advance of the trip, with the real identities of all passengers listed on the manifest. They'd notice and would have enough time to swarm me if they wanted to when I landed."
  
  There were occasionally Nomads around that you could pay for wildcat charters using aircraft, including aerodynes and aircars, but none were around Night City at the moment. Wakako had the horsepower to arrange a charter, no problem, even an anonymous one in most situations, but definitely not the horsepower to arrange an anonymous one to and from Konpeki Plaza.
  
  If we were having the exchange in the abandoned warehouse, she could have several options, including runners stealing automated cargo drones or maybe even a gunship, but there was no way I was going down the "exchange at a seedy, dangerously empty location" path during this playthrough of my life.
  
  He nodded, "Alright, that makes sense. That leaves a ground exfil, then." He glanced at Kiwi, "Let's plan out a route that we can take. We can see the most obvious spots where we would ambush someone, and take precautions, including where the other team will be in overwatch. Perhaps this is a time for that idea you had, Kiwi."
  
  Kiwi looked really excited, and I looked confused, "What idea?"
  
  "Stealing a city services truck and filling a bunch of potholes with command-detonated explosives to create a prepared killbox for pursuing cars!" she said, "Do any of you know how to fill in a pothole?"
  
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  Anything that can go wrong...
  I got word from Wakako at an inopportune time, as we were currently huddled behind a large heavy-duty tracked excavator machine as heavy machine gun bursts tinged off of it. The fire was coming from an elevated position, in the second story of an unfinished construction project just ahead of us. The excavator wasn't an armoured vehicle or anything, but it was made out of solid and very thick steel and was definitely stopping the rounds before they made it to our much less armoured bodies.
  
  Ignoring her message for now, I glanced over at Mercy, who was in cover along with the rest of us, and I decided to say something obvious, sarcastically, over our tacnet, "I think this call was a trap."
  
  "Yeah, no shit, Breaker," he said exasperatedly, paused and then continued, "Just keep hiding behind this fucking thing; Alpha and Charlie are both responding and should be here soon, as is a full platoon of SecForces on the ground."
  
  I didn't nod, but I continued glancing to the side. I was a little concerned that with us so effectively suppressed that the enemy would seek to flank us and direct fire enfilade, raking us with automatic weapons from the long axis. It was the textbook response when you had a dangerous enemy, like us, suppressed, and it was what they had taught me in basic training.
  
  I had decided I would immediately activate my stealth system and leap out, trying to eliminate anyone who tried to flank us if that happened. However, it would be dangerous, as the HMG was obviously using armour-piercing rounds on account of the damage it had done to the AV-4, which had to lift off and conduct a forced-landing several kilometres away on the interstate.
  
  There was a brief hiss as I saw a rocket flying above our heads, and less than a second later, a loud explosion was heard in front of us, muffled somewhat by the giant excavator machine; my helmet quickly normalising the sound and flash to something that wasn't harmful. Mercy glanced at us and said, "Stay down; let's let them pacify the entire area from range first."
  
  I snorted but managed to mute my vox in time so nobody heard it. He didn't have to tell me that. I wasn't stupid.
  
  Suddenly, a very familiar sound started up again, the sound of that heavy machine gun firing off long bursts, but this sound was coming from a different direction. An additional gun, in a separate emplacement, then. Still, there was barely a second of it firing before a second explosion silenced that gun emplacement as well. How interesting. This sounded like an attempt at a double trap. Just what had we done to piss someone off? Really, there was no telling. We did kill a lot of people, especially if they were gang members and in the vicinity of any of our calls, much less responsible for client injuries.
  
  We still didn't move, and I could tell that Mercy was talking on the tacnet with the new arrivals. About five minutes later, our ground-based backup arrived in four armoured scout cars. Modern scout cars had shifted a lot over time, and today they were mostly indistinguishable from wheeled armoured personnel carriers but usually featured a small calibre autocannon and micromissile launcher instead of a machine gun, similar to wheeled infantry fighting vehicles.
  
  One of the cars drove right up to us and opened the back ramp, and Mercy nodded at all of us, and we ran into the vehicle with a quickness. The ramp automatically closed back up, and the vehicle started driving away before I had even secured myself into one of the seats.
  
  Back at the base, we finally were conducting an after-action report now that the pilots had returned with their damaged AV. Mechanics had fixed it on the ground there on the interstate in record time, as it didn't do anything good for our PR for people to see one of our AVs with a mechanical in front of god and everyone.
  
  Mercy began, "So, the ground team found two destroyed, remote-controlled, fifty-calibre Dushkas. They were apparently connected to net-controlled servo motors. We have our runners working on it, but this explains why they weren't taking more advantage of the situation."
  
  I raised an eyebrow. That gave me an idea, actually. I still had the Dragoon borg in my storage, halfway disassembled. It was a good source of parts, but I didn't think I could ever get it working again. However, the weapon system was one of the things that were in perfect condition, as far as I could tell. It was equipped with a shortened version of a popular 23mm Soviet rotary cannon that they sold far and wide on the export market.
  
  I wondered at the valuation Alt-Dad had put on the borg because that was an expensive gun just in itself and could easily be removed from the borg by anyone with some tools. It was too big for any person that wasn't borged as fuck to use, and I'd have to ask Wakako to get the ammunition, though, as I didn't have any way to do so that wouldn't paint a huge target on my back in the event we had to use it.
  
  Could Kiwi and I rig a quick and dirty firing platform and have her control it for our exfiltration? We had already planted a number of explosives along our route. The second team was made up of Tyger Claws, which Wakako was providing. Most Tyger Claws weren't what I would call elite combatants, but some definitely were, and she was making up for the rest with numbers. They would be waiting in ambush at an abandoned building that was about four kilometres from Konpeki Plaza.
  
  The idea was that this location was a very good ambush location, but since any theoretic pursuers wouldn't know our precise route leaving Konpeki Plaza that they would only be able to rush to this location after a few kilometres made it clear we would be driving by it.
  
  We would then ambush the ambushers and then proceed to meet Wakako to finalise the deal, with me and her splitting up the loot between ourselves at that point.
  
  It was something to think about.
  
  I was putatively driving back home, but in truth, I was driving on the loop 210 highway that circled downtown for fun. Although Night City was a city that never slept, there were definitely times when traffic was bearable or even non-existent, and we had recently shifted to a 0300-0300 schedule at work, which I hated, but it had the advantage of allowing me to let loose on the highway with the speedo currently inching above two hundred kilometres an hour.
  
  It had taken a surprisingly long amount of time, a couple of weeks, to completely refit my Type-66. In addition to removing all of the previous paints and doing a full respray, they also sold me on a number of physical cosmetic changes, adjusting a faring here and there to make it completely indistinguishable from the previous vehicle. It still looked like a Quadra, of course, but now it was more in line with what a traditional Nomad vehicle looked like, except in purple, which used to be one of my favourite colours once upon a time. This was instead of the obviously Wraith-inspired panelling that it used to have.
  
  Honestly, until the mechanic pointed out the differences using a number of images, I had no idea there were different "styles" of customised vehicles, as they both looked like Nomad cars to my untrained eyes. Still, I took the mechanic at his word. The Nomads did sell their cars sometimes, costly and gas-guzzling varieties like my Type-66, but Wraiths never did.
  
  I hadn't been found out yet, but the mechanic insisted it would only be a matter of time before some Wraith that was in town for some reason noticed me driving, and then the best I could hope for was them following me and stealing or torching the car when I went into a cafe for lunch.
  
  As I downshifted a little bit at a curve before placing my foot firmly on the floor as the loop straightened out, I hummed tunelessly. Listening to Wakako's voice message again, I passed three cars in a flash.
  
  "Taylor, Biotechnica is very interested. I'm in the process of negotiating a final price now, but we should be good to go within ten days. He's already agreed on an exchange in Konpeki Plaza like you wanted, although he grumbled a little bit about it. He is insisting on a technical expert being present on our side, and I have tried to give him the impression I have hired a chemist. I'll make sure we have at least three or four-day notice before the meeting is scheduled," she said and paused, "Let's plan on an early lunch tomorrow to discuss things more in detail."
  
  That last bit amused me. She had made a lot more time for me when it became more and more clear that she was likely to make many hundreds of thousands of dollars off of me. Plus, I had already reviewed the accounting for the enterprise, and she charged every working lunch to the venture, which I couldn't really complain about, but I found amusing. I supposed one didn't get to Wakako's station in life without being thorough with details.
  
  I let off the accelerator as I topped out the speed at over two hundred and sixty kilometres an hour, with the engine closing at seven thousand revolutions per minute at ninth gear. I let the machine coast, slowly losing speed. I was asking to be pulled over going as fast as I was, Corpo or no Corpo.
  
  I certainly wouldn't survive a traffic collision at this speed. My brain had gotten a lot better at doing quick calculations due to offloading them onto my cyberdeck. Two hundred and sixty kilometres an hour was a little over seventy-two meters per second. Deceleration was a simple formula of end velocity minus starting velocity over time, and if I assumed a very, very conservative time of 0.06 seconds to decelerate in a full-on crash, that gave an effective deceleration of over a thousand meters per second squared, which was the equivalent of over one hundred Gs on the body which wasn't survivable even with my augmentations, and that was before all the associated trauma like being crushed.
  
  The weakness, as it usually was, was my brain. A body could be engineered to survive such decelerations, and in fact, my bones might not break even now. But without a very sophisticated shock-absorbing life support pod, of which my skull definitely was not, my brain would still be turned into mush. A borg could survive that, but anybody with their actual brain in their skull couldn't without some sort of high-tech gravity-manipulation-based inertial compensation helmet, the kind that hot-shot Corpo astro-pilots wore in combat spacecraft.
  
  And that was assuming such things weren't just bullshit to begin with, as the only time I had seen them had been on films and entertainment BDs.
  
  It took me five kilometres of coasting to slow down to a reasonable enough speed to take the next exit at a safe speed, and I winced a bit when I glanced at the fuel gauge. I had used quite a lot of fuel, but that wasn't all that surprising.
  
  I pulled into the first filling station I saw with a deep sigh at the cost.
  
  Our working lunch didn't take that much time, and towards the end, I asked her about the high-explosive armour-piercing shells I wanted her to source, which surprised her.
  
  "What in the world do you have that would fire those?" she asked, half-amused but mostly curious.
  
  I said, "It's a six-barreled Soviet rotary autocannon, an export model. I thought I could build a simple control mechanism and turn it into a remote-control turret that Kiwi could operate. We'd leave it in the same building the Claws will be watching out from. One of the biggest what-ifs is if they bring armoured vehicles. I don't think they have any actual military vehicles in town, but they definitely have a bunch of bullet-resistant trucks and cars. This would put paid to that threat."
  
  She blinked at me for a couple of moments before shaking her head, "You know, Taylor. You think too much. Why would you build a remote-controlled turret? There are dozens of such models commercially available that support pretty much any weapons system. Tell you what, I will acquire one, as well as a goodly amount of shells. In exchange, you let me buy this gun after the mission. I can both by tomorrow, and my team will set it up at the primary ambush site."
  
  Ah. Yes, that probably made more sense. The Trauma Team after-action report said that it was likely Maelstrom that had attacked us, and I just assumed that they had built the turrets from scratch as that was something that they tended to do, but I still occasionally forgot what world I was in. Of course, there were dozens of models of remote-controlled or autonomous turrets that you could buy in this world. Why would I have expected there wouldn't have been?
  
  I kept my mouth closed for a moment because I was honestly expecting to leave the turret after the fight if we did need to use it. I intended it to be a one-use, disposable device. But if she could cart it off again, selling it to her would be fine. Ideal, even. Weapons in Night City were like sand on a beach, very easy to find. But large rotary canons that fired explosive shells and would be more at home mounted on a combat aircraft were a little more difficult to get.
  
  Again, I wondered why Alt-Danny considered the hulk of the Dragoon valueless. Irreparable, I agreed with. Perhaps he didn't want to part it out for sentimental reasons. It made me wonder who was piloting the device before, presumably, Alt-Danny killed it.
  
  I got a sly expression on my face, which Wakako instantly mirrored, "Let's talk price, then." I wouldn't walk away without at least a quarter of its MSRP!
  
  It was finally the day, or rather the day before the day. I was gathering all of what I would need, some of which I would take into the hotel with us and the rest, what could be considered dangerous, would have to be in their lower-security parking garage, along with our vehicle. We weren't using Ruslan's van this time, but a stolen one.
  
  I was a little concerned about that, but he reassured me that he knew precisely which vehicles wouldn't be missed for several days. Nobody would be reporting it stolen until we were well and truly done with it, which I would just have to accept on faith. They were the experts on this sort of thing.
  
  However, it was Ruslan's van that pulled up to pick me up. I guessed he had the stolen van stashed somewhere so that it wouldn't be able to be associated with any of the buildings we lived in, just in case the authorities later attempted to backtrack the vehicle through the city's camera and traffic system.
  
  I waved at them; it looked like it was all of them picking me up. I got into the passenger side door. Once I had closed the door, I triggered my techhair to change from what was indistinguishable from my standard to a straight, glossy blonde, lengthening by over twenty centimetres in the process, "'Ello, Rus, Kiwi, Jean. Are you lot ready to get a wiggle on and get this bleedin' thing started, eh?"
  
  They looked at me like I had grown a second head, "Don't yer worry, I jus' bought a British accent skillchip. I figgered it'd be one more bleedin' layer in me attempt to disguise meself. Dead cheap, it was, too."
  
  Kiwi started laughing at me, having to quickly press the auto-drive button because she was closing her eyes in her mirth. This caused the other two to start laughing at me, too. What? What was the problem?
  
  Finally, Kiwi said, "Uh, Taylor... you may want to check the settings. It sounds a little low-class, which is the opposite impression of what you were trying to go for."
  
  I frowned. Certainly, the accent sounded a bit different from my favourite characters on Downton Abbey, like Mary Crawley, but was it really so different? It wasn't like I was an expert in British dialects. I paused for a moment to pull up the settings for the skillchip, my mouth coming to a fine line when I realised it was set on "Cockney Whore." This had better not be the only option.
  
  I switched it to "Derry" for a moment and said, "Oi switched it ta da Derry, Oi wonder how dis sounds. Jaysus, dis is awful, jist awful." Everybody cracked up again. I shook my head and started doing quick net searches for each of the options. Apparently, Derry was an Irish accent. Was that even considered British? I thought the Irish people fought a few wars to settle that question in this world. These days, after the resumption of the Irish monarchy, His Royal Navy was as likely to sink refugee boats coming from England as from anywhere else.
  
  I finally found a candidate in what was labelled "Eton public school (RP)." Net searches revealed that contrary to what I would first think, a "public school" was really a very, very exclusive private school. That didn't make any sense to me at all and seemed to be entirely backward.
  
  Still, I coughed briefly before stating, "Alright, I think I've got the correct one set. This is what they call a public school accent, I suppose." I blinked and grinned. Oh, I sounded just like the people from Downton Abbey now!
  
  Kiwi chuckled, "Yes, that sounds a lot better."
  
  Jean still laughed at me, but I pointed a finger straight at him. He had his techhair set in a ridiculous pompadour hairstyle and must have added a huge if neatly trimmed, silly beard that would look more at home in Afghanistan than here. He must have made these changes during the biosculpt treatment, and the combination was insane, but he definitely wouldn't be easily associated with his previous appearance, I supposed, "You're one to laugh! You look absolutely ridiculous!"
  
  Kiwi and Ruslan started chuckling, and Jean ran a hand through his neatly trimmed dark black beard, "I think I look really distinguished."
  
  He looked really... something. But it wasn't distinguished. Still, at least they were all wearing the semi-nice clothes I had demanded they get. If we were going to be spending one day and night in a high-end hotel, then we didn't need to stick out more than we had to. I intended to eat dinner at the restaurant downstairs at the hotel to give a chance for people to hear my posh accent and see my blonde hair. Also, the mask I would wear in the deal would not completely cover my hair, so it would be theoretically possible for investigators to correlate my identity to the guest staying the previous evening.
  
  I did not think that Konpeki Plaza would reveal my identity, as they had a reputation, so this would hopefully send any Biotechnica investigators down a wild goose chase for a blonde-haired British girl that didn't exist. Still, I went ahead and activated my Kiroshi's camera dazzler system right now, in advance. It wasn't a perfect system, and I didn't have any clue how it worked, actually, but it was very effective in all the tests I had put it through.
  
  Hopefully, none of this would be necessary, and everything would go smoothly and simply, but if not, I had a plan, a backup plan and an ace in the hole, just like Alt-Danny recommended. Hopefully, I wouldn't need to use the latter, which I had made tentative plans with Wakako for, as it would seriously impact my life going forward.
  
  After everyone got done laughing at each other, we were more or less quiet for the ride over to where the other vehicle was stashed. We switched over to a similar van quickly, but this time Ruslan drove. It was hard to identify either Ruslan or Jean as anything other than "muscle" or "hired help." Kiwi was playing the role of a hired professional, so it would be weird for her to drive us to the hotel, even if she preferred to be the driver in our ops most of the time.
  
  She could really multitask, watching numerous feeds from cameras and drones while simultaneously either driving herself manually or minding the car's auto-drive system; this generally left the two boys free to fire from the moving vehicle if necessary, and it was sometimes awe-inspiring to watch.
  
  This stolen van had tons of weapons, which would be permitted inside the hotel's parking garage but definitely not inside the building itself. We wouldn't be able to take so much as a popgun inside.
  
  The drive to the hotel was uneventful, if a little long. We weren't commented on, aside from getting a parking slip from a man sitting in a guard shack next to the entrance to the parking building. I had considered having them drop me off next to the entrance for verisimilitude's sake but decided us all entering the hotel at once would be better.
  
  We walked together into an antechamber, nodding slightly at a doorman that said, "Welcome to the Azure Plaza."
  
  The antechamber was slick as hell and looked like a place where you could briefly wait with an associate, but my keen eyes identified it as a security chokepoint despite all the gilding. There were men as big and strong looking as Jean and Ruslan standing next to a non-invasive scanning system of some kind. It was similar to the ones used in the Trauma Team tower, except gilded with real oak panelling.
  
  Ruslan and Jean went in first, and they both tripped the security detection system. Two of the large concierge slash security personnel stopped them. "Sirs, you will have to step this way so that we can make safe your integrated weapons systems."
  
  I had been expecting that and warned them both to expect something of the sort. One of the other "concierge personnel" smiled briefly at us and said, "It should be just a moment, ma'am." I gave him a cursory glance and a short nod, barely acknowledging his presence. I was in character, you see.
  
  I noticed that the bracelets they put on Ruslan and Jean were both heavier-duty as well as a little more stylish. Still, they were thin enough that they could be hidden inside the long sleeves of their shirts well enough.
  
  Kiwi walked right on through without any comment, but when it was my turn, I got the red light again. The security guard said, "Ma'am if you would mind stepping over here for a moment to make safe your internal weapons." It was pretty much the exact same thing I had overheard them tell the boys.
  
  I didn't notice what they had done, so I was pleasantly surprised when another man brought out a tray of bracelets sized to fit my more delicate arms. The security man asked, "Please select the one that is most pleasing to your aesthetic, madam."
  
  I glanced down at them and picked one that looked like a silver charm bracelet, but I was sure it was made of something much more indestructible than that, as I was strong enough to break silver myself. I didn't touch it; I merely pointed to it and got a nod. I held my bare arm out and allowed them to affix the device to my wrist, allowing a gentle sigh at the indignity of it all.
  
  "Thank you, ma'am. You can proceed," the security guy said politely, so I joined the rest, and we walked together to the front desk to check-in. The girl behind the desk surprised me. She wasn't quite a full-body replacement, but I judged that she had more cybernetics than me and Ruslan put together.
  
  She bowed rather prettily, giving us all a glimpse of her sizable and cybernetic décolletage while saying, " Yōkoso . Greetings, and be welcomed to the Azure Plaza."
  
  I returned the bow on reflex, although it was more of me inclining my head. Plus, it helped me to look down her blouse to identify which total skin replacement she had installed. It was an Arasaka model judging from my inspection at various zoom levels, which probably shouldn't have surprised me. Also, it wouldn't do to bow the same as the hotel's hired help, after all, if I wanted to pretend I was high class. I was trying to give the impression that I was at least a middle manager somewhere. Still, I was polite, "Thank you. We're checking in, one suite for one night," I told her while sending to her system my identification through peer-to-peer wireless transfer.
  
  Although I had intended to rent two separate rooms, it was actually cheaper to rent a nicer suite that had two bedrooms but a shared living area. Plus, it was more in keeping with the illusion I was trying to portray, which was that they were my security.
  
  The pretty girl rose up again and nodded, "Of course, ma'am. It also looks like you have the Sakura room booked for tomorrow from thirteen hundred to seventeen hundred hours; is that right?"
  
  I nodded, "Correct."
  
  She smiled and said, "Everything looks to be in order, ma'am. Please enjoy your stay at Azure Plaza." With that, she sent a digital file which turned out to be the unlocking key for our suite, which I forwarded to Kiwi and the boys. It looked like we were staying on the fifty-fifth floor. Not too shabby, when you considered the top twenty floors weren't hotel accommodations so much as either apartments on long-term lease or penthouse-style rooms that you needed to be a billionaire to even be allowed to rent.
  
  We walked past a trendy-looking bar and restaurant that I would likely patronise later that evening and boarded the elevator. The elevator would only allow us to go to our own floor, which was interesting.
  
  Our suite was down a hallway at the end, and I triggered the door with the digital key, which opened and allowed us entry. The room was... large, quite larger than I thought, and this was just the living area. The door closed behind us, and I said, in a bored-sounding rich girl's voice, "Please non-destructively disable all of the cameras and listening devices."
  
  Jean already had his mouth opened, probably to comment on the swankiness of the room shut his mouth when he heard I was still talking in character. Kiwi nodded silently and got to work.
  
  Ruslan and Jean silently explored all of the rooms in the suite, looking as though they were searching for threats, but I felt it was more likely they just wanted to see how nice the digs were. A couple of minutes later, Kiwi returned and said, "Got all of them. I'll be able to reconnect them all no problem tomorrow, so we don't have to lose the security deposit."
  
  Wakako and I both appreciated that very much, I thought. I nodded at her and said, "Thanks." Then Ruslan and Jean returned from their explorations, and I said, "Alright, it's eleven hundred. We don't have anything to do until fourteen hundred tomorrow, so we're all on our own until then. Can do whatever you want inside the hotel. You're each given a seven hundred and fifty eddie budget, so you don't have to look poor. Anything above that and its on you and will be deducted from your pay."
  
  They both grinned; even Kiwi smiled a little. Although we were in a resort where prices were inflated, seven hundred and fifty dollars a piece was enough to eat and probably hit the BD parlour or some other amusements. I was going to get a massage myself. When I mentioned that, Jean grinned, "Oh, that sounds like a good idea."
  
  I frowned, immediately realising what he was thinking, "Jean, here, massages are just massages. If you want companionship of some carnal variety, that is a separate service. Don't embarrass us by assuming all of the masseuses are prostitutes."
  
  Although I was pretty sure that was an extra service that you could ask for when you got a massage, I imagine it shifted the masseuse to one that was also a sex worker. Jean had the decency to look a little abashed as he rubbed the back of his neck, "Ah, yeah, a course, mon."
  
  Ruslan just grinned at him and then turned to me, "So, when should we meet back here to do the preliminaries?"
  
  I thought about that. We had to meet the Biotechnica people at two in the afternoon, which meant we should be in the Sakura room by one. In the worst case, and they got drunk or didn't sleep enough tonight, it would take me a little time to detoxify them. I had some stimulants on hand for the latter contingency. I nodded, "No later than eleven thirty. We'll plan to be in position at the Sakura conference room at thirteen hundred."
  
  Everyone nodded. I grabbed the small luggage I had brought with me and had Jean carry, and Kiwi did the same. We each went into our separate bedrooms.
  
  Kiwi, with no shame at all, stripped naked with me gaping at her. She had a number of unusual body art as well as two obvious Midnight Lady accessories. She laughed at me as she saw my expression and then said amusedly, "You know, you're pretty old-fashioned." She fished out a set of silk pyjamas and, with that, jumped into one of the two beds, disappearing under the covers and sheets.
  
  "These got to be Egyptian cotton sheets," she commented, muffled from being under the sheets and the duvet.
  
  I just chuckled and grabbed my pyjamas as well. However, I intended to take a long bubble bath first. I had been on a shower-only lifestyle since I arrived in this world. A long, luxurious hot bubble bath while reading a book sounded divine.
  
  After William awoke at zero five hundred, exactly, he reviewed some of the non-urgent correspondence that he had received in the three hours that he was down for a sleep cycle. While it was technically possible for him to go without sleep for weeks, it was universally agreed that at least a small sleep cycle every night was beneficial for, well, everyone.
  
  Although he had never really had the same issues with cyberpsychosis as the average man did, it wasn't entirely because he was "built different." He also followed all the directions of his very expensive doctors, as well.
  
  The report he was reading was from the team he had built in Night City to look after Annette's daughter. They had reported several weeks ago that Taylor was working with a Yakuza fixer, who had been in contact with so many people that it was difficult to say precisely who was related to Taylor's business.
  
  The old Japanese witch did not speak or send a message that wasn't highly encrypted. Although the family had giant quantum computing supercomputer clusters for signals intelligence reasons, not only was the encryption somewhat quantum-resistant, but he didn't really have the justification for trying to snoop in depth on her. The costs were not inconsequential, considering the many other uses the family had for this limited resource.
  
  Taylor was almost as paranoid, which privately made him feel good about Annette's girl, but he worked along the periphery, using the metadata from both parties' communications, if not the actual content, to build a fairly good idea of what was going on.
  
  He got confirmation not too long after that Biotechnica's Night City office activity increased. Although the family didn't have any contacts inside the Italian Megacorporation as a whole, they did have the usual intelligence assets in lower-level positions. Biotechnica Night City was expecting something that the upper tier of management was very interested in.
  
  From there, his team put Taylor on twenty-four-seven surveillance. The message he was reading now suggested that the exchange was going to happen imminently, as they had trailed her to the local Konpeki Plaza. That was an ideal place to make an exchange with someone you didn't trust, as Arasaka would ensure no violence would happen on their premises.
  
  He put his thinking cap on and sent a message back. The team captain was to send one team member on an overnight stay at the resort, and his team should expect the exchange to happen sometime tomorrow or perhaps the next day. They would know when they saw a Biotechnica convoy head towards Konpeki.
  
  He also took a moment to reconfirm their standard orders per his principal's instruction. They were to observe the exchange as much as possible and only intervene if it seemed like Annette's daughter was in immediate danger of death. If all they were going to do was kidnap her, then they should not intervene.
  
  Privately he disagreed with these orders, but he always had a soft spot for Annette.
  
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  will go wrong
  AN: I admit to stealing the pessimist joke from The Dresden Files. :P
  
  When I sat down alone for dinner, I had already done some research on the United Kingdom while in the bath, in between reading a fantasy novel, so when I was given a menu which I had already reviewed on their net site, I already had a few ideas of some of the dishes I could order which would be suitably English.
  
  However, the more I read about cuisine in England, the more I was sure that most of the upper crust probably ate French, Italian or international cuisine instead, as most of the results I got were for things that did not seem appetising at all or were very peasanty, although, in the modern day, things like meat pies were considered a lot more high-class, depending on the type of protein that was used. That said, while soaking in the tub and reviewing the menu for the restaurant downstairs, I saw something on the menu that I thought might suit me.
  
  Speaking of my tub, I had only gotten out of it when all my toes became unreasonably pruney. That said, I already had an idea to fix that issue later, so the next time I had the chance for this luxury, I could soak as much as I wanted. Pruney fingers weren't, actually, a result of water being absorbed into the skin as most people thought but a function of the sympathetic nervous system ordering your blood vessels to constrict. The reason for this evolutionary adaptation was debated, and even I did not precisely know for sure, but I felt that it might be to increase the finger's gripping friction while in the water, lest a useful tool or weapon slipped out of your hand.
  
  Still, it was simple to treat either pharmacologically or in other ways, such as intercepting or blocking the signals from the brain and spinal cord. I hadn't yet finalised a design for my first internal pharmacopoeia, in fact, it was barely at the stage of an idea or back-of-napkin sketch, but I already knew that a supply of vasodilators would be included in the medications inside.
  
  There were already similar implants in the world, but they loaded the chemicals into them as a consumable. I wanted something that would generate the chemicals, either on demand or to keep a supply stocked. So while I was calling it an implant, my ideas were really on the scope of a complicated, artificial organ.
  
  Shaking my head from the digression, I glanced across the bar to the tender who was waiting for me to order. He was smiling and tapping his fingers in slow motion on the bar top, waiting for me. That was one nice thing about living in slow motion; I had more time to daydream without looking like an idiot.
  
  I had decided to sit at the bar for dinner, as well, because the main reason I was there was to be seen. Coughing gently into my hand, I said, "I'll take the Beef Wellington, rare, and the scalloped potatoes with a Cirrus cola," I said, smiling, and continued, trying to sound cool, "Also, two fingers of the fifteen-year Glenfiddich. Neat, just pour it into a glass."
  
  I had only drunk alcohol on a couple of occasions, and I didn't really like it. I especially didn't think it was worth a hundred eurodollars for a small glass of it, so I didn't try to order any fancy cocktail because I figured it would just ruin the taste of the other parts of the drink. It was better to think of it as medicine or something, so I asked for it by itself. I had looked up the terminology, and "neat" referred to liquor just by itself, without even ice.
  
  Glenfiddich wasn't a super high-tier brand of whisky, but it was in the mid to upper range these days, especially in the NUSA as an imported product given the state of the global logistics supply chain, and it was still made the same way it always had been, at least if you believed their PR materials.
  
  The bartender brought me my drinks immediately, sliding over a tall glass of cola and an empty lowball glass. He poured what I considered to be about fifty ccs of the amber liquid into the glass and placed it in front of me. I inclined my head and gave him a quiet thank you before taking a sip of the nasty stuff. I had already schooled my face to be expressionless.
  
  It was gross, like a burning alcohol taste combined with an oaky, caramel-type flavour that was, in my opinion, a terrible combination. However, my face hid my displeasure, but it was all I could do to avoid spitting it back into the glass. A man's voice surprised me, and I glanced at him in mid-sentence, "It's nice to see someone, especially a young lass like yourself, not ruin good whisky by contaminating it with ice, much less..." he paused to add a dramatic shudder, "... try to make a cocktail out of it."
  
  The man looked like he was in his early forties, although my trained eyes zoomed in on several tell-tale signs of life-extension therapies, so I guessed he was maybe half again that. He had a course of treatment that was strictly designed to extend his life and wasn't maximised for looking as young as possible. His hair, including a full, well-trimmed beard, had gone to salt and pepper, and my professional gaze identified that the dermis on one of his hands appeared a lot newer than the other, so I suspected he had his hand regrown as it didn't seem to be a cybernetic replacement.
  
  That told me he had money, but the fact that he had gotten the treatment within the last twenty years told me he hadn't always had it, which was a little unusual but not unheard of. Those with real wealth would be treated with genetic therapies when they were in vitro and throughout childhood. Genetic therapies of all kinds were usually much more expensive than biosculpt. However, these days they were somewhat blurring along the edges as some biosculpt treatments included a genetic factor.
  
  My nanosurgeons, for example, included a small genetic change that prevented my body from rejecting the artificial organ that produced the organic nanomachines. The distinction was that genetic therapies usually had to be tailored to the person being treated. When a genetic treatment became so well understood that an average doctor of middling skills could perform it, then these types of treatments filtered their way into the realm of biosculpt unless, like life extension, they were kept artificially scarce for economic or political reasons.
  
  In almost no case, however, would any genetic therapy or biosculpt treatment be designed to alter the genome of your gametes, though. Not only did that make breeding complicated, but more importantly, it made sure the Corporations that offered these services could sell the same services to your children. There was no money to be made in Eugenics unless each subsequent generation had to pay, too, after all.
  
  Personally, I thought that was sad. Despite how dangerous the world was, it wasn't on the same level of danger that could cause evolutionary pressure. So, it would be nice if the human organism, which had been lifted out of the dreary world of natural selection through our ingenuity, could be improved instead by that same artifice.
  
  The way he spoke immediately brought to mind a famous Scottish actor, and I smiled, "Well, I am not a total barbarian, despite what my mum used to say." I raised a single eyebrow, which was a lot harder an expression to practice than one might think, and asked, "You sound a bit far from home."
  
  He chortled and raised a thick mug of beer and said, "Aye. My name's Richard Stewart; I'm a sales executive for British Aerospace, in town to hawk the wares. You sound like you'd be more at home in a cold and rainy place, too."
  
  I blinked once. I still got a lot of news based on Alt-Taylor and Alt-Danny's interests, so I had, by chance, heard that BAE was trying to sell some surplus surveillance drone systems to the Night City government. That the city would even entertain not buying the equivalent Militech product was a shock to the very Militech-focused publication. I tried to parse the last part of what he said while he waited in slow motion and finally considered that he was, as I suspected, referring to England, which, even today, was a very rainy and cloudy place.
  
  I grinned. I found the fact that everyone always included what Corp they worked for amusing. I obviously couldn't reciprocate, but I thought I could tease the older man a little with my reply, "You're quite right. Forgive my manners for not introducing myself sooner; I am Emma Barnes, a member of no particular organisation, and I'm in town for some personal business. Don't tell me you boys are still trying to off-load those Demon Eyes, eh?"
  
  The Demon Eye surveillance system was originally a potent, fully-integrated autonomous military surveillance drone system used to gather real-time intelligence in an entire local theatre of operations. It was one of the first such products released after the world mostly recovered from the DataKrash in the early '40s, so it was in almost all ways inferior to products that had been utilised in the 2020s, which had been lost or suborned by the wild AIs. So much technology had been lost in that incident that we still hadn't recovered from it.
  
  Still, it was a system that was getting a bit long in the tooth today for a front-line European nation, and trying to get some money out of it by selling it for police use was not surprising, especially to what they probably considered to be a second-rate city-state like Night City.
  
  His eyes widened for some reason, and I saw his eyes briefly dart to the obviously not solely decorative charm bracelet on my left arm, then to the barely visible cyberdeck at the base of my skull, and finally a little lower to see the beginnings of my Kerenzikov that were visible in the dress I was wearing. He chuckled a bit, a sly look now on his face, "Maybe. I could get you a good price if you're interested."
  
  "Not me, no. But I wouldn't be surprised if the local city government was very interested in such a system," I said absently, thinking about how an integrated surveillance system like that could improve NCPD response times, which were dreadful for even very violent crimes-a year of working on a ground ambulance made it clear that something had to give. The Demon Eye had a simple machine learning algorithm that categorised possible combatants, including a confidence level of impending violence and could be used to potentially stop some types of crimes before they happened.
  
  That caused him to grin, and he said, "Really? That's very interesting." He took a large swig of beer and watched as the bartender brought out my plate, raising an eyebrow, asking, "Do you suppose that's a real filet?"
  
  I glanced at him sideways as I took in the plate. It smelled really good, "If by real you mean it comes from a real cow, then definitely not." The price wasn't high enough for it to be real, that way, at least. "But it's definitely some kind of vat-grown beef, so in that sense, it is real beef, if not really from a cow. I personally cannot taste the difference, and I doubt anyone who says they can."
  
  I didn't think that industrialised animal husbandry should continue now that we could cheaply grow meat without the intrinsic suffering of that industry when it was done on an industrial scale, but that wasn't something I would comment on because it would make me seem very odd. Almost nobody cared about things like animal rights here.
  
  "I always wondered how they make that stuff," he said absently, finishing his mug. The tender walked over and asked him if he'd like another, and he shook his head, "No, my good man. I think I'll be heading back up shortly."
  
  I glanced at him while cutting a portion and said, "It's the same technology that they used to regrow your hand, but on an industrial scale."
  
  He glanced down at his hand and frowned, rubbing his right wrist with his left hand, "That kind of makes it sound very unappetising. It's no wonder they don't really include that in the marketing material." He chuckled and stood up, "Well, I better go. I really appreciate your intelligence. Thank you, Miss Barnes . Rule Britannia, and all that."
  
  Intelligence? What was he talking about? I raised an eyebrow as I watched him walk away, humming the melody to Land of Hope and Glory.
  
  Whatever, I shifted focus back to my meal. It looked really delicious.
  
  Mr Stewart had called him and all three of the others to an emergency meeting at his suite, which was kind of impacting his nightlife. He had a date planned tonight with a girl of loose morals.
  
  He arrived at his boss' suite, thankfully not the last to get there, and they waited a few more minutes for everyone to arrive. Once everyone was there, the tall Scottish man grinned and said, "Lads, ladies. I meet someone very interesting downstairs at the bar."
  
  He made a gesture, and a still image of a side profile of a pretty young blonde woman sitting at a bar was projected on the room's SmartWall. She had blonde hair that reached her shoulders and was wearing a black dress, although it wasn't quite a little black dress, as it seemed more modest than that with a hemline that went close to her knees, and from what he could tell from this angle, a conservative chest that showed hardly any skin.
  
  The image was obviously captured from Mr Stewart's optics. He frowned but kept his mouth shut. One of the others didn't and asked, "She seems a bit young for you, boss, but congrats on catching a classy bird like her, eh?"
  
  "Go screw yourself, Wilson. She is younger than my daughter," grumbled Mr Stewart. The younger executive wisely kept his mouth shut as that fact rarely stopped anybody when they got to Mr Stewart's level. He continued, "She introduced herself as Emma Barnes, a member of no particular organisation ." He emphasised the last three words a little.
  
  No particular organisation? Wait... NPO? The younger executive blinked and opened his mouth for the first time, "Wait, do you mean..." He tapped his right index finger on the side of the nose twice.
  
  The National Photography Office might have had an unassuming name, but it had a storied reputation of over a hundred and fifty years over a number of different names, from the Directorate of Military Intelligence to later the Secret Intelligence Service to the now more ambiguous National Photography Office. The name was almost a joke, as in the past fifteen years, Britain claimed not to have any foreign intelligence agency. Nobody believed that for a second, not even the Liberal party proles back home.
  
  His boss grinned at him, "Precisely, and she fits the mould perfectly. Young, public school, highly augmented and with eyes that say she could as easily kill you as look at you. She also casually dropped information about me that I thought I had kept secret." The older man rubbed his wrist with his other hand, "I had been asking back home for a little help sealing this deal, and guess what she told me? The Night City government is very interested in the old Demon Eyes."
  
  The younger executive started looking a little excited, too, now. Although that sounded like not a lot of intelligence, it was exactly what they needed right now and invaluable. Of course, you couldn't expect a government spook to share much more than that, but knowing that their potential client really did want to make a deal was the difference between a twenty and ten per cent profit margin, and that would quickly add up over the period of the contract, with all its support and maintenance elements. They might be looking at a serious bonus this time!
  
  "It would be a coup if we could seal this deal right in Militech's backyard," the younger man said exuberantly.
  
  The next morning we all had breakfast, and although Ruslan and Jean looked slightly hungover, it wasn't to the point where I felt I needed to intervene, although I made sure they hydrated themselves well during the meal.
  
  After that, we went over the game plan one more time. I told them what we were trading and how much I was expecting to get, which caused them to grin before arriving at the conference room a little early. Although we were only renting it starting at thirteen hundred, they let us in about fifteen minutes early. We were all wearing very obvious mercenary-style clothing, albeit of a better quality than they normally wore. I sat at the end of one table, with Ruslan and Jean standing to either side of me, acting like obvious security in their cheap suits and Kiwi sitting to my side.
  
  As I settled into my chair to wait, I casually used the hotel's intranet to check out of our room. Frowning, I noticed that the boys had each run up a charge of over three thousand Eurodollars. Well, I intentionally didn't look at the itemised receipt and just paid it. I would deduct most of that from their final pay, though it gave me an odd feeling that I couldn't identify.
  
  Shrugging it off, I pulled out my mask from the bag I was carrying. I was wearing the same conservative dress that I had worn last night, but for the mask, I had selected something unusual for this world.
  
  I was tempted to just grab a random Noh or shinobi mask that were all around Japantown, but instead, I had printed a white plague doctor's mask, which was not in the cultural vernacular at all, to the point that I had to design it myself on my CAD system. I was sure such a mask was in the histories, but unlike Earth Bet or Earth Aleph, it must have been only known to scholars here rather than basically everyone. It was white because the Biotechnica people were expecting to meet "Miss White" at this exchange.
  
  "Woah, that looks weird, Miss White," Ruslan said as he took in my mask.
  
  I nodded at him, "Thank you, Mr Orange." That caused him to scowl, as he wanted to be Mr Black, but I specifically had selected orange. Also, Jean had just stared at him and said that if anyone was going to be Mr Black, it was him, as he was at least actually black. Kiwi didn't like her name, Miss Pink, either, but she should have thought of that before she decided to grow up so boingy and feminine.
  
  The Biotechnica contingent arrived on time, exactly. They had five people, which was one more person than was agreed upon, but I decided not to mention it. I wanted to seal the deal and didn't want to be confrontational from the start.
  
  There were two obvious security guys who looked as big as Rus and Jean were, along with one guy that I was tentatively identifying as a technical expert, along with one man and woman that looked like managers or minders. I supposed that was acceptable; there could have been any number of reasons they needed five people instead of the four they agreed upon. It wasn't enough to make a big deal out of. One of the security guys carried a large nylon duffle bag, which was promising.
  
  The male manager sat at my opposite at the other end of the table, with his security guys behind him and the other two sitting on either side of him. He nodded at me, "I take it you are Miss White, then?" He raised an eyebrow at the odd white mask I was wearing.
  
  "Yes, Wakako has hired me as a subject matter expert in this exchange, but I'd prefer not to be identified and apologise for the discourtesy," I said in my fancy accent.
  
  He inclined his head, "That's acceptable. We have the agreed-upon sum, four point one million. But only one half is in cash; the other half is in irrevocable digital currency."
  
  I raised an eyebrow behind my mask. That wasn't the plan either, so I said mildly, "That isn't as agreed."
  
  "Yes, we apologise about that. We had some issues arranging for so much untraceable cash on short notice," he simpered, spreading his hands as if to say, 'What can you do?'
  
  I didn't believe that for a moment. Digital eurodollars were irrevocable, but they were also traceable. If I started spending these dollars, they could track who I was sending them to. Wakako could launder the money for me, giving me either untraceable digital currency or cash, but that would be another fee-I believed she charged ten per cent for this service, so this would end up costing me in real terms close to a hundred and seventy thousand dollars. That was more money than I had ever had.
  
  Things weren't looking good for this transaction, but this was a small enough setback that it still made much more economic sense to go through with it than to back out now, and the Biotechnica man, who was not Wakako's contact, likely knew that. How annoying.
  
  I stayed silent long enough to make him know I was considering departing or possibly consulting with Wakako digitally, staying still and staring at him from behind my mask. Finally, I said, "Very well. As stated in the agreement, we will need to verify the funds, and then I will give you the data shard that contains the information. Since you requested a subject matter expert, I have reviewed this information myself. Biotechnica indicated that this would be acceptable, and I will be available here for the next two hours if your chemist has any questions."
  
  He nodded to the security guy, who stepped forward and set the duffle bag on the table, sliding it over almost all the way to our side of the conference table in one powerful shove. I nodded formally to my left, "Miss Pink if you would."
  
  She nodded and pulled out a few sensors, opened the bag and started using them on the bundles of currency inside. She was not only checking for transmitters, although if Biotechnica was smart, any such devices would not be active until we left the building, but she was also using optical sensors and flipping through the stacks of currency, checking for sequential serial numbers.
  
  If Biotechnica was a bank, it would have been theoretically plausible for them to track individual random serial numbers. They wouldn't be able to track them like digital currency, but they'd be able to identify the rough location the money was being spent as it entered the banking system. It usually took weeks or months, though, for a random bill to find its way into a bank, and sometimes they never did.
  
  For these reasons, Wakako charged much less to launder physical notes than she did digital eurodollars. That was why I had included getting different bills from Wakako into the agreement, but I knew she would charge for the tumbling of the digital money. Speaking of which, I asked, "And the digital currency?"
  
  He pulled out a small data shard from his breast pocket and said, "It's right here, but I'm afraid I can't let you have this until we verify the contents of the data. If I handed it to you, there would be nothing stopping you from immediately transferring to a random digital wallet in Kazakhstan."
  
  I sighed and frowned again. What he was saying was true. All digital transfers were irrevocable. But so were transfers of data. I pulled out a similar data shard, "And I couldn't stop you from sending the data immediately back to your home office as soon as you have this, so I propose that we do a mutual exchange, then. But after Miss Pink verifies the notes."
  
  He tilted his head to the side and paused as if considering before finally nodding and saying, "Acceptable." We sat there for a few minutes while Kiwi used some tools I had brought along to count and test the money. Finally, she zipped up the duffle bag and nodded at me. I duplicated the gesture at the Biotechnica suit, and he then handed the shard to one of the security guys behind him.
  
  I did the same, handing it to Mr Orange, who nodded at me. The two security professionals met each other in the middle of the room and exchanged shards. Ruslan walked back to me and placed it in my hand.
  
  I should have expected this situation, and if so, I would have brought with me a little air-gapped credshard tester. It was a small device about as big as a business card that you plugged in a shard containing funds, and it would display the amount contained within. It was a security device in case of viruses. It didn't notify you that there were viruses on the shard, just that the money was actually there. A glance at Kiwi, who winced, told me she didn't think to bring one, either.
  
  Still, I had very good security. I triggered my Zetatech ICE to its highest security state, cutting and temporarily blocking all wireless connectivity. Then I casually inserted the shard into my datashard port and froze.
  
  Immediately I was bombarded with messages and security alerts from my system about detected malware. My Zetatech system had mounted the datashard as an emulated drive on a fully virtual operating system and had detected malware attempting to auto-run. It wanted to know if I wanted to quarantine it or allow it to run in the sandbox. The latter was really never a good idea, but it would tell me if this malware was intended to harm me or not.
  
  However, I already had a good guess that it was intended as a rootkit and tracking virus rather than something to burn me out. Plus, with a rootkit installed, they could always remotely load more lethal malware later if needed.
  
  I wanted to sigh. This also wasn't a good sign. I didn't, thankfully, need to run the virus to verify that there was a preapproved digital transfer on the shard in addition to the hidden malware. All I had to do was input the desired wallet ID, and I could have the entire contents, which was two million and fifty thousand eurodollars. That was something, at least.
  
  I used the funds to cryptographically sign the transaction, sending the funds to the public address to an empty wallet which was not located on my personal system but on the servers I used to host my modest net site. That was a little bit dangerous if I intended to keep the funds there for any length of time because, theoretically, that site could be hacked.
  
  The wallets were among the data that I had heavily encrypted there, so it might be difficult for them to actually steal the funds, but a hacker could delete the data, and if so, over two million dollars would be gone into the æther forever. If I was smarter, I would have had a wallet that wasn't physically connected to any network, like on a different datashard that was in my drawer back home, but I hadn't thought of that.
  
  There were some people and companies that made entirely physical and analogue digital wallets, despite how contradictory that sounded. For example, I had seen some with the digital code etched on a metal plate; they were intended to be placed in a safe or safety deposit box and basically acted as the digital equivalent of bearer bonds. You could decode the character etched on top of the plate and regenerate a digital wallet containing however much funds it had. These featured prominently as plot devices and MacGuffins in the espionage genre of BDs and films.
  
  I finalised the transaction but did not post it to the public banking blockchain yet. Both because my network was down hard and I didn't have access to the net but more importantly because the Biotechnica people across from me would instantly be alerted, and we hadn't, actually, finalised our transaction either, so I wasn't entitled to run off with half the money. Still, I would be able to do so without using the data shard again, which was my intent.
  
  I removed the shard from my data port and immediately triggered a full system bit-by-bit security inspection, just in case. I placed the shard in a small protective case and placed it in my backpack, zipping the small compartment I stored it in closed.
  
  I didn't actually need the shard anymore, but I wanted to give the impression to the Biotechnica people that I did to be polite. I am sure they knew what I did, just as I am sure they would transfer the data I gave them back to their offices immediately as well, which was also against the rules of the exchange, but neither of us commented on it. It was the polite and expected way a Corpo created contingencies while pretending that we would never do such a thing. Ruslan "Trust but verify" was a Russian expression, but the average Corpo operated on the slightly different "Never trust, ever" idiom.
  
  I had watched the manager hand the shard to the skinny man next to him, who produced a small laptop computer of all things and inserted it in. That would have been something I could have brought too, or hell, my phone. Many things could mount datashards. It made me want to chuckle because the fact that I hadn't thought to do so meant that I had really gone "native" in this world, utilising only my cybernetics like most people.
  
  The technical expert said, "It looks correct and plausible, but I'll need to review this and possibly watch this video of it being synthesised." I had included everything, not holding anything back except the identity of the person performing the synthesis, me. I used AI tools to change the person's appearance and voice to an old lady's. Such vid modifications were easily detected, but they were lossy. They couldn't revert the old lady back to my likeness.
  
  I watched their chemist review the material as my internal security sweep finished, finding no threat. The Biotechnica manager smiled affably at me now, "And now we wait, I suppose."
  
  I nodded, "Could I offer you some refreshments? I can ring the Konpeki girls to bring some tea."
  
  He gasped theatrically, "But this is the Azure Plaza, completely independent from Konpeki!" We all shared a knowing smile at that; even Kiwi snorted. Then he nodded, "Sure, that sounds nice. Gentlemen, you don't have to loom anymore if you'd like to take a seat."
  
  I made a gesture to Ruslan and Jean as well, indicating that they could sit too.
  
  His security man shook his head, "We're fine, sir." Diligent they were. The manager shrugged.
  
  Jean had a look that he would have liked to take a seat, but now that the other guys said they didn't need it, there was no way he was going to sit down now. Jean said to the both of them, "We're fine, too, Miss White."
  
  I shrugged, mirroring his gesture and sent an order for a tray of tea for six or so, including pastries and those little sandwiches, to the front desk after reenabling my wireless systems. I indicated it should arrive in two trays.
  
  The tea arrived pretty quickly after that. A deep gong announced that someone was about to enter the room to give everyone present a chance to stop discussing confidential matters. A few seconds later, two girls my age but as heavily augmented as the front desk girl sat the tea service next to each end of the table, bowed, and left. They were also wearing yukatas, which really suited them.
  
  The woman, which I assumed was the man's subordinate, started making tea. Kiwi glanced at her before reaching to do the same, but since I was playing the posh British girl, I stopped her, asking, "Just how often have you made tea, Miss Pink?"
  
  She grinned at me. It was simple teabags, where you had to steep it in the teacup, so it wasn't like the Japanese or Chinese tea ceremonies I had watched on the net. I did notice that the little kettles were self-powered, despite being fine-china. It kept the water just shy of boiling, which was a nice touch.
  
  As I was nibbling on one of the sandwiches, I noticed the Biotechnica chemist whispering to his boss. His boss nodded at him and said, "We have a question."
  
  I sat the half-eaten mini sandwich down and nodded, "Of course."
  
  The chemist coughed, "You've repeated this synthesis?" I nodded at him, "Okay, the fourth step, when you are supposed to fluorinate the phenyl group, wouldn't that result in a carcinogen?"
  
  I raised my eyebrows behind my mask. No, it wouldn't. But I didn't say that. I tilted my head to the side and said exactly the opposite of the truth, "My expertise is organic chemistry synthesis, not medicine, so I can't actually comment as to the toxicity of the compound, merely its synthesis steps. That said, the end product isn't listed in any publicly known or expected carcinogen list." I spread my hands, "I was told you had already received samples of the product, so you should have already examined it?"
  
  That merely got a shrug from the chemist. There were ways these days to test even small samples of unknown chemicals to see if they were a carcinogen, although they were expensive due to the complicated machinery they required. There was a zero per cent chance they hadn't already done these tests. There was no reason to ask me this, so it made me a little suspicious. I asked, "Do you have any questions about the synthesis ?"
  
  There were whispers at his end of the table before the chemist said, "Not right now." The whispering also made me suspicious. I wasn't using a hidden or directional microphone to listen to them, but there was no reason they shouldn't suspect I wasn't. I wouldn't use whispers to communicate with Kiwi and the others. For one, there were cybernetics that enhanced senses, including hearing, that could easily discern whispering in a room this small. In this room, I would only trust digitally encrypted peer-to-peer wireless communications in text.
  
  Speaking of which, I sent a text to everyone explaining about the virus and my suspicions about this question. To me, it kind of sounded like they were fishing to see how much I knew about the drug's application, which wouldn't be what a hired chemist would know. Ruslan replied, "We should probably expect an ambush then. I will let the other team know, and we'll send them another alert when we're leaving the building."
  
  I thought about that and agreed. If I wasn't being unduly paranoid, then the virus was to install a tracking system so their security forces could kidnap us at their leisure after they identified us. If that didn't work, it would make sense to proceed to plan B, which was likely a messier public ambush.
  
  If that was their plan, then why were they doing it, though? To just get the money back, or did they think that Wakako's "hired chemist" was actually the inventor of the drug? We had gone to a lot of effort to try to give the impression this was stolen tech. Internally, sighing, I wondered why things were getting complicated. The only bonus was we did actually have possession of the funds, half of which I could spirit away past any recovery in an instant.
  
  If they intended to get the money back, then even if they kidnapped us successfully, I would have already transferred the digital currency away, so there was no way they could get both halves back-unless perhaps the malware contained some kind of man-in-the-middle malware that would intercept the funds transfer, while still making it appear as though it went through properly from my end. That was putting a lot of trust in something as nebulous as a successful viral attack, which could go wrong in any number of ways.
  
  There were too many questions. I asked Kiwi if I should run the malware in my Zetatech's sandbox as that might get them to call off the messy public ambush, and she glanced at me and winced, texting, "No way! Although you have better ICE than even I do, there is just no telling what might happen. It isn't impossible for viruses to escape out of a virtual machine into bare metal. And if that happens, you're probably screwed."
  
  Yeah, that didn't seem like a good idea to me, either, but it was an option. If we were in some place that wasn't as secure as it was, we might be able to extract the malware and then assault someone and install it on their system, but trying to do that in Konpeki Plaza was pretty stupid. I didn't want the cheerful and cute kimono girls to turn into bloodthirsty killers. Going loud in a place like this pretty much ensured you wouldn't have a long life afterwards.
  
  We waited almost the full two hours we had given them, but there were only a couple more questions, and only one of them was actually insightful.
  
  Finally, all the Biotechnica people stood, so I did the same, Kiwi mirroring me. The Biotechnica manager said, "Thank you, we will consider this transaction concluded. We will inform the broker, as I am sure you will as well."
  
  With that, they all walked out of the room, a security guy in front and also taking the rear. Once the door closed, I said, "Miss Pink, please sweep the room in case our guests accidentally left any surveillance devices behind."
  
  She nodded and got some tools to walk over to their side of the table. Jean and Rus sat down at the table. They were silent, but Ruslan sent a text to our group chat, "What's the plan, now?"
  
  I pulled the small backpack of mine that I had Jean carry into the room onto the table, as there was no way I was going to wear a backpack while wearing a dress. It was the same bag that I had placed the datashard containing the funds. Speaking of which, I immediately posted the funds transfer pending on my system to the public banking ledger, getting a green confirmation and a pleasant beep of a transfer successfully processed.
  
  Well, that was one less thing to worry about. Out of the bag, I pulled out several objects. One was a different black duffle bag, which I slid over to Ruslan and said aloud, "Mr Orange, please transfer the cash to this bag."
  
  He raised an eyebrow but started to comply. He texted, "Think there is a tracking device in the bag?"
  
  I replied back in text, "That or in the bundle of bills themselves. This bag features a fine copper mesh sewed in the lining and should block any kind of radio transmission. Wakako will take it directly to a faraday-cage lined room and process the physical currency there."
  
  He nodded and tossed the bundles of cash in the new bag as I pulled out three masks. These were half masks, unlike mine, and obvious respirators with included goggles. I slid them to each of my team and said, "Please put these on."
  
  "Miss White, I can't detect any hidden cameras or microphones," Kiwi said formally before putting on the mask that I slid across the entire length of the table to her.
  
  I hummed and nodded, taking out a final device. It looked like a half-sphere, and I sat it on the table like it was a gauche modern art centrepiece at Thanksgiving dinner. Jean asked in the chat as he secured his respirator on, "What is that, girl?"
  
  I glanced around, verifying that everyone had their mask on before I pressed a button on top of the Tinkertech device. This caused the half-sphere to open up like a clamshell. Immediately, dense clouds of what appeared to be fog flowed out of the machine, filling the entire room up very quickly. I had been worried about the cloud going underneath the door of the conference room, but these doors were basically airtight due to their soundproofing.
  
  My eyes automatically shifted to infrared and I could see the warm outlines of the others, including Jean who was waving his hands out in front of his face. He said aloud, "Woah, what the fuck!" Kiwi and Ruslan just stayed still, but Kiwi texted a long line of question marks.
  
  I replied in the chat, "Biotechnica has known that this room was going to be the meeting site for days. That gave them the opportunity to rent the room after us in order to collect stray hairs or skin flakes in order to identify us. This will render all of those potential efforts useless. Although I don't know for sure that they are doing that, it is better to be safe than sorry. The cloud evaporates dry like an alcohol, so it won't leave a mess, but while it is fine on your skin, it is irritating to the eyes and lungs, hence the mask and goggles." It went without saying that my plague doctor mask had a respirator in it; I mean, I had that whole beak volume to use, so why wouldn't I put one in it?
  
  Five seconds later, the machine stopped, and less than ten seconds after that, the clouds vanished as if by magic. I nodded and tossed the closed half-sphere into the bag and tossed it to Jean.
  
  Jean grinned, "I've never carried two million eddies before." He still wasn't, but I didn't want to ruin his fun, so I just said, "Let's go."
  
  Being able to pay all the fees digitally over my implant meant I didn't have to walk through the front desk looking like a weirdo because I didn't intend to remove my mask until we got into the getaway van.
  
  So we just left the room and, as a group, walked into one of the elevators, taking it to the underground parking garage. The Konpeki security guys didn't even give me a second glance, as I guess they had even a lot of weirder stuff come and go in their day.
  
  We had to pause at this checkpoint briefly to get our bracelets removed. The security man nodded at us and said, politely but as though he was reading a script, "Pleasant travels, and always be welcomed here at the Azure Plaza."
  
  Wakako called me as we approached the car, and I answered. She asked in an icy cold way that kind of scared even me, "You expect perfidy, Taylor? Are you being a pessimist?"
  
  "I'm not a pessimist," I complained to her out loud, then sniffed delicately and raised my nose into the air, "But that can't possibly last."
  
  That got a snort and a brief smile on her face. She asked, "So you are proceeding with the exfiltration plan we discussed?"
  
  I nodded, "Yes, I think that is best."
  
  "Very well, the bravo team is waiting and ready," Wakako said grimly, "Good luck."
  
  Ruslan jumped into the driver's seat of the van while I jumped into the passenger seat. I really quite liked this model of van; the interior cab was exceptionally spacious, almost like an eighteen-wheeler, and one of those sleeper cab versions at that. I could reach out and not touch the windshield unless I bent really far forward. Kiwi liked driving, but it made a lot more sense for her not to have the distraction as she was the one that had the codes for all of the planted explosives, as well as the control codes for the autocannon. Wakako hadn't been able to find armour-piercing high-explosive rounds like I had wanted, but she got loads of armour-piercing incendiaries and regular high-explosive rounds, which were almost as good. They were reportedly loaded candy-cane style, with one AP round followed by an HE.
  
  The first thing we all did was rearm ourselves. I strapped my thigh holster on and checked my submachine pistol. We all put ballistic vests on, as well, and I thought my appearance was starting to be comical as I had a gun strapped to my thigh and a vest on over my black dress. Hopefully, I wouldn't need to do any high kicks today, as I skipped the pantyhose.
  
  "Connected to all of the devices, as well as the drones by the ambush site," Kiwi said, giving a thumbs up.
  
  "De cash is tied down back here, and secure," Jean said. That was important as if there was a traffic collision, the last thing we wanted was for the duffel bag full of money to be ejected from the vehicle, potentially spilling millions of dollars into the air on whatever road we were travelling. That would trigger a riot.
  
  Ruslan nodded, and he pulled out of the parking space and started driving. We left Konpeki Plaza without incident, but soon after that, Kiwi said, "It looks like we have a tail." Part of the preparation was planting quite a few stickycams along our route of exfiltration and especially near the recently replaced portions of road farther along into the bad part of town, and Kiwi was monitoring them all.
  
  I sighed, "The nice thing about pessimists is that we are never disappointed, only very occasionally pleasantly surprised. But it looks like today is not going to be one of those days."
  
  Ruslan snorted while Jean and I checked our weapons. Kiwi said, while her eyes still stared off into space, "It's just one car, a black SUV with tinted windows." That was on brand for any number of corporate SecTeams, including Biotechnica, which I had personally observed using this style of vehicle a number of times while working.
  
  We were still way too close to Konpeki Plaza and the intact downtown area to start a firefight, as NCPD and possibly even MaxTac would be on us in a surprisingly short time. Although last night I had complained to myself about their response times, that was only for individuals reporting single crimes and in crappy parts of town. If you started a full urban street battle in the good part of town, you could expect to have the borgs of MaxTac show up even if you weren't a cyberpsycho.
  
  But, our ambush site was not only in a bad part of town but right up against the slowly shrinking no-go zone that was a result of the Arasaka bombing decades ago. The cops likely wouldn't respond here unless the battle started expanding a few blocks past the edge of the zone.
  
  "Two more turns, and they'll know our probable path. Get ready, equipment cross-check, da?" said Ruslan as he continued driving the speed limit strictly. All of us, even Kiwi, had more than mere pistols on this op. I had the Kang Tao submachine gun that I often used, and Kiwi had an old but serviceable looking Arasaka Nowaki, while Jean and Rus had two relatively new-looking Ajaxes, which were a fine, simple and reliable Militech product.
  
  I checked both mine and Ruslan's weapons and spare mags, as well as the few rocket-propelled grenade reloads we had for Ruslan's projectile-launch system. I made sure to put those by him in easy reach and got a thumbs up and a grin from the man, with him grabbing the two reloads we had and stuffing them into his pockets, one on either side. Perhaps we should have bought more of those.
  
  Shortly after Ruslan made the second turn Kiwi piped up again, "New contacts behind us. Four more SUVs. They're not bothering to hide, anymore. I think they must have been paralleling our route on a side street." I nodded while I fidgeted and tried to ignore the roiling psychosomatic feeling in my stomach. Although I had been in what would be described by anybody, rightfully, as combat, I was still scared every time it happened.
  
  Another pause, then a hurried, "Four more SUVs coming from the other direction at our far cameras; it looks like they're setting up a roadblock right next to the abandoned building that bravo team is in." She said that last part excitedly.
  
  That... was really good. If the Claws were smart, they would hide right now until they got set up and then attack together with Kiwi's autocannon. To set up a reasonable roadblock across the street that we were travelling, this second team would have to set themselves up to take enfilading fire from the Claws across the street in the building and from elevation to boot.
  
  That was what we were hoping to happen, but there was no telling what might have been. Their entire snatch-or-kill team, whatever their motives were, could have swarmed the van instead, but military men were fundamentally addicted to clever plans, I thought.
  
  I certainly wasn't really one to throw stones in this regard as this entire scheme was a series of clever plans, but when you were on the attack instead of the defence, there was something to be said for a sudden, simple attack with overwhelming force. At least, I thought so, in my lay person's opinion.
  
  It was simple escalation, and as simple as it sounded I felt it was a winning strategy. If the enemy was prepared to deal with small arms, then you brought explosives and a surplus Soviet cannon. It was a shame this second team also darted in from a parallel track and missed the explosives that they had planted on the far side of the ambush site, but you couldn't have everything.
  
  "Kiwi, I think you and the Tyger Claws should attack as soon as you can. That will undoubtedly cause the guys behind us to flip out and start chasing us right into our potholes," I said, glancing at Ruslan as he really did know more about this than I did, "What do you think?"
  
  He grinned, "You read my mind? I hope not because I don't think you'd approve of the things in there. We don't want to wait until we get to the ambush on the off chance they just want to murder us all; this van isn't bulletproof."
  
  I scowled at the implied perversion. Suddenly, even about two kilometres away, we started hearing a cacophony of automatic weapons fire. Then without further preamble, an even louder but much briefer "brrt" sound of the autocannon firing. The six-barrel beast had such an insane rate of fire, at over eight thousand rounds per minute, that Kiwi had to line up shots for a tenth of a second burst; otherwise, she'd burn through the ammo immediately.
  
  I didn't even need Kiwi to tell us that the five vehicles behind us started accelerating because they also started shooting at us. Small, short aimed bursts from the lead vehicle, and I thought they were aiming at our tires, but not only did Ruslan start swerving erratically, but we had already replaced the tires with run-flats the same day he stole the van. Unless they got totally shredded, we'd still keep trucking along.
  
  They'd notice that soon and try something else. There was no way they'd want us to get within range to be supported by that heavy weapons emplacement. "Approaching the first set of potholes," Kiwi said. "The gonks at the ambush site are basically annihilated, some fled on foot the north into downtown, and the Claws didn't pursue. That cannon... well... glory to socialist science, is I'll say."
  
  Ruslan started cackling, and started singing off-key in another language, " Партыі слава! Слава Радзіме! Слава табе, Беларускі народ!" My auto-translate system hiccuped, saying I didn't have the Belarusian language pack installed, but it gave its best shot at translating it due to its similarities with other Slavic languages. Something about glory to the Party and the Motherland. I didn't even know they had a different language. To be perfectly honest, before I met Ruslan, I didn't even know that country existed. I snorted, and then I felt the van max out at about a hundred and twenty; it must have a fucking regulator on it or something because I was sure the motor had more oomph than this.
  
  The vehicle shuddered as one of the dark SUVs collided with us from behind, ramming into us when they tried to perform a PIT manoeuvre to spin us out, getting denied by Ruslan, swerving to keep them from being able to get to the side of us. However, a second vehicle suddenly appeared right next to us, on the driver's side, slamming into us menacingly as men inside the vehicle made gestures demanding us to pull over.
  
  "Pothole in 5," Kiwi said, and at the same time, Ruslan rolled down the driver's side window and made a rude gesture at them, following it by pointing his arm at their passenger window. The projectile launch system deployed smoothly; I had been seeing to his maintenance after all, and a small rocket-propelled grenade fired off. It detonated on the obviously ballistic-resistant transparent polymers of the windshield. But while it might have been bulletproof, it wasn't shaped charge proof and I briefly saw the carnage the weapon had done to the interior of the vehicle before the truck spun out on fire.
  
  Near on simultaneously, we passed over the first pothole, and immediately Kiwi set off the explosion as the SUV trailing us passed it. The explosion was... a bit much. Not only did it flip the trailing SUV end over end like this was an action film, but it lifted the tail end of our van, causing me to yell, "Fuuuuuck!" I'm not sure what everyone else said, because I was too busy yelling, "Fuuuuuck!"
  
  The tail end of the vehicle, after what seemed like an eternity, slammed back into the ground hard enough that I was worried the axle would fall off. Kiwi said, "Fuck, we missed the second pothole just now. The third is coming up."
  
  Maybe we shouldn't have put them so close together. To be honest, we had actually made most of the potholes instead of finding existing ones and filling them. Ruslan fired another RPG from his hand, like a video game character, but this time missed as the third SUV swerved at just the right time. However, it swerved right into the third pothole, and Kiwi promptly blew it. The vehicle only took half the explosion this time, from the side and spun out and collided with a public DataTerm on the side of the street.
  
  I blinked, as the DataTerm didn't look that damaged. Those things really were indestructible.
  
  "That was the last one-fuuck!" yelled Kiwi as one of the last two SUVs managed to get a PIT manoeuvre off on us, spinning us two hundred and seventy degrees, followed by the last vehicle blocking us in. Ruslan didn't waste any time thinking or prevaricating; he just yelled, "Out, now!"
  
  All four of us jumped out of the vehicle with our weapons, followed by the same by the occupants of the two SUVs. Instead of jumping out of my door, which would have exposed me to fire from their entire team, I unbuckled and leapt out of the driver's side, leaping and rolling while activating my stealth system.
  
  Perhaps we had just infuriated them, or maybe Biotechnica was trying to cut its losses or maybe even they always intended to murder us all, but in either case, each SUV had about five men in it, and they all disembarked from their vehicles, automatic weapons firing. They were moving with a purpose and firing tactically, with several men taking turns to place continuous fire on our position to keep our heads down while the rest of them instantly split into two groups and started moving to either side of us.
  
  About as soon as I had calculated a plan, I looked up to see a grenade sailing in a lazy arc over the roof of the van we were crouched behind. I moved at my max speed and darted up and grabbed it out of the air, and immediately threw it to the side. I was hoping to throw it at the approaching enemy, but when I grabbed it I felt that would be pushing it a little so I basically just deflected it off to the side, causing it to detonate about fifteen metres away from us, and I winced as I felt a piece of shrapnel hit and bounce off my ballistically resistant derriere. It might not be the best time to think about this, but this dress is ruined.
  
  We should have had a better plan for what we would do after leaving the vehicle, as these guys we were facing were professionals. Even mostly invisible, it didn't seem like a great idea to stick my head out, but staying still was certain death. Finally, Kiwi said over our tacnet, "Short circ incoming in three."
  
  Ooh, that was good. Kiwi had a very expensive cyberdeck, and one of the optimisations on it assisted her in using certain quickhacks more easily on multiple enemies. Short circuit was one of these, and while it wasn't a fatal attack, it was quite painful, and that was exactly what we needed right now. It was hard to riddle us all with bullets when some of your cybernetics were mild to moderately electrocuting you.
  
  Ruslan and Jean glanced at me from the other side of the van, and Rus gave a thumbs up. Wait, why were both of them over there? I was alone against the other half of these guys. I didn't think I was more badassed than both Rus and Jean, not by any measure.
  
  A loud zzzt noise and groans of pain, and most importantly, the momentary lack of gunfire, made me discard that thought, and I could see Ruslan as he activated his Sandevistan and started moving even a little quicker than I did. I darted out the other side, the barrel of my weapon rising up. I fired immediately, striking the first man, who was hunched over in pain. The four guys on this side were all stacked up, tactically approaching, so I just held the trigger down and sprayed the entire magazine in their general direction, using my enhanced strength to hold the muzzle rise down.
  
  When the weapon clicked empty, to maximise the useful time of their incapacitation, I just dropped the weapon and pulled out my pistol, putting two rounds into the one man that was still standing. Rushing past them, I moved laterally and put a fair bit of distance between me and the edge of the van before I rounded the corner, seeing one of the two guys that had been keeping us suppressed recovered and aiming a light machine gun down at where I would otherwise have popped my head out of.
  
  I aimed a careful shot and hit him in the centre mass, causing him to fall and me to miss my follow-on shots, which turned out to be a good thing as I immediately got an alert in my head of a Trauma Team Gold member in my vicinity that required aid, and to assist him if it was possible. Then a second burst of fire from Ruslan and Jean taking the other guy, which produced a similar alert on him.
  
  Fuck. I sent over my tacnet, "Cease fire! Cease fire! These two guys are Trauma Team subscribers, don't fucking kill the other guy if you haven't already." Were these two the only Trauma clients? We had exploded a few cars already. Kiwi came over the radio as if reading my mind, "Yeah, Trauma collected two guys from up ahead, too; the Claws and my turret stopped shooting."
  
  Fuck! Who knows when they'd arrive? I glanced up and moved into high gear. In one running jump, I leapt over the SUV they were using as cover, and as I landed, I grabbed the still-conscious one's head and thumped it firmly into the ground, knocking him out.
  
  Looking at the two men and their injuries, I frowned and grabbed the more injured of the two in my arms in a princess carry and started flat running back the way we came on the road, not stopping until I got a good fifty metres away before I sat him down. I had to get these two fucks away because although we didn't have a policy of always shooting when we got on scene, this would already be labelled a high-threat situation given the earlier calls, and there was no telling what the teams on duty would do. If I moved them clearly away from us, they likely wouldn't hose us down with the miniguns on general principle.
  
  I repeat the process with the second guy, setting him right next to the first, who looks like he might code soon if Trauma doesn't get here in the next couple of minutes. I manage to make it halfway back to our van, which Ruslan is trying to extricate from its predicament before the first AV-4 shows up. I yell, "Drop your weapons and put your hands up! They don't give a shit about our fight; they just want their patients."
  
  It was Delta's AV that was responding, and if they fucking flatlined my friends, much less me, I was going to be so very pissed. Thankfully, they didn't hose us down on approach but merely landed right next to the dying guy and hopped out. They didn't work on him much here, just grabbed him, which was an indication that they thought there was a serious and continuing hazard to remain in this area. Then I watched them pause for a couple of seconds, talking with each other, even seeing the led Med Techie shrug, and they grabbed the other guy as well. Ballsy. That was something I would have tried to do, but if their first patient died because they tried to take two home with them, its going to be their asses.
  
  We watch the Trauma AV-4 fly away, and Kiwi says, "Phew. Those guys are kind of scary, you know."
  
  "Let's get the fuck out of here. Hopefully, they didn't fucking shoot the bag of cash to pieces," Ruslan groused, which caused me to wince. They had put a lot of rounds into the sides of that van. It was a wonder it was still operable. Finally, he jumped in the back of the van and yelled, "Kiwi, you drive."
  
  The van was a lot worse for wear, but it probably wouldn't get that much attention, as I had seen a lot of vehicles in a lot worse shape driving the streets day after day. Although she looked like Swiss cheese, she wasn't even in the top five most shot-up vehicles I had seen casually be driven like nothing was wrong. I hopped into the passenger seat after recovering my SMG and carefully buckled my seatbelt again before I glanced in the back as we backed up and navigated around the SUVs and dead or incapacitated bodies. I felt kind of bad for having to shoot these guys. They weren't Scavs; they were just doing their job, no different from what I did every day. Still, I had a smouldering and growing hate for Biotechnica-one of the good ones my foot.
  
  We didn't really need to drive past the ambush site anymore, but it was really the only way to go down this street unless we wanted to make a U-turn, which I didn't. So we drove past it quickly and gawked at the vehicle on fire. I say finally, "Glory to Socialist Science," which got a couple of chuckles as we managed to drive off into the shoulder of the road to get around the destroyed "roadblock." Ruslan said, "The cash is fine, although I think maybe a few thousand might be a bit damaged." Well, that was a good sign, at least. I had hoped so. They had tied the duffle bag underneath the seats in the back, so that was pretty much out of the way.
  
  I started to relax a bit as we got on the freeway, and Kiwi and I grinned like fools at each other.
  
  From the back, Ruslan said, "Alright, Kiwi, take the next exit in four kloms."
  
  Kiwi blinked and said, "But we're supposed to meet Wakako in Japantown." Suddenly I got an alert about all my net connections failing, while at the same time Jean pointed a gun at the back of Kiwi's head. Ruslan mirrored the gesture at me, in his other hand a small but powerful signal jammer, "About that... You know, it is not personal, da? But, this is a score of a lifetime. Sorry, Kiwi... we would have brought you in, but we didn't think you would have gone for it, and then we'd have had to have killed you."
  
  Kiwi's face, which had been smiling so happily before was still frozen in the same expression, but with shock and despair registering in her eyes, which probably mirrored my own. I blinked back tears, wondering why people who I thought were my friends always seemed to betray me.
  
  "Don't worry; we'll leave you tied up in an abandoned building. This jammer only has a battery for about six hours, so you should be able to call someone to get free after then," Ruslan said affably.
  
  Jean shrugged, "Yeah, sorry mon but this is retirement money, ya?"
  
  Absently I wondered if this was why they had run up such charges on the hotel last night. They were high but not high enough that I would have immediately done something about it, but it seemed like they never intended to be around to reimburse Wakako and me for the expenses. Had they been planning this the whole time? "Wakako will find you guys. This is a braindead move," I finally said, my voice sounding tired and monotone.
  
  "Yeaah... I don't think so. You see, I think you're very special, Miss White. And I ain't exactly new to the scene, either. I got some contacts that can definitely help us vanish, new identities, new genomes, the whole burrito," he said excitedly, and I absently wanted to correct his incorrect idiom use as I would have before, but my heart wasn't in it, "So, you're coming with us on a little road trip. Don't worry; I got a friend collecting your input and her little brat too. These people realise that family is important to be productive."
  
  Wait, my input? All three of them had been over to my place, and I had introduced them to Gloria several times. Did they think we were dating? I didn't have the mental strength to even complain internally that they were implying Gloria wore the pants in the relationship, either. I had to think of something, a way to FUCKING KILL THESE TWO TREACHEROUS ASSHOLES so I could save Gloria and David . Being kidnapped at a young age was a very traumatic experience.
  
  I noticed Kiwi glancing at me sideways, and I did the same and noticed her staring intently at my worn seatbelt, and I widened my eyes. Getting either Ruslan or Jean to wear a seatbelt was almost impossible. Ruslan even said, once, "In Soviet Russia, you fly out of the car like man in accident!"
  
  I decided to keep talking to him to keep him distracted, so I lied, "You know I didn't make that drug, right? I stole it from Trauma Team."
  
  "I don't think so. I did a lot of research after we used anaesthetics you provided, da? There is nothing like that in the world, nothink ; it is like magic," he said happily, "And I even managed to klep some in the bag job gig, da? Very interested."
  
  My judgement for trusting people was, as usual, total and utter shit. I had made several different delivery mechanisms for the drug back then, darts, a spray that I still had in my bag right now, and we finally settled on drugging his disgusting Nicola drink. I thought I had misplaced a few of the darts, but I didn't think anything of it.
  
  "Don't worry, don't worry! You probably be richer than Croesus in a few years, and they'll make sure you'll be well protected," he said, confirming that whoever he was intending to sell me to was a Corp of some kind. He chuckled and said, "You don't need-"
  
  He was interrupted by Kiwi roughly yanking the wheel over hard, throwing us into oncoming traffic. I could see the vehicle ahead of us and knew there was no way we could avoid a collision at this point. It was a truck, about as big as our van. I just hoped Ruslan was practising good trigger discipline and didn't shoot me in the back in the collision.
  
  Even in slow motion, the crash was unimaginably quick and violent, with Kiwi bouncing hard off the steering wheel and dashboard. Both Jean and Ruslan were airborne, and I expected to see them fly through the windshield with no further input from me, but I saw it immediately when Ruslan activated his Sandy again.
  
  I didn't wait any longer because he was sudden death in both hands, but then again, so was I. The expression of pure, unadulterated rage on his face told me that he wasn't thinking about his plan. Or rather, that he knew he was about to be grievously injured and wanted to burn the whole world down with him. It was an ugly and heartrending expression that I knew would stick with me for a long time in my dreams, assuming I lived through the next couple of seconds.
  
  My left hand flashed, my monowire flying out in a difficult one-handed throw to wrap around his left arm before I yanked it tight, coiling tightly around and fouling the deployment mechanism for his projectile launch system. I didn't try for the more difficult shot to wrap around his neck because I was somewhat concerned that I would miss, and if so, I was absolutely sure he would kill me, and perhaps himself, by firing off his PLS inside the cabin of a moving vehicle.
  
  I wanted to kick myself when I saw what was in his other hand because it was the exact same thing that was already in my hand, raising to point at him. An M-73 Omaha. I should have never let him shoot mine, as he had bought one as soon as they went on the market a few months later, and it was one of the few pistols that could punch through both my body armour and ballistic skin weave pretty much like it wasn't there.
  
  We were levelling our weapons about at the same time, although he had the more complicated shot flying as he was sideways while tangled up with Jean, who was flying perpendicular to Ruslan's orientation. They were both about to collide with the windshield, but then again, we were all close enough to touch each other with our pistols if we only stretched our arms out a little farther, so missing was basically impossible.
  
  I was firing from retention, keeping the pistol tucked up against my breast so as to keep him from using one of his spinning limbs to knock the barrel off-true, but it looked like we were going to fire almost simultaneously.
  
  As I started squeezing the trigger, Ruslan's face changed from the rictus of pure rage to the cheeky, friendly, mischievous grin I had gotten so fond of.
  
  (AN: I briefly considered ending the chapter here, but that would only be mean.)
  
  I did not die, although seeing my former friend's head blow apart did not fill me with the satisfaction that I thought it would have when I fantasised about murdering him in the seconds after his betrayal; in fact, it hurt a lot. Also, Rus shot me at the same time as I hit him in the chest. That also hurt, too, but not as much, if I had to admit it.
  
  The hypervelocity, copper-coated steel projectile punched right where my liver should have been and out the other side of my back. The one downside to the Omaha was overpenetration - there was no expansion whatsoever, which actually lessened my injuries somewhat.
  
  I was injured enough that my Trauma Team membership tried to activate, but it was actually possible to suppress it if the internal biomonitor gauged your injuries were under a certain limit, especially if you had nanosurgeons or other first-aid style augmentations. However, if I lost consciousness for even a moment it would trigger the alert, so I was trying my best to stay conscious as I reviewed my injuries. Aside from the penetrating trauma and internal bleeding, I had a moderate to a serious concussion, and that was basically it.
  
  My custom liver's arterial connection had been damaged, so it had already shut down its duties as my second heart, but that could be repaired. I glanced sideways to check Kiwi's status and winced.
  
  She wasn't dead yet, but she was hurt, bad. I shook my head to clear it, as I had some work to do. I shook off Ruslan's forearm, which had been ripped off despite the fact that it had significant metal content when his body continued its travel out of the cab of the vehicle. When it was clear, I retracted my wire and unbuckled my seat. The vehicle was on its side, so I thumped to the floor and carefully freed Kiwi from the driver's seat.
  
  She had a high cervical fracture and was displaying signs of paradoxical breathing. My medical sense estimated that there was over a ninety-six per cent chance that she was completely paralysed below the neck down, which was unfortunate but fixable. What wasn't fixable, though, at least in a van, was that she was about to stop breathing. I searched the back of the van and grabbed the medical kit I had brought with me, and dug through it before I found a small tracheostomy kit.
  
  Working at my speed, it was no time at all before I was done with the procedure and carefully managing and manually ventilating her airway with one hand. I hadn't brought a ventilator machine with me, which was another oversight.
  
  What to do now? I would have to perform a carjacking before the ambulance showed up. I glanced around and gathered the things I was definitely taking with me, and they only comprised a pistol, Kiwi and the bag of cash.
  
  Right before I was about to try to extricate myself from the vehicle, I heard a voice. A man's voice, "'Ello the wreck, anyone alive in there? Are you okay?"
  
  Frowning, I stood up and stuck my head out of what was the passenger's side window and was now the ceiling. I saw the man, and I was ready to pull my pistol but he seemed unarmed and, unusually, concerned. He grinned and said, "You okay? Do you need any help?"
  
  The man was attractive, in his mid-twenties. My eyes zoomed in on several parts of his body. He looked like Alt-Danny's young lieutenants did, earnest and tastefully but highly augmented. He looked like a soldier, which was troubling, especially since he was helping a random stranger in Night City. That didn't usually happen. Still, I nodded and tried to play up the damsel in distress angle, "Yes, please, my friend is hurt quite badly. Can you come over here and help me lift her out of the van? I'm afraid it might catch fire soon."
  
  He nodded, "Of course." I quickly ducked down and rummaged into the medical bag again, palming an item. As I rose up, I said, "You might need to come in here to help me."
  
  He nodded and leaned close, and that was when I struck at my maximum speed, shoving an inhaler right by his nose and spraying him two times in the face. He had a very brief couple of seconds of confusion as the anaesthetic took effect before he slumped against the side of the van.
  
  Sighing, I didn't really feel good about that but need's must when the devil drives. Glancing around, I frowned as I didn't see Jean. I thought he would be unconscious by Ruslan's body, but he was gone. Suddenly, I looked around everywhere just in case I was about to be ambushed, but I didn't see anyone. I couldn't think about it right now.
  
  I ducked back in, grabbed a few other things in my med bag, and tossed them into the duffle bag full of cash, putting it over my back and gently reaching down to pick Kiwi up princess style. Instead of trying to climb out with my hands full, I judged the distance and carefully used one hand to hold Kiwi's neck stable so as not to aggravate her spinal fracture and just jumped straight up through the window. I landed on the passenger door and carefully slid down, doing my best not to jar Kiwi any more than I needed to. Every few seconds, I would pause to mechanically ventilate her.
  
  Well, that was a coincidence. The young man/soldier's vehicle was a van exactly like the one we were driving in. I hurried over to it. There was really no good way to transport Kiwi, and I spent a couple of minutes fashioning a quick neck brace out of things I had on hand, which were duct tape and a few stacks of cash.
  
  Glancing at the unconscious man, I hummed and quickly ran over and grabbed him as well, placing him into the passenger seat. I opened his mouth and put another inhaler inside, giving him one puff. It was my drug that caused anterograde amnesia. I would leave him with some money in compensation after I got home. He had made the correct moral decision, so I would see him rewarded for it, even if he didn't remember much of it.
  
  I put his van into gear. Thankfully, it had an auto-drive system, and I selected my Megabuilding. Now, what else could go wrong today?
  
  As I thought that, my phone rang now that I was outside the area effect of the small jammer that was no doubt next to Ruslan somewhere. However, it was someone I wasn't expecting. Johnny the Tyger Claw. While I wasn't expecting him, surprisingly, he was exactly who I wanted to talk to.
  
  Johnny was still guarding the employee's entrance to Clouds. It was kind of boring, but it gave him a lot of time to practice both his slashes and his quickdraw, so there were at least some benefits.
  
  As he was practising the latter, he heard the muffled but unmistakable sound of a gunshot. A loud one. He checked his Tyger's Eye app. The Claws had installed a number of simple but exceeding useful security systems on this floor for the building. One of them was a series of multiple sound-detecting instruments spread across the entire floor.
  
  They could detect gunshots, and they were also networked together, which allowed them to triangulate exactly where on the floor the gunshot happened. What he saw on the app caused him to frown in concern and stand up. The gunshot came from inside Doc Taylor's clinic.
  
  He triggered a security alert in Clouds, which was required if he was going to leave his post, and at the same time, he tried calling his boss but found that the call went straight to voicemail. If he recalled, Mr Jin was supposed to be meeting one of the big bosses today, so it wasn't surprising he had his implants set to do-not-disturb.
  
  He grabbed his Stetson from where he kept it on a hatrack he bought just for this purpose, settled it comfortably on his head, and started moseying his way over to Doc's clinic. It wasn't far.
  
  He got there just in time to see the door open and an unusual man dragging Doc Gloria's kid out of the clinic. He frowned and said, "Pardner, I reckon..." He didn't get more out because as soon as he started talking, the man shifted to look at him, which allowed Johnny to see past the two into the clinic and what he saw caused him to stop talking. There was no need for words now.
  
  He cleared leather before the man's eyes even met his own, and the scoundrel had barely the chance to look surprised before Johnny put a bullet right between his eyes, painting the Doc's door with the no-good varmint's brains. The dead man fell, both in and out of the Doc's clinic, blocking the automatic closing mechanism from working.
  
  Sliding his pistol back into his holster with a smooth motion, he frowned. He'd have to do something about this crying child now. He was a saint of the gun and the sword, but of crying children, he was much less skilled. He'd have to do something, though, on account of what he saw in the clinic.
  
  It was Doc Gloria, dead as a doornail on the ground.
  
  The kid tried to run away, but that wasn't a good idea, so he grabbed the munchkin and said, "Shh, shh." Then, he had a brainstorm and called one of the dolls that he knew had a good relationship with Doc Taylor. One of the door guards was coming to investigate what happened, mouth agape.
  
  Johnny nodded and handed the squirming brat over, and said, "Take this boy to Miss Evelyn right now. There's been a killin'." It was tough being the law 'round these parts, but despite people often making fun of him, he was higher ranked than almost everyone that worked security today, so the other man nodded, grabbed the kid and skedaddled.
  
  He sighed and stepped over the dead man and into the clinic, and he tipped his hat sadly to the dead woman on the floor. The man had shot her with two twelve-gauge rounds to the chest; there was just no survivin' that absent some serious armour.
  
  Doc Taylor would probably want to know, but he didn't look forward to this conversation. Sighing, he dialled her. She answered on the second ring and said, "Johnny, I need you to get security on Gloria right away. I think someone's going to try to kidnap her if they haven't already."
  
  Giving a friend or a loved one bad news like this was never easy, so instead, he just sighed, "Ma'am, I'm afraid that's why I'm callin'. I just caught someone trying to kidnap her boy outta your clinic. I stopped him, and the boy's safe, but I'm sorry to tell you that Doc Gloria didn't make it."
  
  Doc's voice shrieked, and Johnny winced, adjusting the call volume down, "What?!"
  
  "Ma'am, she's dead. The kidnapper shot her," Johnny repeated. It was better to just give it to people straight, he felt.
  
  Instead of shrieking her voice got really, really cold and she asked, "How dead?"
  
  Johnny was confused, "Stone dead, ma'am." What the hell did she mean?
  
  Her voice shifted to exasperated, "No, you fu... No, Johnny... I mean, what were her injuries? What's the status of her skull and brain? WHAT HAPPENED? "
  
  "Ma'am, it looks like there was a struggle. I don't know what happened; maybe the boy can tell you as he musta have seen it. Distraught, he is, but long story short, the guy shot her in the chest twice with double ought buck. But, I mean, I guess her face is okay; we can make it an open-casket funeral and all," he said. Although he had to admit that nobody actually had funerals like that anymore, despite what he saw on his westerns, so he wondered why it mattered.
  
  The voice was intent and commanding now, "Johnny, I need you to do two things right away."
  
  "'Course," he replied.
  
  She told him, and he frowned. He agreed to do it, and she said she would be there in less than ten minutes and hung up. He reached down and picked up the dead lady and said the words she told him to say, "Biobed mode."
  
  He blinked as the Doc's chair shifted and turned into a bed or a gurney. That was pretty neat. He laid the dead woman on the bed and stepped back. He coughed and said, in Japanese, " Spider-bro, wake up."
  
  Nothing happened, and he tilted his eyes and then coughed. The Doc had said it in English, despite the name. He tried that again, "Kumo-kun, wake up."
  
  Suddenly the equipment above the bed started moving and making noises. She'd said that would happen, so he nodded and said, carefully reciting the words she made him memorise, "Kumo-kun, vampire cuff, emergency oxygenation mode."
  
  What happened next caused Johnny the Samurai Gunman to take a step back as six terrifying arms descended down onto the biobed and started doing things. He carefully affected an accent, a Western drawl in English and a homey Kansai-ben when he spoke Japanese, but what he saw in front of him shocked him enough that he forgot, and he spoke with the native Tokyo accent that he thought was so boring, "Maji ka?"
  
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  She bravely turned her tail and fled
  It wasn't easy sometimes being an ethnically Chinese man that grew up in Tokyo, but Johnny knew he had the soul of a Samurai, so most things didn't bother him. He let things flow over and around him like the best Zen masters, but he was a bit put off by what he was seeing.
  
  So Johnny merely backed away from what was going on on the hospital bed and glanced behind him to find a full tactical quick reaction force of his brothers, led by Demon Wind Kato himself. While glancing left and right for trouble, the borged-out street samurai asked, "What's going on?"
  
  Johnny sighed and told the man everything that had happened. Not only was the Demon Wind his superior, but he was quick to anger. Kato could be as ornery as a rattlesnake with a toothache, snapping at anyone who crossed him, and it didn't do to rile him up unnecessarily.
  
  Perhaps Johnny was the wrong person to throw such stones from his glass house, but he always felt that Kato was too attached to his moody and brooding persona. If Kato was a lesser man, Johnny would call him all hat and no cattle, but the Demon Wind had the whole herd, so Johnny was always careful to catfoot around the man.
  
  Kato scowled, looking at the abomination before him as it worked on the dead woman, "Well, you better get to it, then. Okada-sama is blowing up my texts."
  
  "I reckon we should do something about this here... detritus," Johnny said, eyeing the man he had shot, "We don't want to spook the customers comin' to the cathouse."
  
  Kato ground his teeth together, "I told you before to stop calling it a cathouse." He turned to one of his men and motioned for them to pull the body into the clinic for now. Glancing around, he brightened when he saw a stack of something in the corner. "Well, at least we don't have to go and get a bodybag; she keeps a number of them around. I thought she was a good Med Techie; why does she need so many body bags?"
  
  Johnny grinned, unable to resist, and drawled, "Probably to put in people who are makin' aspersions on her medical skills." That got two of his men to chuckle and Kato to scowl. He shook his head and went to complete the rest of what the Doc asked him. He walked over to what she had described as her "work table" and peered at it, deciding he didn't recognise any of the tools except one small screwdriver and what he might charitably describe as a fancy pair of tweezers.
  
  Still, he didn't need to. Above the work table was a set of cabinets, and he opened them and looked around. Here things were labelled carefully and stored in over three rows of twenty small plastic drawers each, stacked on top of each other. He followed the drawers with his fingers and stopped when he got to the one that was labelled "XAC-3." He opened the drawer and pulled out one of the small inhalers inside, the same type used for any number of drugs. Closing that draw, he continued looking until he found another draw labelled "Lorazepam" and took another inhaler from it.
  
  He put both the inhalers in his pocket and tipped his hat at Kato as he passed, offering a polite "Demon Wind."
  
  Kato inclined his head back at him but replied, "Clown." Johnny sighed and ignored the provocation. At least Kato's men were loading the dead man into a body bag. He sent a message to the building janitorial division to have the blood and brains cleaned off the entryway. Despite what Kato said, it would scare the customers coming to visit the cathouse.
  
  He walked across the corridor and into Clouds. He walked directly to Miss Evelyn's room and rang her doorbell. "Miss Evelyn is..." Fuck, what was that gaki 's name? "Is that young'un with you?"
  
  In lieu of answering, she unlocked the door, and he walked in to see that he was. The kid was currently still bawling his eyes out while being mothered by four busty dolls, including Miss Evelyn and Miss Himeko. However, when the kid saw Johnny, his eyes went wide, and he broke out of their embrace to race toward him, yelling, "My mom... is she going to be okay?" However, before Johnny could even reply, the kid asked what seemed like a dozen questions about Doc Gloria.
  
  " Yamero... You need to yamate kuda STOP ..." Johnny said suddenly, unable to take anymore. Sometimes had trouble keeping which language he was trying to speak straight when he got flustered.
  
  Shit, the dolls were glaring at him now. He shook his head, "I don't know anything. I talked to Doc Taylor, and she seemed to think that maybe Doc Gloria might not be dead." He looked down at the kid and pulled out one of the inhalers. She was very clear that he was to turn the dosage selector all the way to the left and cross-check that the dosage displayed decreased as he did so. So he did that, making sure the number was the smallest number possible before handing it to the kid, "Doc Taylor says you're to use this right now. Do you know how?"
  
  He shook his head, so Johnny told him, "Put it in your mouth and press that button while inhaling." He watched the boy do so and took the inhaler from him and replaced it with the other to do the same.
  
  Miss Evelyn asked, "What are these?"
  
  Johnny shrugged, "I dunno. I ain't no bonesaw, ma'am." However, he could take a guess as the kid immediately looked less lively and had stopped bawling and hyperventilating. Some kind of light sedative, probably? He blinked as he got a text from Doc Taylor and sighed. Two things he had to do turned into three so often in his life, so he shouldn't be surprised.
  
  "Anyway, I gotta go now," Johnny said, while he tipped his hat to the dolls, "Ladies."
  
  I swore loudly and inventively as I hung up on the call with Johnny Leung, slamming my hand repeatedly into the steering wheel with enough strength to slightly deform the aluminium underneath the soft polyurethane on the wheel. This gave me immediate pause as I sometimes forgot how strong I was, and I was hitting the steering wheel of my stolen van with significant force. If I broke it and, as a result, the car became inoperative, I would be up shit creek without a paddle. Worst of all, it would be me putting myself there with the mother of all unforced errors.
  
  As much as I wanted to break down, all I could allow myself to do was scream at the situation, "Why has everything gone wrong?!" I glanced at the in-car navigation system and auto drive, very thankful that I didn't have to operate the car while ventilating Kiwi. I would have made it work, somehow, but I was inordinately glad I didn't need to.
  
  Glancing around the interior of the vehicle, I was looking for something like a napkin or paper towel. Something I could use to wipe the tears that appeared to be welling up in my eyes, but the vehicle was spotless, without the clutter of yesterday's fast-food bag that sometimes accumulated in one's car.
  
  Finally, giving up, I just used the side of my hands, sighing and slowing my breathing. I had a lot of different breathing and meditation techniques in my brain that were, according to my medical sense, very effective at relaxing a person. As all of them worked in a similar way, I picked one at random and began breathing in a pattern through my nose, holding my breath for a specific amount of time before exhaling through my mouth.
  
  I wished I had some cameras inside my clinic or some way to remotely access Kumo-kun from here, but I didn't think either of those things was a good idea. Kumo-kun was ridiculously dangerous if you were within its sphere of influence, so giving any kind of avenue for hackers to connect to any of its machinery was a bad idea. Also, I occasionally worked in nothing but my bra and panties in there, especially if I was doing electronics work, so a net-accessible camera was asking for trouble there, too.
  
  However, if Johnny did as I asked, then Kumo-kun should be keeping Gloria's brain oxygenated the best he could. By telling it to oxygenate with a vampire cuff, it would mechanically connect the carotid arteries and jugular veins to my heart-lung bypass machine.
  
  It was extracorporeal oxygenation, used, for example, when you needed to perform surgery on or replace either the lungs or the heart. Every cybernetics surgeon, even the terrible ones, had such bypass machines because the heart and lungs were one of the most popular organs to replace, and for a good reason, as the bog-standard organic human heart and lungs weren't the best designed. But, of course, normally, you wouldn't connect the device this way, as it would only oxygenate the brain and head.
  
  It was emergency first aid of the very last resort, taken with the idea that anything that wasn't the brain could be replaced. Kumo-kun had only practised this procedure in simulations, obviously, and I hoped very much it was doing it properly.
  
  I was as worried for David almost as much as I was worried for Gloria, too. I had told Johnny to dose the kid with an anxiolytic, as well as my experimental, almost entirely Tinkertech drug. I didn't have a name for it, and it was just labelled experimental amnesia compound number three, despite the fact that it didn't entirely cause amnesia anymore.
  
  I glanced at the unconscious man that was seatbelted into the passenger seat. The drug was based on the same drug that I had just used on the driver of this van. However, instead of temporarily disconnecting the short and long-term memory portions of the brain, it sought to disconnect the memories from the emotions you were feeling at the time you experienced them.
  
  It didn't entirely work, but I thought that was all to the better as I intended its use to be exactly as I had instructed Johnny to use it today, as a drug to be used directly after an extremely traumatic event. If taken, it would make the last couple of hours as though you watched a film or read a novel instead of experiencing it. In my tests, using myself as the guinea pig, you wouldn't lose any memories, but they would be slightly disassociated.
  
  That didn't mean you wouldn't feel emotions about them, though, because there had been both films and novels that I had read that caused me to cry like a baby, but the purpose was to untangle the Gordian knot of post-traumatic stress before it got too large. You'd still have to work through all of your experiences, but the idea was to head off irrational self-destructive feedback loops before they got too carried away. Honestly, I intended to take a dose of the drug myself when I got home too. I was just trying not to think about things right now.
  
  I didn't know if administering a barely tested psychoactive Tinkertech drug to David was the correct decision. Still, I thought that I probably would have wanted it myself right after hearing that my mom had died, especially since I had been trying to call her on the phone at the time of the accident. It had been almost impossible to separate the irrational guilt I had felt for years. I knew, intellectually, that there was no way to know she was driving when I called, as well as that it was her responsibility not to be distracted while driving, but there was no way I could have emotionally felt that, much less even admit it. It wasn't until, well, maybe a year ago, that I came to this conclusion.
  
  Watching your mother get, effectively, murdered in front of you... no, I thought what I was doing was the correct decision, even if, as I hoped, I made it home in time to stabilise her. David was intelligent, but little boys were little boys, and little boys were stupid. There was a vast gulf between intelligence and smarts. He was likely thinking some ridiculous thing about how he should have been able to save her, and it was best to head off the guilt feedback loop as soon as possible. All the drug would do would allow him to look back on the events honestly instead of focusing on the emotions he was feeling at the time.
  
  Nodding, I glanced at Kiwi as I continued to ventilate her, squeezing the bag rhythmically with a free hand. Glancing at her neck, I sighed and composed a text message to Johnny Leung. I needed him to meet me at the parking garage with a few things. A gurney would be best, but I didn't have one. But I did have some immobilisation devices. I would get a lot of stares just carrying her back up to my clinic, but if I kept using four stacks of ten thousand eddies and duct tape as a make-shift C-spine collar? While carrying a suspiciously full duffle bag? No, that wouldn't fly, even in my building.
  
  Looking ahead at a minor traffic jam, I started hyperventilating again before catching myself and frowning, trying to find a way around it on the net, but the current path seemed to be the fastest route, even including the traffic. Still, it would likely double the estimated time to return to my building, which I didn't like the sound of at all.
  
  Sighing, I started writing a message to Wakako, although I was ignoring her attempts to call me at the moment. I definitely wasn't going to make our meeting, and she would have to come to see me at my home. She also needed to know what had happened, especially since Jean was still, theoretically, alive.
  
  I couldn't imagine he was in particularly good shape after being ejected from a previously moving vehicle. I hoped that the driver of the large truck we collided with wasn't injured too badly, but our van had hit it obliquely, tipped over and spun out. But she needed to know, and she had a strong motive to track him down as he almost stole from her and almost ruined the whole gig. I couldn't think about him anymore, though, because when I did, I started slightly dropping into a homicidal rage, which wasn't helpful to me at all right now.
  
  Wakako was also the one for whom I had made tentative plans for my "ace in the hole" plan, which, the more I thought about it, the more I felt I probably needed to enact. "Ace in the hole" was Alt-Dad's term, and it made it sound much cooler than it was. To be more accurate, I could have called it the "she bravely turned her tail and fled" plan.
  
  I'd like to say that I spent the rest of the car ride plotting my revenge, but I honestly just never wanted to see Jean again. There was a very good chance he only managed to get away to die of some internal injuries shortly after. If that wasn't the case, I didn't think anything I was willing to do would be worse than what Wakako would likely plan out. I just wanted him dead; I didn't have a large organisation and reputation as a fixer that demanded that people who betrayed me be made an object lesson.
  
  Shaking my head, I just waited for the ride to be over while doing a little first aid on myself. My liver was in a failover mode; although I didn't think it was damaged, some of the arterial connections to it were. I went ahead and shut it down completely, for now, though, as I didn't need slow internal bleeding in case there was damage that wasn't being detected. Although the liver was a vital organ necessary for survival, it would take some time for me to die without it. Toxins had to build up, after all. My nanosurgeons had already stopped most of the bleeding in my organic bits, so I wasn't really in that much acute danger anymore.
  
  It took almost twenty minutes to get back instead of the ten I had estimated. I took manual control of the van as it turned into my Megabuilding's parking structure. I didn't drive to my spaces, but directly next to the elevators, where I saw Johnny Leung and a few other minions. I didn't know how the hierarchy of the Tyger Claws worked, but the idea that Johnny was in some sort of supervisory capacity was hard to imagine. Thankfully, I saw the bag of my equipment at his feet. I had brought a small trauma bag with me on the gig, but mainly just first aid supplies, most of which I had on top of the pile of cash.
  
  I kept the van running but opened the driver's door and yelled, "Johnny! Come here; bring that bag."
  
  He walked... nay, he moseyed over to the open driver's side door, thrust the bag out to me and said, "Here you go, ma'am." I grabbed it quickly and pulled it into the car, setting it on the lap of the unconscious man I had carjacked. I unzipped the bag and pulled out a number of things, including one of my ventilators which I regretted not taking with me on the gig.
  
  Ripping a ventilator circuit out of the plastic bag, I quickly set it up and programmed it to provide the best ventilation possible, given the fact that I didn't have any oxygen bottles with me. That shouldn't really be an issue, though, as she stopped breathing due to physical trauma to her spinal cord, preventing her hypothalamus from transmitting signals that keep her body in homeostasis. It wasn't like she had pneumonia or injuries to her lungs and needed one hundred per cent oxygen, although that would have been better.
  
  I pulled the cash carefully off her neck, replacing it with a C-spine collar and hummed. Then I took two of the four stacks of cash that I used to immobilise her neck and stuffed them down the shirt of the unconscious man. I was so worried that I didn't even blush at the sight of his muscled chest and abdomen.
  
  Getting out of the front of the van, I walked around to the back to get everything. I picked up the duffle bag first, carrying it via a strap as I settled the running ventilator just below Kiwi's breasts, resting against her tummy as I then lifted her out of the van. I gave Johnny a side-eye and said, "I need one of your men to drive this vehicle somewhere safe that isn't here and leave it there with this guy in the passenger seat. Make sure nobody steals anything from the van or the guy."
  
  Johnny had remained quiescent as I unloaded the van and lifted Kiwi out using my hand to expertly cradle her head to prevent any further damage. He didn't comment on the obviously injured woman in my arms other than a slight tilting of his head.
  
  Johnny was wearing a pair of genuine Levi's, a faux-leather gun belt that also had a shorter version of a katana's sheath stuffed in a loop on the opposite hip to his pistol. I knew such a smaller sword was called something else, but I couldn't recall the actual word in Japanese, nor did I particularly care. He also had a pair of cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. I thought he looked kind of silly, but honestly, I owed him a lot if Gloria could be saved. After I made my request, he hummed for a moment before turning to one of the men and saying in Japanese, " Tanaka, take this vehicle to the parking garage across the street from Jinguji and leave it there, yeah? Do not molest or take anything from the man or the van. Return immediately on the NCART."
  
  The mook nodded and jumped into the driver's seat, and started driving away after Johnny closed the back doors of the van for me. I started walking quickly to the elevator. If Kiwi wasn't in my arms, I would be running.
  
  I quizzed Johnny about what happened while we walked, getting a better understanding. I was pretty sure this was the friend that Ruslan implied was in the process of kidnapping Gloria and David. Kidnapping two people when you only had one person to do it seemed foolish, and there was no telling what precisely happened.
  
  We did get a few stares from the looky-loos as we walked to my apartment, but it wasn't exactly that unusual a sight, I supposed. I had injured people brought to me by the Claws, although not that often. I eyed the janitorial worker who was sullenly cleaning up what had to be the remains of blood stains off the wall right next to my door. From what Johnny had told me, he was a decisive man, at least which I approved of. He had shot the guy almost before he left my clinic.
  
  I opened my door with my implants, suddenly scared as to what I would find inside. All Johnny had told me was that Kumo-kun started to do things that he found quite disturbing, which sounded about right, but I wouldn't know if Gloria was salvageable until I entered the room. However, unlike Schrödinger's cat, what had happened had already happened. There was no quantum superposition to collapse here, so remaining outside would just be rank cowardice. Sighing, I stepped inside quickly, being followed by the Samurai Gunman.
  
  "Ah, good, the Demon Wind left," Johnny said, his tone brightening as I looked for a place I could set Kiwi down, frowning at the poor choices all around. Finally, I cleaned my long workbench off as well as I could and rested her there for a moment as I walked over to see the state of Gloria, wincing as my eyes took in her injuries.
  
  Although I was curious about this Demon Wind, I asked him, "Can you see if Mr Jin will lend me the gurney in Clouds' clinic?" There was a rolling gurney in that room, kind of like what I would have found in a hospital back in Brockton Bay, with no technology installed at all, nothing as my biobed had. But it would prevent her from waking up and rolling off my work table, and killing herself.
  
  Johnny rubbed the back of his neck, "He's in a meeting with the bosses, but I 'spect he wouldn't have an issue. Let me go get it."
  
  I ignored Johnny leaving as I looked down at Gloria's body. The sensors that Kumo-kun placed on her were, of course, reporting that she had flatlined and that she had no detectable SPo2 levels, which wasn't surprising because the pulse oximeter sensor was on her finger. With the vampire cuff on, she would not have any oxygen or blood perfusing her extremities at all.
  
  I unclipped the sensor and clipped it onto her earlobe, getting a good reading of about ninety per cent, which was a good sign. I let out a sigh, seeing that Kumo-kun had succeeded. I didn't know how long her brain was without oxygen, but it didn't seem to be that long, given Johnny's story and Kumo-kun had performed the procedure correctly.
  
  The damage to her body was... catastrophic, though. Much more than what I was expecting two shots from a shotgun to accomplish. I noticed the likely weapon the dead man used as I walked into the clinic and went and picked it up, frowning. It was a short-barreled, break-action, double-barreled shotgun. Opening the breach, I ejected two shotgun shells that were much larger than twelve gauge. Writing on the side of the weapon was in Cyrillic text, and part of it read in all caps, "ЦНИИТОЧМАШ."
  
  My Kiroshi optics switched automatically to a measuring mode, detecting my intent with the scanner pulling up and measuring the barrel to be almost exactly 23 millimetres. That was a significantly larger diameter than a twelve gauge and instantly answered my question as to the extent of Gloria's injuries. It looked like she had been shot in the chest four, five or six times instead of twice like Johnny suggested.
  
  Shaking my head, I tossed the weapon aside and put on some nitrile gloves and turned to her body, mentally vacillating between a few treatment plans as I inspected the damage close up. I was now positive that I could save her life, so I relaxed some, but I wasn't sure I could save much of her body.
  
  Every organ in her torso was damaged beyond repair, and her body had already begun necrotising due to the lack of oxygen, although that could be fixed. Her spine was completely destroyed from below the brainstem. Everything was just fucked. If I had unlimited time, I was certain I could repair everything, but I was very worried that I didn't.
  
  When the door opened, I spun around, my hand dropping to the pistol on my thigh for a moment before I recognised Johnny rolling in a hospital-style gurney. "Put it over here," I ordered him while I removed the gloves I was wearing and tossed them into a special red medical waste trash receptacle that I kept on hand. I easily picked up Kiwi again and placed her carefully in the bed, and spent a couple of minutes connecting an IV to her and starting some opiates and other sedatives to keep her from waking up.
  
  Kiwi was in critical condition, but any hospital in Night City could handle her injuries, but that was asking for her to be murdered. I was worried about the same for Gloria, too, actually. I honestly didn't know how much time I had, but I was hoping I could ask Wakako's opinion when she came around. She had already texted me, telling me she would arrive when she could.
  
  The problem was that our "car accident" would be quickly investigated and determined to be something else. The van was shot to shit, and there was a high likelihood that it would be linked to the running street battle that occurred not too far from the accident site. If that happened, Biotechnica would muscle in on the investigation. Ruslan's body was right there and could be identified. In fact, all of our genetic material was in the van. Mine, obviously, was from getting shot. Kiwi's nose was broken in the crash, and Jean went through a window.
  
  I had wanted to torch the van before I left, but I didn't want to do it while carrying Kiwi; plus, I didn't have that much experience doing anything like that. I suppose I could have cut the fuel line easily enough with the van on its side, but I didn't have anything handy to light the subsequent fuel on fire, and I knew that randomly shooting a puddle of CHOOH2 didn't actually set it on fire, despite what the films and BDs would like you to believe.
  
  I felt that immediately leaving the scene was more important than fucking around and maybe getting caught by the NCPD, even if that caused me problems later on. I was pretty positive that it would, but I didn't think my choice was wrong. Sighing, I glanced over at the hatbox I kept on one of my shelves.
  
  Wakako arrived about an hour and a half later with two gorilla-sized men, which I presumed were acting as bodyguards. She rang the doorbell politely rather than let herself in, which I appreciated. When she walked in, she glanced around, and not seeing Gloria, her eyes softened a bit, and she asked, trailing off politely, "Did Miss Martinez...?"
  
  I turned around. Kiwi was in the biobed now. I had completely stabilised her, and I just needed some supplies to fix her completely. She required a cybernetic replacement for part of the nervous tissue in her spinal cord, but this was a pretty common and temporary fix. It would get her walking around, but the definitive treatment was replacing the damaged nervous tissue with cloned replacement, nanorepair in a biosculpt tank or an entire spinal replacement; for example, a Kerenzikov installation would also work.
  
  I was assuming she didn't tolerate boostware as well as I did, plus I didn't have a spare one lying in my stocks, so I was just going to get her on her feet. I, or another doctor, could fix her definitively with about twelve hours in a biosculpt tank. A biosculpt tank was one of the things I was going to buy today because I could convert it easily enough to also function as cloning equipment.
  
  I shook my head and said, "She's still alive and will be fine, but her body was a write-off." I motioned to the modified hatbox that was sitting on my workbench. My original hatbox was designed only to store brains, but most Borg bio-pods included portions of the spine as well, so I quickly modified it to those specifications.
  
  Her previous body, I had already placed in a body bag. I didn't want any chance David might see it again. I didn't have the equipment to clone her an entire replacement body yet, although I intended to get Wakako to get it for me. That said, I could fairly easily get a Gemini ordered from Raven Microcybernetics on the black, grey or above-board market. They cost over two hundred and fifty thousand Eurodollars for a stock model, but that would be a small price to pay to get Gloria on her feet again.
  
  If she wanted to keep it, that would be fine too. If not, then I could clone her a replacement biological body and perform a brain transplant, and I could sell the Gemini as gently used for almost the full price. I was definitely willing to spend a quarter of a million eurodollars to make Gloria whole again. If she wanted a cloned body, she was getting one that was improved significantly over baseline, anyway.
  
  She brightened at that, "I'm a little curious why you happened to have a brain life support pod on hand, but that is secondary, I suppose. I'm glad she is alive, in a sense, but what are your plans? For yourself, her and Miss Kiwi? Let's take a moment and discuss how things went wrong on the gig."
  
  I nodded and said, "Let's go into my apartment; it's more comfortable. If your mooks don't mind standing guard out here?"
  
  One of the mooks definitely seemed to mind, but Wakako waved him off, saying, "I very much doubt Taylor intends me harm. It's fine."
  
  We walked into my apartment, and Wakako raised an eyebrow as she followed me in, "If you want, feel free to change out of that ruined dress if you like. Also, are you shot?"
  
  I glanced behind me at her, "I mean, a little... it's fine, though. I'm not bleeding anymore," I told her but thought about it and nodded, "Yes, if you don't mind, I'm going to take a quick shower unless there is anything pressing you need me to tell you now?"
  
  She snorted, amused, "No. I pretty much understand the broad strokes of what happened. I do have some news, but it isn't immediately pressing."
  
  I wondered what that could mean but just nodded. I went into my bathroom and stripped out of my ballistic vest, holster, dress and underthings and stood in the hot shower, washing the caked blood and grime off me for a couple of minutes. While in the shower, I programmed my techhair to its full curliness and restored my natural hair colour, but I decided to keep the length. I liked long hair, and since attending basic, I have been growing mine back out again.
  
  I redressed in one of my business-casual outfits and replaced the holster on my thigh before I returned to the living room with a towel over my head. I did feel quite a bit better just for the shower. Wakako had made some tea in my kitchen, which was nice, I supposed. I sat on my couch and sipped the tea in front of me. I wasn't that worried that Wakako would poison me.
  
  Well, actually, I was a little worried, but things had deteriorated to the point where I had no backup plan but to trust her. In fact, Wakako featured heavily in my "ace in the hole" plan. If she wanted to tie up loose ends with me as one of them, all I could do was hopefully take her with me. I also had a packet of information that would automatically forward to a number of people if I suddenly went missing. I had already updated that packet of information, too, to specify that it was likely Wakako responsible, which would damage her reputation quite a bit.
  
  My first idea for a deadman's switch involved highly infectious pathogens secreted on my body. My medical sense was kind of sociopathic at times, I felt. I had the feeling that it was like a happy, sociopathic puppy. "So, are we sure it was Biotechnica that attacked us? It seems unlikely that it could have been someone else," I told her.
  
  Wakako nodded, "I'm almost positive it was Biotechnica, but I am not positive it was my contact yet. I'm giving him an opportunity to clear his own name. He is suggesting it is one of his former peers, attempting to both screw him over and get something for themselves at the same time."
  
  I rubbed the back of my neck, near where my cyberdeck was, and drew on all of Alt-Taylor's memories that I could. That sounded plausible. His boss died, and he was merely acting as the boss temporarily. His former peers would likely have the opportunity to get information about the exchange and possibly sabotage it. The saboteur wouldn't want to completely sabotage it, but enough sense of betrayal to get Wakako to murder his or her rival while still getting everything Biotechnica wanted was a possibility.
  
  If so, then maybe they were just grasping at straws. I was working under the impression that they knew, somehow, that the inventor, myself, was at the exchange and were trying to kidnap me. The little power plays that I had ignored and most of the questions they asked pointed to that possibility.
  
  If not, then it didn't necessarily mean they wouldn't still be searching for me; it just meant the intensity of their search would be less. Corporate bullshit... it was so wearying.
  
  I'd like very much to burn the entire Corporation to the ground, but that wasn't a realistic scenario. If I wanted to get even, I would have to do it like I had done that Mercenary leader. I'd have to do it in such a way as nobody realised the damage was from me. Was such an act of private revenge merely spite, I wondered?
  
  I shook my head, "Our agreement was that any perfidy and we would release the data, possibly publicly. What do you recommend?"
  
  Her mouth made a fine line, "Not a public release, but we do have to do something. My contact expects as much, and it would simply be seen as a sign of weakness if we didn't follow through. I recommend we give or sell the research to one of their competitors. This will cost them about half their profits, as they'll definitely come to some sort of agreement with that Corporation, and the drug will likely be released as some sort of joint venture."
  
  "I'm done trying to sell this thing. I got what I wanted out of it. I'll release a copy of the research to Trauma Team; they have a small pharmaceutical research division and have four times the military strength as Biotechnica, so they can't really be pushed around," I said after barely a moment's thought. I shook my head and said sourly, "Besides, I might have to resign with immediate effect there, which wouldn't be in accordance with my employment contract." I left it unstated because it sounded like a weakness, but I would feel I owed them something in that case.
  
  Wakako raised an eyebrow, "So you're planning on wanting that new identity after all? Your requirements were kind of stringent - a real person, female, with no real family or friends and a legitimate degree in medicine." Wakako shook her head, "I do have such an identity; she had been kidnapped by Maelstrom and forced to act as a surgeon for them and was killed when the clinic they had her stashed in was raided a couple of weeks ago. Nobody knows she is dead... yet, but it will be difficult to just slide into her identity, even with surgery to resemble her. A lot of things are taste-locked these days, and her genome is definitely on file."
  
  Taste-lock was a slang word for rapid genome testing for identity verification, and Wakako was implying that I would be discovered as soon as I applied for a job using the stolen, well, inherited identity. I didn't believe you could steal from the dead, and she allegedly didn't have any family left.
  
  I waved a hand, "It shouldn't be that difficult, so long as you can find me a sample of her DNA."
  
  "Are you implying what I think you're implying?" Wakako asked amusedly, "Because if you are, then that is what I will want as payment for this favour. Four times. I often have people who might need a new start, so to speak, and genetics clinics that can actually adjust someone's genome specifically are heavily scrutinised by, well, everyone."
  
  I pursed my lips and said simply, "Hypothetically, if it becomes known I could do such a thing, then it would ruin my disguise. People would wonder if I was who I claimed to be." She was correct, though. It was usually only serious secret squirrel types who could get a full genome change for a fake or assumed identity. I'd need to buy or acquire some tools, but I was absolutely certain I could fashion a virus to accomplish the change in a person, even if it took multiple re-infections over a few weeks.
  
  "I'm going to be the only one who knows your new identity, and I'm sure we could arrange some sort of anonymous way for you to accomplish it for anyone I send you, even if I have to send the person unconscious for the entire treatment," she said reasonably.
  
  I frowned. I'd rather pay in Eurodollars, but finally, I nodded, "Only one time, though. Four is way too much, considering how much such a service would cost you if you could ever find someone to do it."
  
  "Three times," she countered, and then we settled on twice. She seemed inordinately pleased, so I suspected I might have gotten ripped off. I didn't actually know what the black market going rate for a genome duplication was, but I started to suspect it was more than I thought it was if it was available as a service at all.
  
  She immediately sent me a digital file, which was a complete dossier on a woman that was named "蓮池 桜 (Hasumi Sakura)." A woman of twenty-nine years old and a number of centimetres shorter than me. I frowned. Lotus and cherry blossom characters in the same name? Not only was the name excessively flowery, but...
  
  I complained, "Mrs Okada, I don't speak Japanese. I barely recognise the characters in this name! I also know none of the cultural referents for someone who grew up in Japan," I complained, "Don't you have any European or American choices?"
  
  She shook her head, "No. How often do you think doctors die without anyone knowing in Night City? You're lucky I had any. We would have to have gone with a totally fake identity unless you want me to kidnap and do away with some doctor so you could steal her identity?" She asked the last with amusement, and I shook my head.
  
  She shrugged, "Then just get a high-quality Japanese language skill chip. The best ones will teach you the language after using it for half a year. Besides, are you planning on living the rest of your life as Dr Hasumi?" she asked, a slightly unbelieving tone to her voice.
  
  I shrugged, "Only if I very much have to. I'd like to resume my actual identity if I know I'm not being hunted down like a dog. I just think it is better to assume I am being hunted right now and leave everything behind for a few years."
  
  "Then who cares? Are there any real objections?" she asked imperiously.
  
  I sighed and reviewed her file again, frowning. I was hoping I could vanish for a few years, then return as my actual identity. I didn't want to abandon the name Hebert unless keeping it would get me killed. I wasn't so proud if it cost me my life.
  
  As soon as I realised that I would likely have to disappear, though, I realised that my idea of going to medical school was dead along with it. I didn't think I needed the education provided. I just wanted the credential and if I was honest, more experience of "college life." Even when I got back under my own identity, I was leaning towards bribing someone in one of the medical schools to just give me a degree. I was sure I would excel regardless.
  
  Finally, I frowned and complained, "Dr Hasumi graduated from a dual PhD, and MD degree program in Kyoto, but she never actually worked as a resident, so she isn't really a doctor. She's also a citizen of Japan, although she has a visa to work in the NUSA. Do you know why she was in the country at all?" I doubted very much that Maelstrom cared that she wasn't technically allowed to practise medicine, but anywhere I wanted to work would, or if I wanted to start my own practice.
  
  Wakako shrugged, "No, I don't. But it isn't that uncommon for Japanese physicians to come work in the NUSA. What does that mean, precisely, that she was never a resident?"
  
  "It just means I would have to get a job as a medical resident for at least a year, perhaps longer," I sighed. It wasn't really an insurmountable issue, and I was sure I could get hired at a teaching hospital fairly easily. I would also have to deeply research whatever research focus she received her PhD in. People, especially doctors, would ask about it and if I didn't know it backwards and forwards, well, that would be a clue I wasn't actually Dr Hasumi.
  
  I downed the rest of my tea in one large gulp. "I'll need a new identity for Gloria and her son, too. Maybe Kiwi, too. Those can be fake, obviously." It was a lot easier to pass a fake identity that didn't have any credentials associated with it. In fact, plain fake identities like this were a dime a dozen everywhere because record keeping since the DataKrash was a lot worse than it was before. Reducing or adding height through biosculpt was possible, but it took a very long time. So I was going to be spending a significant amount of time in the tank before I could pass myself off as Dr Hasumi.
  
  Speaking of which, "I need to acquire a full biosculpt setup as soon as possible. If possible, I'd rather not have to pay full price for it, either." I was basically asking her to send some of her mercs to steal it for me, which caused Wakako's eyes to gleam.
  
  "Why, what a coincidence; I happen to know a few clinics that are owned by Biotechnica. I can get you what you need for fifty thousand," she replied, probably amused at combining revenge and profit. Considering that was one-tenth of what such a setup cost, I felt it was a good deal and also approved of stealing it from Biotechnica. She coughed and said, "Oh, that reminds me... the news I was going to give you. I think you'll be happy to know that I found Jean."
  
  I winced. I was kind of glad that he wouldn't be looming after me in the future, somehow like a jump scare in a scary movie, just waiting for the right time to startle me. That said, he was my friend once. I didn't want to participate or even know about what was likely going to happen to him; I just wanted to never see him again. I sighed, "Where was he?"
  
  "He was fairly injured but managed to get away. Stole a car, similar to you, although the driver wasn't treated as well as yours. It would have probably taken me longer to pick him up, but he went straight to a net runner with a cred chip he claimed had two million eddies on it, as well as a virus," she raised an eyebrow at that and spread her arms wide, "Turns out it didn't have any money on it, but by that time the word was already out that I wanted him so the runner just called me and we picked him up."
  
  I sighed. I didn't even bother pulling that datashard out of my bag when I fled the van, so I hadn't noticed that it was, apparently, missing. From this story, it sounded like he had klepped it before the accident, perhaps as soon as I handed him the backpack, which would track. Poor fucker. "I, of course, transferred the money more or less immediately, but I pretended like I still needed the datashard so as not to rub the Biotechnica people's faces in it. I'm sure they did the same thing with the data I gave them, but they pretended to take the chip with them too." I shook my head, "That's standard Corpo politeness, but I guess Jean wouldn't recognise it."
  
  Wakao just nodded, wincing, although her eyes were deeply amused, glittering with promised malice. All she said was, "Ouch. Poor guy."
  
  After that, we discussed how we would split the money. Although I trusted her somewhat, I demanded that she take the bag o' cash first, and then once I had a clean amount of cash, I would transmit the digital currency to wherever she wanted. She was fine with that arrangement. I declined her offer to go "speak with" Jean, merely stating that I never wanted to see him again.
  
  After that, we would get all of my belongings moved to a temporary safe house.
  
  As I was loading most of my personal belongings into boxes, the sample of Dr Hasumi's genome arrived, along with a data storage implant in a clear plastic static-resistant bag. I called Wakako immediately, and she said, "Oh, I thought I would give you this too. We took it out of Dr Hasumi, but it is taste-locked, too."
  
  I raised an eyebrow. It was a somewhat high-end data storage implant, similar to the one I had taken out of Kumo-kun's brain, except instead of encrypting through a continual brain scan, it encrypted through a taste lock of the user's genome. It was a little unusual for a random doctor to have, but people did like their privacy. I asked, "Why in the world did you keep it, then?"
  
  "Oh, simple. SNDL," she said over the phone and then at my silence, she said, "Store now, decrypt later. Who knows when some advance in cryptology will occur that would allow us to decrypt it easily? And information can stay valuable for decades, even information from a dead woman. We don't know who paid for her education. Perhaps her family inheritance paid for it, but maybe she's the secret lover of Yorinobu Arasaka, and knowing that would be worth tons. It's very cheap to do, so why not?"
  
  I supposed that made sense, but I said firmly, "She had better not be the secret lover of Yorinobu Arasaka."
  
  That caused Wakako to laugh, "Oh, there's almost a zero per cent chance of that. There is a chance she got her education paid for by a Corp for some reason, though, but you already knew that risk. Maybe you could find out more about her through the data stored in her implant, even if it is just to improve your legend." Legend, that was another spy word that seemed to roll off Wakako's tongue easily.
  
  I was silent, and then Wakako asked, "Have you decided on your destination?" She knew I intended to leave Night City for at least a year, maybe longer. Not only did I not want to be someone who popped up here as soon as Taylor Hebert disappeared, but I kind of wanted a break from this city. Although I knew it would draw me back eventually because there was something magnetic about the place.
  
  I sighed and double-checked the encryption on the call before saying, "The city of angels. Going north to the Free States would be problematic, and I already have a visa to work in NUSA. The situation in Los Angeles is almost worse than Night City from a crime perspective, and I definitely will be hired at any of the hospitals there for my residency."
  
  The amusing thing was I might end up working for Trauma Team again, as they had a large trauma centre in Hollywood that was associated with the University of California in Los Angeles. I would have to make doubly sure that all of my implants were scrubbed clean of all of the company apps I had installed. Perhaps I would upgrade my deck and operating system and change everything out that way. Although I very rarely used my deck offensively, so I didn't really need an ultra-performance model, it would be nice to upgrade from the beginner's version I was using now.
  
  "Ah, good choice. Not too far away, but at the same time, a world apart. I'll send you a list of places that I would recommend a young Japanese woman to live, as well as a list of places I would highly recommend you stay away from. I'd recommend you get a dual Japanese-Mandarin skillchip, too, then. The Chinese control that city more than we do, but they run it in a similar way," she said amicably. She was implying that there was a Tong or Triad there that was similar to the Tyger Claws, likely, they were friendly with each other. The Claws protected Chinese and other Asian people in Night City in Japantown, and this currently unknown Chinese organisation probably did the same for the Japanese residents of, I presumed Chinatown.
  
  The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. I disconnected the call after inquiring when the moving mooks would be here.
  
  I'd have Kiwi up and walking by then. I was willing to take her with me, and Wakako approved doubling the pay and giving it all to Kiwi. She might want to stay in Night City with sixty thousand eddies acquired all at once. I didn't know yet. But I owed her my life and more.
  
  The worst part about this was I was going to have to get rid of my car. That and explaining to David why his mom wouldn't be around for a couple of months and about how his last name is now different. Perhaps I could get Gloria admitted to UCLA as a nursing student while I was in LA?
  
  Todd woke up, drooling on himself, in the rental van. He had hundreds of missed calls on the encrypted tacnet and had a sudden fright that he had, somehow, gotten drunk and missed the op as he did not remember getting in the van.
  
  But the last thing he remembered was he was eating breakfast at the wonderful Azure Plaza. Their team had been ordered to watch this pretty girl for months, with no real reason why. She worked for Trauma Team and didn't look much older than his little sister, so he was mighty curious. But, it didn't really do to ask why in his line of work, and it was an easy assignment.
  
  Apparently, she was something of a badass herself. At least, he got that opinion, along with a slight crush on her, after watching footage from a high-altitude drone of her single-handedly wrecking a Wraith encampment out of the city.
  
  His present assignment was to spend a night in the best hotel in Night City and inform his boss when the girl was leaving the building. Why, then, was he inside his van?
  
  He suspected he might be in some trouble. He sighed, and he learned from his stint in the NUSA Army that it didn't do to prolong this sort of ass chewin', so he got on the tacnet, "Eye-5, reporting in."
  
  The tacnet was suddenly full of chortles and a couple of laughs before his boss got on the line and the rest of the men quieted. His boss was terse, "Eye-5, Eye-1, what's your status?"
  
  "Ah reckon Eye-5's up 'n runnin' just fine, but uhh... it's like ah just done woke up, an' there's a dang..." he glanced at his internal chronometer, "... four-hour hole in mah memory. Apologies, boss, I couldn't rightly let ya know when that ol' target skedaddled on outta here. I think I was drugged, ya?"
  
  "Eye-5, Eye-1, delete your West Virginian folksy bullshit. You don't work for the NUSA anymore. Yeah, you got fucking drugged. Are you serious? You have amnesia? You followed the target as planned, and then intervened when she got into a car accident, and she dosed you with something and stole your van," his boss came back on the line.
  
  One of the others piped up with, "It was hilarious!"
  
  Todd snorted. He didn't particularly care who he worked for. He certainly wasn't an American patriot. Before he got this job, most of his family back home barely survived off home gardens and often did a spell in the slammer for shootin' some critter the government was too fond of, so he had no deep abiding respect for the government like his great grandaddy probably did. He didn't mind working for some rich family, it was pretty much all the same to him, and these fellows paid a lot better, letting him send some money back home, keeping his entire clan in food.
  
  He got back on the radio and, this time, was using purely standard radio phraseology, "Eye-1, Eye-5, Affirmative. I'll need to be examined by the medics. I kind of want to watch my video download now, more than ever. I'll head back to the RP, now," he said amusedly.
  
  When he stood up to slide into the driver's seat, he felt something rough rubbing up against his chest, inside his shirt and blinked. He glanced down into his shirt and raised an eyebrow, seeing two thick stacks of bills. Pulling them out of his shirt, he inspected them, seeing the marking of €10,000 on a band of paper that was holding each stack together. Twenty thousand? Not bad. A little more than he made every two weeks, still, he got on the radio delightedly, "Boys, the drinks are on me tonight!"
  
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  We're the government & are here to help
  David had asked me if he could sleep in my bed that night, and so I found myself lying in bed, holding the boy while my mind was still wide awake. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I hardly ever used my bed in the first place, so I was just laying there, silent, still and waiting for the morning while considering the previous day. Every now and then, I would check Kiwi's vitals and a visual feed of my biobed, as well as plan out her upcoming surgery. Although I made sure all of my medical equipment, especially Kumo-kun, was disconnected from the net itself, I could still make direct wireless connections to the devices so long as I was close enough.
  
  Explaining to David that his Mom wasn't dead was hard when I couldn't show her to him. To me, his eyes had the look of someone desperately trying to convince themselves the lies he was hearing were the truth.
  
  My EQ wasn't low enough that I had the idea to show him my hatbox, either. As far as he knew, she was in a specialised hospital, which wasn't, by some definitions, a lie. He understood that she was hurt very badly, and he was intelligent enough to realise that there was no way she could afford treatment at a traditional hospital for an injury this severe, so he wasn't asking questions. That he was so aware of money at his age was kind of sad, but Gloria was so frugal that she must have talked to David a lot about money, even when he was just in kindergarten.
  
  For now, he accepted what I had told him, that I would be able to fix his Mom up as good as new, although I intended for her to be better in the end. I hadn't quite told him about possibly leaving town with me because I didn't know for sure that Gloria would want to. I was setting up the options for both Kiwi and Gloria to do so if they wanted, though. I think it would be the safest thing they could do, but Gloria wasn't in as much ongoing danger as Kiwi would be and might want to stay in Night City.
  
  However, the current state of the art in cloning technology required about a half-year to fast-grow a complete adult human body to full maturation, so it wasn't often done. Merely growing a specific organ, or in the case of the food industry, one "cut" of meat, was a lot quicker as they used more specialised machinery, but it still took days to a week, depending on the mass and complexity involved.
  
  I was certain that I could increase the speed in the cloning vat I intended to build by a lot, but unless Wakako managed to steal two biosculpt setups, I would need to have priority use of one to begin transitioning to my disguise.
  
  Adding or removing a little over ten centimetres of height could be done, but it was the most time-intensive, and therefore expensive, thing that biosculpt treatments could do. I would need over sixty hours in the tank to take that much height off myself safely. If you considered my current non-organic augmentations, especially my stealth system, that I would have to adjust at the same time, it would probably take half again as much time in the tank, plus however much time it took the traditional surgeries on myself to adjust these non-organic parts.
  
  In other words, even after I got the biosculpt tank and even after I converted it into a dual-use cloning vat and upgraded it, not only would I need to monopolise it for at least a week, perhaps more, but I would need three weeks minimum to grow Gloria a new organic body. That meant she wouldn't be back for two months after the physical therapy, depending on how things went. It's likely closer to three when you considered that I was fleeing the city simultaneously and wouldn't be able to start growing a clone until I was somewhere where we wouldn't be moving the equipment around.
  
  I felt it was too long for David to be without his Mom; by that point, he would start to think I was just lying to him and Gloria was really dead. That wouldn't be good for his psyche, even if he learned it wasn't true later. Attachment and co-dependence and a number of other psychiatric issues could easily develop that way. Not to mention my own guilt meant I wanted her back as soon as possible.
  
  After tonight, David and I would be staying in a safe house with all of my belongings until I was able to leave the city. I would have Kiwi repaired by this morning, I felt. I was waiting on the delivery of some components that I bought from the ripperdoc I used in Japantown.
  
  I had an eclectic collection of implants in my stocks, but as they tended to come from people like Scavs and those Wraiths, they were mostly the expensive kind that I couldn't immediately liquidate by selling to other nearby doctors. I didn't have any plain neural tissue replacements that I could use to fix Kiwi, and I didn't want to take her to this doctor to do the work either. Although he was somewhat under the Tyger Claws and, therefore, by extension, Wakako's thumb, I wouldn't trust him entirely to be discreet.
  
  It was better to do the work myself, anyway. I had been holding myself back because, in some ways, I wanted to fit in with what I felt was a civilised society, but I had been drifting away from that for some time. A civilised nine-to-five doctor didn't annihilate a group of Wraiths in the Badlands, for example. When it came down to one of my only friends, I didn't give one whit what credentials I had. It might be hubris, but I didn't think there was anyone on the planet who could do a better job than I could.
  
  As for Gloria... Fundamentally, replacing Gloria's organic body would take way too much time when I could have a brand new Gemini delivered to me on the grey market three to four days after my wire transfer cleared. That made it clear to me that a full-body replacement, even if it was temporary, should be the first step in her treatment plan.
  
  I couldn't buy a new Gemini myself on the up and up, even using the credentials from my new identity, because Raven Microcybernetics required doctors that bought its full-body replacements to attend certain Gemini-specific training that they offered, but I could easily get a new model on the black or grey markets for a suitable markup.
  
  I should have Gloria out of the hatbox before I left town. That would give her a chance to decide whether or not she wanted to come with me, but it meant I would be delaying my physical transformation to my new identity until she decided. Although I trusted her more than most people, she couldn't be forced to tell people things she didn't know.
  
  I noticed my doorbell ring, and it looked like it was the courier from the doctor's office. Instead of answering it myself, though, a couple of Tyger Claws that were unobtrusively guarding my door intercepted the courier and took the package from him, and I got a text message asking me if I wanted the package delivered unopened. It wasn't anything sensitive, so I told them they could go ahead and examine it for bombs, neurotoxins and tiny elves with switchblades.
  
  I was surprised at the level of security a mere street gang had, as Johnny Leung had mentioned that he would have my two cars moved somewhere temporarily once they examined them for bombs and tracking devices. I felt a bit bad for making them go out of their way, and he had just looked at me oddly and finally told me that it was just their standard sweep that they performed before they drove any vehicle. I supposed it wasn't paranoia when you really had people out to get you.
  
  Apparently, Clouds had even stricter security, with every package addressed to them being delivered to an off-site location and inspected for all manners of deadly things.
  
  I glanced at David, who had fallen asleep cuddling into my chest and was using my arm as a pillow. I moved slowly and eventually, over a period of about ten minutes, was able to extricate myself from him, transitioning his head onto one of my pillows. As I tucked him into the blanket, I felt that the feat of keeping him asleep should have resulted in a Stealth skill level up from how difficult it was, too.
  
  In my clinic, I carefully prepared for the upcoming surgery. I double-checked my plan, carefully examining the medical images I was able to take of her injury and closed my eyes, mentally simulating every aspect of it, along with contingencies for if things wildly went wrong. Although this was a relatively simple surgery, and I wasn't expecting anything to go wrong, it didn't do to make assumptions.
  
  Kiwi was in an induced coma, and I would keep her in one for probably the rest of the day. After the surgery to repair her spine, I planned on using nanomedicine to repair her tracheotomy and performing normal endotracheal intubation on her for the rest of the day. If things went well, I would be able to extubate and wake her about the time I was going to leave for the temporary safe house.
  
  In the middle of the surgery on Kiwi, David pitter-pattered out of my apartment in his pyjamas and got wide-eyed. Although, he wasn't as frightened of the blood in the operating theatre as I would have thought from a kid that had just had an extremely traumatic experience.
  
  "Aunt Taylor, can I watch?" he asked, kind of interested. I let him after I secured a promise that he wouldn't interfere, along with making him put on a surgical mask. It wouldn't do for him to breathe all his little boy germs directly into the Kiwi's exposed spine; I also made him wash his hands very thoroughly, even though I explicitly told him to keep his hands firmly at his sides.
  
  I glanced at him as he peered down as Kumo-kun and I worked on repairing the fractures and finalising the installation of the neural tissue replacement. I asked him in a lull, "Are you interested in medicine?" I asked him, curious. Perhaps he would follow in his Mom's footsteps into medicine!
  
  "Uh, n-not really, it looks kind of gross," the boy replied, looking at the process of me repairing two shattered vertebrae. I had already installed the cybernetic neural prosthesis and was in the clean-up stage. Back in Brockton Bay, orthopaedics was kind of a barbaric part of medicine, according to my power, with one of the prerequisites being physical strength.
  
  As such, nine out of ten orthopaedic surgeons were males. However, repairing bones was a lot easier in the world I found myself in now. Although Trauma Team wasn't primarily a pharmaceutical company, one of the products they sold was a series of different trauma-based nanomeds under the brand name MaxDoc. I was using the ones intended to temporarily fix and repair broken and even shattered bones right now.
  
  Kiwi's spine would be a bit weaker than usual for about forty-eight hours, but after that, it would be stronger than it was before it shattered. David asked, "You never did say how Miss Kiwi got hurt."
  
  I hummed behind my surgical mask and said, "We were in a car accident. There were some bad men after us, and she did a very brave thing and intentionally crashed our car, which caused them to be injured and us to escape." I didn't want to tell him that the bad men were my friends whom he had seen a couple of times.
  
  His eyes sparkled, although I couldn't see what expression he had behind the mask he wore, "Maybe if I was as brave as Miss Kiwi, I could have done something to help Mom. Are you sure she will be okay?"
  
  I nodded, "Her brain was without oxygen for almost twenty minutes; that isn't good, but it isn't that bad either, as these things go. I've already begun treatments to repair the damage this hypoxia caused." Hypoxia-related brain injuries were quite predictable in the way they damaged neural tissue and, therefore, reasonably easy to repair with nanomachines, which I had running in the hatbox. I looked at the incomprehension in his eyes and mentally berated myself. David was an intelligent kid, but he was still just five-or rather, five and a half, as he repeatedly claimed.
  
  I spent a few moments rephrasing what I said and dumbing it down to his level, eventually getting an excited nod. "And you shouldn't blame yourself; Johnny told me that you were very brave. You just have some growing to do before you can handle bad guys." Although I hoped very much his ambitions went beyond smiting bad guys, especially since there were so many in this world.
  
  "Oh, he was so cool! Wham-blam! The bad guy was all over the wall!" the somewhat excited boy said, raising his hands in a finger gun until my glare at him reminded him he was supposed to keep them to his side. His voice had a hint of grim satisfaction at his kidnapper's fate too, which I found slightly problematic in a child his age. Not to mention anyone thinking Johnny was cool was ipso facto evidence of mental illness by itself.
  
  Still, I couldn't help feeling some of that satisfaction too. I didn't have many friends left, so anyone who hurt the ones I did have, I would want to see smeared over a nearby wall, too. I had to think of some way to repay the obnoxious Samurai, but I didn't have any real ideas yet. So I just nodded and said, "This is the last part; then I'll use this special glue to heal the incision site. It won't even leave a scar."
  
  "Glue?! Sick!" said the boy, looking pretty interested for someone who said they weren't interested at all.
  
  I extubated and woke Kiwi as the Tyger Claws were moving most of my stuff out of the building. I shooed them out of my apartment temporarily so I could have a frank discussion with her after she demanded a shower first. At first, she was a little weak, like a newborn deer, but she gained her strength and her balance back quickly.
  
  I had already told her about the money she was owed, and Wakako had already delivered a series of bags with my share of the exchanged physical notes. I wasn't sure how she laundered the currency, but there were a number of options. Since Biotechnica knew she was involved in the gig anyway, perhaps she just directly deposited them all in her bank account, as in that case, they wouldn't learn anything new.
  
  Beyond the sixty thousand dollars, I owed Kiwi a lot more than that. That sixty thousand was just what the venture owed her. I personally owed her more than money could ever buy, so I was hesitant to even put a price on what I owed her, as it seemed like it would cheapen it.
  
  "Of course, I'll come with you wherever you're going," Kiwi said, her voice still a little scratchy-sounding from being on a ventilator for almost twenty-four hours, "I don't really have much keeping me here, and I agree it might be best for us to lay low for a while. It won't be the first time I've had a new name, either." She shrugged and then asked, curious, "You sound like you intend to come back to Night City as Taylor Hebert, though. Why? Returning back to a burned identity is not what I'd call a pro move."
  
  I frowned, "Because it is who I am? I like being Taylor. It is the precious name my mother and father gave me, and I'm attached to it." I sighed and shrugged, "I'm not so proud that I would insist on it if I were pretty sure it would get me killed or worse, but I think there is a fair chance that all of this is unnecessary. Although people like to say that Corps have long memories, that is really less true than you'd believe. We might have stubbed a few people's toes, but realistically in the grand scheme of things, we probably only have to outlast the memory of a few director-level suits." Despite how well and how professionally the men who attacked us performed, I doubted more than a few of them were actually Biotechnica Spec Ops. They were likely the ones with the Trauma Team memberships, while the rest were contractors.
  
  That caused Kiwi to scrunch up her face, "I wouldn't bet my life on that fair chance, but I suppose that we're not since we're leaving ASAP. You're thinking that if they're looking for you, it is just going to be perfunctory. They'd grab or kill you if they can find you, but they're not going to expend many resources to do so." She frowned and looked thoughtful, "Maybe, but it leaves the option that, sure, you've outlasted the memories of the current guy, but maybe your name is still on a database, and when you come back as Taylor, they make a token, but effective, attempt to get you again."
  
  That was true. It all kind of depended on whether or not they thought Taylor Hebert was a mercenary or inventor, I supposed. If they thought the latter, they'd be fairly obvious about looking for me, and Wakako assured me that she would be able to detect it. In fact, Kiwi could probably help me a lot with that herself, as information was much more in her wheelhouse than mine. I shrugged, "I'll wait as long as it takes to ensure my safety, but I am pretty sure I'll only need to be super-incognito for a year, maybe two."
  
  I then stared at Kiwi and said simply, telling her something that I hadn't put into words with anyone else, "I intend to live hundreds of years, maybe longer, so I'm taking a long view here. And it isn't like I intend for this to be a waste of time, either." I thought I might try to start a business in Los Angeles, and if so, after I reclaimed the mantle of my true name, there were numerous ways for me to receive the fruits of these labours.
  
  Perhaps I could keep the Hasumi identity active somehow, even if I wasn't using it. Alternately, "she" might sell the business to me for a pittance. There were many options. Depending on what type of company I started, if I found a niche, then I might get successful enough to be noticed by a Corp. If that happened, I would still make a profit even if they screwed me on the valuation during a hostile takeover, and it would have the benefit of severing all relationships with the enterprise instantly as they took over my operations. Most small companies dreaded getting noticed like that, but I took a more pragmatic opinion that getting screwed was inevitable, and I wouldn't get too attached to anything I started in LA.
  
  All of that assumed I saw some opportunity that I could exploit that went beyond merely me using my medical skills, as Corps generally didn't perform hostile takeovers of a doctors practice because all the value was tied up in the skills of the clinician and you couldn't easily force them to continue on. They would generally bribe really good clinicians to join up when they discovered them, though.
  
  Kiwi grinned, "Oh? That sounds nice; make sure to remember your good friend Kiwi when you have figured out immortality. Even the best life extension tech hasn't gotten to that stage yet." I wasn't so sure about that, actually. I couldn't be the only one that had thought of cloning bodies and performing a brain transplant, nor the only one who had the surgical skills to pull it off, and that was ignoring the fact that I was pretty sure full borgs could live for hundreds of years if properly maintained.
  
  However, she was correct that it was the popular belief that LET could only gain you sixty to eighty years, but I kind of suspected that this belief was propagated intentionally. It was one thing to kind of suspect your overlords were Methesulean oligarchs but knowing for a fact it was true was something a lot more demoralising.
  
  Perhaps that would be a good way to repay her. There were very few people who didn't want to live longer, after all. Plus, I wouldn't want to watch my friends grow old. David interrupted my commiserating by running up to us both and saying to Kiwi, "I saw your cervix!"
  
  Kiwi glanced at me with a shocked expression, her eyes asking, 'What the hell did you do to me when I was asleep?' Snorting, I quickly corrected David quickly, "You saw her cervical spine. " My correction caused Kiwi to snicker, hiding her mouth behind her hand.
  
  "Cervix spinal!" he declared and then ran off to talk to Johnny in the clinic. The Tyger Claw then proceeded to show David his wakizashi, including several rather dangerous-looking slashes through the air, causing me to narrow my eyes at the display. I didn't want David to get used to playing with sharp objects, but it gave me an idea. Perhaps I could get Mr Johnny a customised Sandevistan or something. It'd be nice if he didn't get himself killed before I managed to pay him back for saving Gloria and David.
  
  Glancing at David and Johnny talking, I sighed. Well, it was good that David wasn't lost to despair, at least. I suppose he trusted me to make things better, which was a heavy thing to consider and try to live up to.
  
  I could bare that weight, though.
  
  The safe house was more like a warehouse, and it was boring. Wakako had settled with me for all the money I was owed, and in between my fat stacks of dosh and my digital wallet, I had just under three million Eurodollars. It was kind of crazy how much money I had. As soon as I got the digital money, I gave two hundred and eighty-five thousand back to Wakako. She had a contact that could get a brand new female Gemini of the right approximate size and body, and fairly quickly too.
  
  It was close to the same height, but it was two centimetres shorter than Gloria was, but she would just have to get used to it for now. I would be able to use the included OEM equipment to customise the face and rough body shape. The Gemini had larger breasts but smaller hips, and the skin tone didn't precisely match either, but all of that could be altered by the tools that came with a new Gemini.
  
  I hummed, considering. Perhaps Gloria would like an upgrade in the bust department? I'd leave them as they were and then ask her once she was conscious. It was a simple matter to make adjustments if she wanted them smaller, like her natural size.
  
  I'd have something that was almost indistinguishable from Gloria, absent the height discrepancy, fairly rapidly. It was partly like configuring a new implant and partly like painting a portrait. Half technical and half artistry. I didn't have a good skill for art and never have, but since getting my power, I've discovered I was preternaturally skilled at drawings, so long as they were of living creatures and especially if they were drawings about anatomy, so I felt I could easily accomplish these tasks despite not actually being trained in how to initially setup a Gemini.
  
  Not only that, but Geminis were one of the few full-body replacements that my power deigned to sink its teeth into as I was reading about them online. I think it was because the Gemini was partly organic, and it tried its best to mimic the human form so well. I was very confident I could work with it when it arrived. Perhaps I could make some upgrades? She was already going to be superhumanly strong, which would take some getting used to, but perhaps I could build a Taser or concealed hypodermic injectors into her fingers.
  
  Something she could use to give her non-lethal options so she wouldn't feel the need to try to grab a gun and shoot someone, which is what David said happened after the bad man had threatened him to get her to come quietly. Was I responsible for that since I had gotten her proficient and comfortable in using firearms? I thought about it and decided I wasn't. She would have grabbed something else. She wasn't entirely rational when it came to David's safety and well-being were concerned.
  
  My plan for her appearance was one that let David instantly recognise her as his Mom while still being different enough to thwart facial recognition. Neither of their fake identities needed to be as ironclad as mine. I didn't honestly think anyone was looking for them, even if they considered them a possible acquaintance of mine. Also, nobody really cared if you made a fake identity and then used that to get a real credential. I figured they, especially David, would have the same first name if they came with me to make it easier to adapt.
  
  It was easy to even merge two identities if your appearance, particulars and name were similar, but it was very difficult to fake a credential like a degree and add it to your real identity. For example, if Gloria got admitted to a nursing program at UCLA, she could, with a few bribes, get the names changed to her real identity if and when she came back to Night City. It would just be a matter of changing the name on her degree and the school records from Ramirez or whatever her last name ended up being back to Martinez.
  
  Her peers, teachers and administration would still remember Gloria going to classes, so it wasn't anywhere near like getting Taylor Hebert a degree in medicine without her actually going to any classes. That was much more difficult and much more expensive. But it was theoretically possible, according to what I've asked Wakako about, but it would still take time, especially considering my age. It would be impossible if I wanted a degree today because nobody would believe I entered medical school at the tender age of thirteen or fourteen.
  
  I didn't particularly mind waiting, though. The world wasn't circling the drain like it was in Brockton Bay. I wouldn't be surprised if the world was pretty much exactly as it is now in fifty years. Rather than an apocalypse like back home, the world's biggest threat was stagnation. Everyone in power liked the status quo. Sure, there were some minor quibbles, including some possibly genocidal AI in the Old Net if you believed the conspiracy theories, but coming from me, a girl that wondered if the Hopekiller would show up and brainwash me or if Leviathan would flood the entire city that was much less scary to me for some reason.
  
  In the best case, I would feel safe to return back to Night City in a year or so. If that happened, I could use Dr Hasumi's medical degree as a puppet, work in "her clinic", and the like. There would be options.
  
  I frowned at that idea suddenly because it seemed as though if I did that, I would have to pay taxes twice . How horrible.
  
  Glancing over at David, who was playing a VR game in the large open area of the warehouse floor. I had decided on a strict isolation policy. None of us was leaving the safe house until the time came to leave the city. Most of my stuff, except some of the medical equipment, was packed, and we were waiting on some contacts to smuggle all of us both out of Night City and as well as into Los Angeles. I had discussed transportation options with Wakako, and we had both decided it was best if I just appeared in LA without any real history of how I got there, so that meant I was dealing with one of the Nomad clans. That meant that there would be a period of waiting before they got into the neighbourhood, but there was no better choice if you wanted something or someone transported through the wasteland.
  
  David was getting bored, though, and starting to ask questions about when his Mom would be back, but I felt that he would likely be fine for a few more days. I had already gotten confirmation that the order comprising Gloria's new body was going to be shipped imminently, although given the value, it was being commingled amongst other high-value shipments and transferred over ground in a highly militarised convoy, so I wasn't precisely sure when it would arrive.
  
  Only a few of the Tyger Claws knew who was in this warehouse, and one of them was Johnny, who was acting as a sort of temporary concierge. We were getting full service; if we wanted something, he'd either get it or have it delivered. Now, I heard the distinct beeping of a truck backing up, and I got an excited look on my face. It was too soon for the Gemini, but this was a heavy delivery, so that left only one other thing. The stolen biosculpt equipment.
  
  After the trucks were unloaded, there were several large wooden crates in the warehouse, and I went to perform an inventory, getting followed by both Kiwi and David, who had set aside his game in order to see what the fuss was about.
  
  "Uhh... Doc Taylor, if you could look over everything here? I'm told that you'd know who to send the money to if everything is in order," Johnny said, looking around for a while before he returned with a crowbar.
  
  "Oh, this is last year's model. Kiwi, I'll need your help to re-flash and hack the firmware; we won't want it to be bricked after they report it was stolen," I said amiably. Plus, I didn't like my medical equipment to have phone home capability in it anyway. I didn't want or need that, especially when I knew how untrustworthy everyone was.
  
  Kiwi looked at the large machine and shrugged, "It shouldn't be that much of a problem." I believed her, as she had done the same on a lot of my more modern medical equipment that I had acquired over the past year.
  
  Opening the next box, I hissed, "Wow, they-" I was about to say stole, but I glanced sideways at David before saying, "sent me a lot."
  
  "What is all this, Aunt Taylor?" asked David excitedly. I quite liked being Auntie Taylor, so I grinned. "Replacement nanomachines-uhh, I guess you'd call it the food for the big machine." They had brought at least two hundred thousand dollars worth if you went by MSRP, likely stealing all of the unopened containers from whatever clinic this came from. That would keep me in nanomachines for a long time. The rest was a series of somewhat specialised laboratory equipment that would let me modify a cold virus to alter my genome.
  
  I included an extra ten thousand eddies as a bonus to whatever team Wakako hired and forwarded her the money, along with a brief note.
  
  It took some work getting the machine out of the crates, even using the old electric forklift that had been gathering dust in the main room. I nervously asked Kiwi as she sat the biosculpt vat on a carefully cleaned area of the warehouse, "Are you forklift certified?!"
  
  "Uhh... yes," she said after the briefest pause. I wasn't sure I believed her given that pause, but she managed to use the equipment and not damage anything.
  
  I thought it would take longer to hack the firmware than to set it up, but Kiwi had the former done before I had everything connected and the machine going through its long self-test and warm-up cycles.
  
  "Nice, it has all of the pre-programmed routines this clinic had been selling, including some higher-end bio mods. Have you decided if you'd like me to make any adjustments to your appearance, Kiwi? I definitely want you to get a similar muscle and bone lace treatment that I have. That would have stopped your spine from fracturing in twelve places," I told her primly.
  
  "Uhh... what kind of changes can you do?" she asked, a little curious and nervous. Did she not trust me?
  
  I spread my hands, "Pretty much anything you'd expect a biosculpt clinic to be able to do. Let's sit down and have a consult."
  
  She agreed with the muscle and bone lace, even asking for both the additional ballistic skin weave and the same nanosurgeons I had. I frowned at that, "Although nanosurgeons are styled as a biosculpt treatment, we just refer to them as that because they use entirely organic biotechnology. It's a specialised organ installed in your body, and the installation process is more similar to traditional cybernetics. Although I can perform the surgery with no problem, I don't have those organs right now, but I should be able to get some in a few months once we get settled. That's a good idea, and you should also go for the similar enhanced immune system as well, but we'll have to table it for the moment."
  
  As for any cosmetic modifications, I sat there with a tablet in graphics mode, sketching out any changes. She liked being blonde and pale, but after a few stops and starts, I sketched out minor changes that would allow her to look fairly similar while seeming to be more Slavic than Western European, and she also had me remove all of her existing scars and tattoos and a seemingly mostly cosmetic Midnight Lady accessory on her chest. I'd have to do that with a traditional cybernetics surgery, then put her in the tank afterwards.
  
  She made me promise to keep it for her, though, because it was apparently a special limited edition. But honestly, who wanted nipples that doubled as a cybernetic spinneret? Even I thought that was a bit out there. Was it a sex thing? Was I just a prude? I didn't think the silk was strong enough to be practically useful for any real purpose, so it had to be some kind of sex thing, but I didn't really want to know.
  
  The same day the Gemini arrived, Kiwi and I had gotten word that the Nomads I was paying to take us all to Los Angeles would be arriving in about a week, which didn't give me a lot of time to get all of my ducks in a row.
  
  David was upset I wouldn't let him see the Gemini, but it was shipped naked, and it was going to be his Mom, so it would be weird, I thought. I had begun explaining to him a little more about how serious his Mom's injuries were, and at first, he was terrified, but surprisingly, he was okay with it once he realised Gloria was going to be receiving what I called a "mostly full body replacement." Cybernetics was indelibly imprinted on the entire world's zeitgeist, such that a five-year-old kid suddenly understood what I was saying and even thought it was "supernova, totally bright." How could a kid that could barely talk be more hip to the slang than I was? I was in the prime of my life.
  
  I didn't start on my own cosmetic changes at all until I knew David and Gloria were or were not coming with me, but I'd be able to make most of them pretty quickly. The height change, however, would take some time, as would fashioning the virus to adjust my genome.
  
  Kiwi walked around the tarps I had set up as a dividing line into where I was working on the Gemini and frowned, "Wow, it is starting to look like Gloria already." I glanced at her and nodded. The Gemini was still in its OEM adjustment cradle, which allowed me to upload an appearance file which it was very slowly morphing into.
  
  The cradle used company-specific and proprietary consumables, so you could only set the appearance of a new model "one and a half times." That meant, once for real, and then if you had some minor changes or mistakes, you could make some adjustments, but I was getting it right the first time so that I could disassemble and examine the unused consumables. I expected they were nanomachines, just like my biosculpt vat, but what type of composition? I didn't know, but I hoped to learn enough to make changes like this in the future without needing to return the unit back to the factory, as that would help a lot if Gloria decided not to keep it.
  
  "What's this?" Kiwi asked, looking at a table I had set the rest of the Gemini equipment on.
  
  "Biopod, that is where her brain will be installed, and unit charging station. Although almost indistinguishable from a bio-human, the Gemini does need to charge, but it's just a regular high-voltage charger you'd find on any robot, so it isn't special," I said with a smile. I had the biopod in bits already, as I was adding extra functionality which would allow me to more easily continue to treat her for the brain damage she suffered while she was dead for almost half an hour. Also, it was my first time seeing a biopod in person; before I knew it, my power and I had disassembled it in a light fugue. It was very, very interesting but had lots of room for improvement.
  
  I then glanced where Kiwi was looking on the table, at my hatbox, "Oh, and that's Gloria." That caused her hand, which had been reaching out to touch it curiously, to jump back as if she had touched a hot stove, which I found kind of amusing. She spun around and asked me, in tense whispers, "You're just keeping her in a box next to your wrenches?!"
  
  I blinked. Box? I sniffed delicately, offended at her making aspersions onto my hatbox, "It's a hermetically sealed, hazardous environment life support pod. She's perfectly safe in there," I made that up on the spot, as I mentally called it a hatbox, but she didn't need to know that. Mrs Pegpig cooed in agreement from her perch on my shoulder, and I nodded at the pigeon and reached into my pocket to pull out some minced carrots I carried in a ziplock bag and offered the treat to the pigeon, who greedily tore into it.
  
  "You're getting a little more mad sciencey, and I'm not sure that's a good thing, but I guess I am all for it," Kiwi remarked. "I'll find some clothes for Gloria after I work on some of the designs I want for my new tattoos."
  
  I frowned at her. I had removed all of her old ones, which were spiderweb-based and all over her body, and she was talking about getting what seemed to me very similar spider-themed tattoos when we got to Los Angeles. Didn't that defeat the purpose of removing such identifying marks? She said I didn't understand anything, and not only were they not similar, but the act of building up a body of art through multiple tattoos and tattoo artists was an important part of her starting a new identity.
  
  I didn't understand at all, but to be honest, she was a lot more of an expert on the subject than I was, as I still didn't even know what her real name was, and she refused to enlighten me. While I was really attached to my identity as Taylor Hebert, she was the exact opposite. In fact, she never even gave her new identities names until she absolutely had to when she needed to sign up for some governmental service. It wasn't like she worked nine-to-five jobs, after all. Apparently, Kiwi was just what people had started calling her around her scene in Night City after she showed up one day.
  
  Perhaps I could prank her by telling everyone that her name was some other fruit or vegetable in advance, 'Hello, this is my friend Avocado. Friends call her 'Cado.' Mandarin? Ooh, mango? Mangos were delicious!
  
  Mrs Pegpig cooed aggressively, demanding more carrots from my shoulder. She came with us alone, and I thought she would be more upset with me for just grabbing her and absconding, but I had learned that what I had thought was Mr Pegpig was actually like three different birds, and she didn't seem that upset at leaving her royal harem behind. If anything, she seemed to coo some orders to them before we left. She was the weirdest pet.
  
  She had already raised one clutch of little Pegpigs, with them all leaving the nest months ago, so I guess she wasn't that attached to any specific place anymore.
  
  David just cried when I was finally able to show him Gloria's body, which I had shifted over to my biobed after I had finalised the appearance and placed the clothes Kiwi scrounged up on her. "I know you said she'd be okay, but I was so scared," he blubbered, and I patted him on the head as he clung to my leg.
  
  Although I hadn't had time to really Tinker much with the body, I did install my custom paralysation nails on their hands. I had carefully removed the custom-designed implants from my own hands and regenerated my fingernails as I was going to some lengths to make my cybernetics load out divergent from what people, mostly Trauma Team, had records of, and my handy fingernails were one of the more unique implants I had.
  
  There were similar implants on the market, of course, there were dozens of different kinds of slasher and razorclaw type implants, but mine had the appearance of a bespoke item, which they were.
  
  I also totally replaced my slightly damaged customised liver and second heart with two commercial models that served the same purpose. Kiwi called me insane for Kumo-kun and me performing minor surgery on myself, but it wasn't like she didn't watch and find it riveting.
  
  I tabled my custom liver not only for the same reason that it was identifiable but because it was just customised and not something completely novel. I based it on a liver I had taken from Scavs, and I wanted to build something from the ground up. Filtering toxins was an important biological activity, and I felt that most solutions were suboptimal. The human liver was terrible, which meant that while cybernetic options remained highly superior in comparison, they were still objectively sub-par.
  
  "Okay, stand back. I'm going to bring her online, but I'm going to try to bring her back to awareness slowly," I told Kiwi and David. I was concerned she might react violently, considering her last memories, and I had my mental fingers around the override controls to her body.
  
  I was right to be concerned because despite how slowly I tried to bring her back to awareness, she went from motionless to thrashing about, attempting to attack someone that wasn't there, which caused David to grip my pants some more. However, the reaction quickly quieted, and she looked around, shock on her face and tears quickly welling in her eyes. Good, both the tear duct system and facial micro-musculature seemed to be working without even needing to be configured.
  
  As soon as she saw David, she held her hands out for a hug and probably would have jumped out of bed if I hadn't disabled her legs via software. David yelled, "Mom!" and attempted to leap into her arms, but I frowned and caught him as he was flying mid-air, easily plucking the brat out of the air in slow motion, then spinning him around and setting him down well away from her grasp, saying, "Nope, nope, nope. What did I say?"
  
  He sullenly glared up at me, "No hugs until Mom gets used to her new body; otherwise, she might squish me like a ripe tomato." Wow, he read back that verbatim. The kid really is sharp and has a good memory, even if he ignored it completely.
  
  Her indignation at me denying them their reunion turned to just shock as she blinked and looked at her arms and hands, apparently checking herself over as much as she could. She opened her mouth and asked, stutteringly, "N-n-new b-body?" Then she frowned at the stutter she had developed.
  
  I noted it as well and wasn't surprised at all. I expected her to still have a number of neural deficiencies and problems with her speech centre, recollection and hand-eye coordination were all things I was expecting, at least for a little while. Her voice was working correctly, though. She probably didn't notice it, but she didn't make her vocalisations with her larynx, but a digital system was installed in the same location. Once she learned how, she'd be able to talk without exhaling if she wanted to, although, by default, the Gemini's systems were designed to mimic the exhalation process when vocalising.
  
  David had helped me get enough recordings of Gloria speaking to feed into the Gemini, and it used a pretty standard but effective artificial intelligence system to create a digital voice equivalent. Although vids and BDs had Geminis, even if they weren't always named as such, always featured as some sort of spy or impersonator, the truth was their bread and butter business were people exactly like Gloria, who needed a full-body prosthesis due to Trauma.
  
  And anything that reduced the feeling of body dysmorphia when you were jacked into a total body replacement would vastly decrease cybernetic-linked mental instability and cyberpsychosis, so duplicating a previous user's voice was a small but very important feature. I coughed into my hand, "Alright, she's alive. I need to speak to her in private now. Kiwi, please take David into the other room." The warehouse we were staying at had an attached office, which we were using for bedrooms.
  
  "Awww..." David complained but didn't even complain when Kiwi lifted him over her shoulder and carried him off like a sack of potatoes. He waved excitedly at his Mom while being carted off.
  
  I pulled up a chair and sat next to her, and asked, "So, what's the last thing you remember?"
  
  "W-where are we?" she glanced around for a moment before shaking her head and answering me, "A sk... ske.." She frowned, looking angry and slowly and methodologically enunciated each phoneme, "SKETCHY man came into the clinic."
  
  I nodded and said, "Okay, let me explain what happened. This might take a while..."
  
  I told her pretty much everything, even how a misunderstanding in my business caused the "sketchy man" to come and try to kidnap her since I did feel pretty guilty about her situation. Although the only thing she shrieked about was the cost of the body she was currently inhabiting, and she even tried to comfort me by patting me on the shoulder when I told her about Ruslan and Jean's betrayal, it was less of a pat and more of several hard slaps.
  
  We had an in-depth technical discussion about exactly the nature of her injuries, and she was a bit shocked. She shook her head and said, still stuttering every few words, "Don't try to feel guilty for not taking me to the hospital; they would have just called me DoA. You know that NC Med's medical insurance doesn't cover extraordinary measures like this." She made a motion at her body, and I frowned.
  
  It could be I had gotten too used to the extraordinary default measures that were commonplace at work at Trauma Team. Trauma Team even had similar "vampire cuff" technology built into the biobed of the AV-4, although that one depended on the two clinicians installing the bypass on the carotid and jugular manually.
  
  I thought back to what would have happened if Gloria and I had brought a patient back to the hospital that was in the same shape as Gloria had been and frowned. She was right. We would have been written up for not declaring them dead and for wasting the Emergency Department's time. I could see my former boss yelling exasperatedly, "You bring dead bodies to the morgue, not to the ER!"
  
  "Do you have a mirror? I want to see what I look like," Gloria asked quietly. I frowned. Was she expecting I just threw her in a random body?
  
  I looked around and finally found a makeup compact in a box of my toiletries and handed it to her. She snapped the top of the plastic compact off instantly, which caused me to chuckle. She eyed me warily and said, "Thank you for grabbing David before I squeezed him like a tube of toothpaste." That was a pretty gross image, but possibly accurate.
  
  She glanced down at the mirror now and looked shocked, "I look exactly the same!"
  
  Well, not exactly. But quite close. I didn't duplicate the two fashionware vents she had previously installed on her cheek because they seemed not only pointless but a possible avenue of infection.
  
  Finally, after everything, she said, "I think me and David should go with you. Not only am I not exactly firing on all cylinders yet, but the offer to get me admitted to a critical care nursing program is too good to pass up." She was performing some simple neuro self-tests on herself, like touching her thumb rapidly to each fingertip.
  
  This was a pretty common cognitive and coordination test, and she was having some issues with the timing. This might indicate a TBI to her cerebellum, but it just as well might simply be that she hasn't gotten used to the body yet. I told her as much, and she shrugged, "It doesn't really matter either way. I'm either going to need whatever treatments you're doing to continue repairing the hypoxia-related brain damage or, alternately, physical therapy from a total body prosthesis specialist. You say you can provide both."
  
  I winced, "I don't want you to think you're trapped in a decision just because of your medical situation. The hypoxia treatments are going to basically be automatic, and I can find a specialist physiotherapist and pay for it." I didn't say it out loud, but I very much didn't want her to feel forced into abandoning everything she had and then later resent me for it.
  
  "Don't worry about that. Honestly, there isn't a whole lot keeping me in Night City. My mom, I suppose, but she isn't helpless despite her attempts to portray herself like she is." She winced and continued shaking her head, "So long as I can get word to her that I am not dead, I would actually relish a chance to escape from her. She does help me a lot with David, but..." She pursed her lips in distaste, " Mi madre es una loca... She also survives solely on government assistance, stealing and me, which isn't really the example I want David to see at all. Can you really get me into a good nursing program? You haven't said where you planned to go."
  
  "Nothing is certain, but I am pretty confident. We'd have a few months before your packet would need to be in, so you'd have to take the entry tests. But they won't be that hard for you, especially if I help you study for six weeks. Plus, we'd be paying in cash, and that is probably the most important factor for the university, despite their protestations to the contrary," I told her confidently and nodded, "I wasn't going to mention where we were headed if you didn't want to come with me. It isn't that I don't trust you, but..."
  
  She waved a hand, "I know. My entire priority is David, and I am a bit angry that you were a gonk and indirectly put him in danger, but it wasn't your fault, really. Maybe it wouldn't have happened if you hadn't tried to grab the gold coin you saw flying through the air, but I can't blame anyone for trying to catch it." She flounced back onto her bed, staring up at the ceiling, "No, this is just irrational. It sounds like it was mainly my fault, anyway. I can't remember what I did, but it was probably something stupid. If I had just cooperated, there would have been no way that guy could have forced us both through the whole Megabuilding without the Tyger Claws noticing him and turning him into sashimi. I could have texted someone. Oh, god, I can't believe David saw me get shot like that. Is he okay?"
  
  I very specifically never said that, despite sharing the same opinion. I nodded, "I think he'll be okay now that you're back in the land of the living." I then grinned, "You said that whole spiel without stuttering!"
  
  "G-g-good!" she replied, then scowled.
  
  It had been three months since the gig at Konpeki Plaza and about seven weeks since we had arrived in Los Angeles. The Nomads that had agreed to smuggle us into Los Angeles was a family called the Bakkers, led by a stern matriarch by the name of Selita.
  
  The Bakkars were something of experts at smuggling, although they just considered it logistics. They had a rotating convoy that would proceed apace throughout what I would have called California and Oregon, touring the cities of the Free States before returning down south. They would get us to Los Angeles, but not directly.
  
  We spent almost a month on a circuit with them, with all of my stuff packed into a truck. I didn't particularly mind because Selita was also being paid to tell all and sundry that she and the Bakkars had saved me, Dr Hasumi Sakura, from a group of Raffen Shiv that had been using me as a medic slave in the wasteland.
  
  It was really the Maelstrom gang in the badlands right next to Night City, but the story was close enough to the truth that it would likely ring true to anyone who heard it.
  
  I thought living on the road as the Nomads did was kind of nice, especially when everyone around you was a family member. It was a vastly different life, though. The matriarch, Selita, chuckled when I mentioned that and said, "By the third generation, us so-called Nomad's almost a different species than the rest of ya'll. Every one of those kids got a toy gun as their first toy when they were five and a real twenty-two when they were eight, even if it was just a break-action single shot." She shrugged, "Everyone out here knows you can only count on yourself and, of course, family."
  
  It was no wonder the Corporations denigrated them; they lived almost entirely outside of normal social and thought control. Perhaps calling it thought control was a bit of an exaggeration, but not completely. It was definitely true that self-sufficiency was seen as more of a sin than a virtue in the Corpo-controlled media. At the very best, Nomads were considered delusional conspiracy theorists, but they were more often all considered highway bandits.
  
  Still, I thought we all enjoyed our brief time with them, even if I doubted I would ever want to live that lifestyle. I found that sand and dust got everywhere . It also made me jaded and somewhat disillusioned about the "romance on the beach" braindances that I occasionally indulged in. If my PG-13 braindances were taken to the logical x-rated conclusion, wouldn't sand literally get everywhere ?
  
  After we got into Los Angeles, we didn't all become roommates or anything. We didn't even live in the same building, but we all did live on the same block as we felt that mutual support would be an advantage. I bought Kiwi and Gloria the same language skillchip I bought for myself, when we settled in the middle of Chinatown.
  
  David was incensed, wanting his own, but you had to be at least eleven or twelve before surgery for even a child's operating system could be considered, so he would just have to learn the language the old-fashioned way, but he was at the right age for it.
  
  It took another month for me to both get down to the correct height as well as to devise and reinfect myself with the genome-altering virus enough times that any sample of my body, with the exception of a biopsy of my brain or sample of my spinal fluid, would pass muster. Once I was sure, then "Dr Hasumi" reported her kidnapping and stint of forced servitude to the police and even the Japanese consulate.
  
  The consular staff at least pretended to be sympathetic, but the police very nearly threw me out of the precinct once they learned it happened in the desert outside of the city. "Lucky to be alive, lady, but that ain't our problem," one of them said, shaking his head, "That's a state... or federal matter, or well, something. Not us, though. Have a good day!"
  
  Well, fuck you too, I thought.
  
  Now that I had settled down enough that I was looking for hospitals to apply to as a resident after my "traumatic event", I got a notice from the Japanese consulate that the US federal government, specifically the Immigration Department, wanted to speak with me, and they offered their consulate for the meeting.
  
  They didn't say what it was about, but I had sent a request to this department at the Japanese consulate to replace all of "my" physical identification documents. As a non-resident alien on a work visa in the New United States of America, not only was I required to let the Immigration Department know where I slept every night, but I was required by law to carry upon my person, at all times, a special alien identification card and I must present upon request to anyone in government, but specifically police officers.
  
  It kind of felt a little dehumanising and vaguely disconcerting, and it was weird to feel like an outsider in the country. It was a weird feeling. I didn't have much respect for the government or authority figures in either set of memories, but that was a different feeling from feeling like an outsider around everyone.
  
  I dressed in some of the nicer clothes I had bought to replace Dr Hasumi's wardrobe. I had installed her data storage implant on myself and had been perusing its large trove of data and one of the first things I noticed was her tastes in most things were way different than my own. I liked dark, drab colours. Black and navy blue were my favourite colours for outfits, while Dr Hasumi liked pastels and bright colours. She also wore dresses and skirts a lot more than me, and I had been finding it a little grating to follow the pattern, but I felt it was important. One could expect a little bit of a personality shift after such a traumatic experience, but anything large would create a datum for later inspection.
  
  She also didn't carry firearms, which was the biggest thing I had to get used to. Technically, I didn't have the right to own any as the second amendment only applies to citizens and resident aliens, but realistically nobody cared.
  
  I absolutely would not remove my monowire, though, so I sat patiently at the security office as they affixed a small bracelet to my arm before I could enter the consulate.
  
  " Hasumi-sensei, ah, you are early," said Mr Tanaka, one of the many assistants to the Consular General here. He was the same one who had helped me the last time and seemed like a nice guy.
  
  I nodded and politely followed him into the back area and into a conference room, " Tanaka-san, do you know what this is about?"
  
  He frowned and shrugged, " Some sort of paperwork issues with your visa. It obviously isn't a big deal; otherwise, they would have arrested you... Well, maybe not. You're a class A, educated and professional worker. " Even before the Data Krash, the US had become somewhat less hospitable to foreigners, which wasn't too surprising. The poorer a country became, the less likely it would be inviting to foreign immigrants or workers, so they created a category system. Dr Hasumi was considered a "desirable" class A-someone who was highly educated, highly compensated and therefore highly taxed.
  
  Great. I knew it was too much to hope that the Immigration people were just doing an in-person delivery of my identity documents. I sighed and nodded. Surprisingly, the Immigration people were right on time. It was a man and a woman, and they sat across from me after Mr Tanaka was polite enough to introduce us to each other.
  
  "Dr Hasumi, thank you for agreeing to meet with us. It prevented this situation from deteriorating such that we would have had to pick you up," the man said politely, but I could see that he was about as interested in me as the average DMV clerk was in who was getting a driver's license next.
  
  I blinked, "Ano... Is something the matter, Agent Wilkes?" The language skill chip I had really was high-end. Not only could it provide me the language, but it could also make my English slightly accented, to the point where it would insert Japanese-specific disfluencies instead of the usual Anglo 'umm'.
  
  His partner was silent, and he sighed and nodded, "It isn't a huge issue, but you neglected to renew your authorisation to stay in the country with an endorsement on your visa by the anniversary of your entry into the New United States of America. That means, technically, you are not even authorised to be in the country."
  
  I blinked several times, using my high speed to review everything in Dr Hasumi's files that might enlighten me about this, and finally found a reminder in her calendar from several months ago. Really? I tried to sound as reasonable as I could, but I still sounded clipped, "I was kidnapped by criminal elements in your country and held incommunicado, so I wasn't able to file the renewal as I planned."
  
  He smiled regretfully, "That's why we're not immediately taking you into custody and are delaying filing deportation proceedings, Dr Hasumi."
  
  I stared at him, "Do you know how we can resolve this matter?"
  
  He shrugged, "Your visa remains valid, but as far as this..."
  
  His partner spoke up, this time, and her voice was cold, and I immediately internally labelled her as Agent Bitch, "I'm sorry, Doctor, but Agent Wilkes, nor I, are authorised to advise aliens on methods of compliance, and Agent Wilkes has already gone much farther than he should have. I recommend that you retain an immigration attorney to advise you of your options if the consular staff here cannot assist you."
  
  With that, they left. What assholes. I looked at Mr Tanaka, and held my hands up in a prayer-gesture, " Tanaka-san, please tell me you know what I have to do?"
  
  That caused the man to chuckle, and he sat back down, " Yes, I do. They are rather terse, aren't they?" He was being a lot more polite than I. I would have used a different word myself. He smiled, no doubt noticing that in my eyes, and said, " As the man said, your visa is and remains valid. The simplest way you could solve this issue is to leave the country and re-enter it; the problem is solved, and a new one-year clock starts. This time you'd be able to reauthorise your stay before the time expired."
  
  I frowned, " That's it? This isn't some kind of trick to get me out of the country, and then they'd be like: 'Haha, trick! You can't come back!' right, Tanaka-san?" It would be deeply, deeply ironic if I somehow got deported from my own fucking country.
  
  He shook his head, " No, it isn't. We deal with this issue fairly often. They're really being more bark than a bite here; they hardly have the resources to deport law-abiding people like you, anyway."
  
  I rubbed my head into my hands, " That means I have to fly back home? Airline tickets to Tokyo are so expensive." I complained, not even pretending anymore. It'd cost me five thousand Eurodollars for this lunacy.
  
  "Oh, you misunderstood. You don't have to go back home. You just have to leave the country. I recommend a weekend trip up to Vancouver; it's pretty cheap from here, and it is quite pretty compared to this shit-hole of a country. But you could go to Mexico too," he said, breaking the character of the consummate Japanese diplomat by openly disparaging the country he was a diplomat to with a grin.
  
  Seriously? This just became stupider and stupider. I should be, as a Japanese citizen, sharing in the ridiculousness of the situation, but as an actual putative citizen of this country, I just felt embarrassed. It was like with the crash, all the corporate wars and the Data Krash, the country died, but the bureaucracy survived.
  
  " I guess I'll need to request an emergency passport after all," I said morosely as I had decided not to bother with one the last time I came here since I was just staying in the NUSA, which caused Mr Tanaka to chuckle. Now that it was shown to just be an inconvenience to me and not something more serious, he found the situation I found myself in completely ridiculous and, therefore, amusing.
  
  " That, I think, I can help you with. You don't need to go back and stand in the line; come with me to my office," he said affably.
  
  In his office, he pulled up my file and hummed, " Your passport photo looks recent enough, so we'll just keep the one on file ." He pulled out a small device and sat it on his desk, and motioned towards it, " If you don't mind, Hasumi-sensei."
  
  If I hadn't been able to change my genome, this would have been where I was discovered and arrested. Instead, I peered at the genome taster and thought. Hasumi was a bit more fastidious than Taylor Hebert. I, as Taylor, wasn't scared of germs at all, so I elected to carefully press the button for the device to run through its cleaning cycle, noticing a flash as an internal laser sterilised the surface of the testing plate. Then I sighed and licked my index finger, and casually pressed it on the plate for a moment.
  
  The machine briefly paused before making a gentle ding sound and lighting up in green, and as soon as I lifted my finger, the cleaning cycle repeated. I glanced left and right, and Mr Tanaka noticed what I was looking for and offered me some hand sanitiser from his desk drawer, which I accepted and rubbed on my hands. He smiled at me and said, " Well, everything seems to be in order. If you're going to Canada, you'll have to apply for a visa online at least twenty-four hours in advance. Mexico, seven days in advance, so if you intend to go there, I would do that today. I'll print your new passport, and you can pick it up probably tomorrow, or if not, then Monday at the latest."
  
  I smiled gratefully at the man as we both stood up, " Thank you, Mr Tanaka. You've been a great help."
  
  As I left the consulate, I had already decided on Canada. Canada was a richer country than NUSA and much nicer to visit. Global climate change has turned it into an even more verdant and pleasant place to live and visit. It was the bread basket of America these days now and produced three times as much food as the continental United States did, trading most of the excess to the NUSA.
  
  Vancouver? Maybe. It was true that I could use a relaxing weekend of vacation. Maybe even more. I had gotten more than one request to interview for a residency, and when I accepted, it would be very, very busy at least for the first six months.
  
  Darryl Corban was a busy man, busy just staying alive, especially for the last few months. He was the acting Regional Vice President of Biotechnica Night City and tried very hard to make that promotion permanent, despite being sabotaged along the way by his "peers."
  
  He took the gloves off with these idiots after they blatantly tried to get him murdered by proxy. Samantha had attempted to queer the deal he negotiated with the local Yakuza enough for the old bat to murder him, but not so much that Biotechnica didn't at least secure the merchandise.
  
  It was this latter overriding loyalty to the Corporation that prevented him from just having her murdered. Instead, he just had her flown to Central America with nothing in her pockets and then shot in the kneecaps. In her personnel file, it was listed as a leave of absence to deal with personal matters. But if she made it back to Night City alive, he would make her his right-hand woman.
  
  But not before he sat down with her and explained exactly how much her attempt cost the company. He didn't so much mind her attempts to murder him, as that was somewhat to be expected, and it kept him sharp. But her actions caused that old Japanese bat to release what otherwise would have been a Biotechnica exclusive to one of their competitors, Trauma Team.
  
  At least, Trauma was barely a competitor. They produced a few drugs, and they researched a few drugs, but it was all small potatoes compared to them, so it could have been much worse. They already had begun discussions with Trauma Team to market the drug as a joint venture, as their legal team was pretty sure that the EC courts would decline to step in and what Trauma Team lacked in biotechnology they made up for in lots of guns. They were basically a military that ran some hospitals.
  
  Now he would have to go into the quarterly meeting with his boss, which had been his boss' boss up until recently and explain how much they stood to make. It was a lot, but it was still fractions of a per cent when you counted the total enterprise's bottom line.
  
  He wouldn't even mention Sam's perfidy; it was something that would just make him look weak, and besides, he didn't actually have any hard feelings so long as she didn't.
  
  Looking over the files he seized from the woman's corporate account before he had approved her leave of absence, he frowned. Did she really think that this eighteen-year-old girl was some kind of chemistry savant? They had identified her from the genetic material left in a car accident, but it had to be a false trail or bullshit, right? He could see the daughter of a spook acting as a Merc as she did. Papa spook makes baby spook, right? But anything else? It seemed implausible.
  
  That was Sam's claim that the girl was special, but he knew for sure she would have been just as satisfied if he had been kidnapped by the Japanese and forced to commit hara-kari for his supposed betrayal.
  
  Baby spook was probably dead, anyway, in some ambiguous spook-related misadventure, the kind that left no body or trace, very much unlike the guy without the head their SecTeams had found in front of the car accident. Who cared?
  
  He used his cybernetics to mentally stamp the file closed for now.
  
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  Kyaaa!
  Although I had left my Quadra back in Night City, the car I got to replace it in Los Angeles was still fairly nice and a sports car, as I liked. From my study of Dr Hasumi's files, I came to the conclusion that she was kind of a Japanese nationalist. I came to this deduction from reading her files and watching the personal videos and photos she posted on social media. She wasn't on the level of some of the ultra-nationalists, but she definitely thought that Japan and its culture and governance were superior to all other options on the planet today, which made me slightly curious about why she came to the United States in the first place.
  
  The woman also had an actual, honest-to-goodness diary in her files, although she was somewhat irregular about writing in it. It seemed clear that she had felt that she owed a lot to the Japanese government, which had taken care of her since her parents died when she was young. As such, I decided to try to find a Japanese car for her to buy and settled on the Mizutani Shion MZ2. It was a used model a couple of years old, and I had gotten a good deal on it. I would have gotten an even better deal on the Targa-style convertible version of the same model, but the weather and pollutants in Los Angeles were sometimes even worse than in Night City.
  
  Far from wanting to drive in a convertible, I wanted to drive in an NBC-resistant hazardous environment tank. But I got the Shion instead.
  
  However, the most troubling thing about Dr Hasumi was she was also the real identity of an online net serial novelist, and this gave me more indigestion than anything else. Was I expected to continue writing 'That Time I Got Transported To My Otome Game, The Rage Of A Villainess Turned White Mage!'? I mean, why was the title so long in the first place? It was over five hundred chapters long already, and I had notes for her planned plot outline for the next five hundred, although I had specifically not opened that file yet so I wouldn't read spoilers. A thousand chapters, really!
  
  Each chapter was about two thousand Kanji characters long, so I hadn't even finished reading the entire thing yet, although I would find myself reading a chapter here and there as it wasn't terrible. Perhaps even entertaining. The main character was a doctor that died from overwork and was reincarnated into a romance game that she had cleared when she was a younger girl, except that she wasn't the protagonist but the villainess. A kind of interesting premise that I hadn't seen, although I didn't really have a lot of time to read a bunch of net novels.
  
  I could tell that she had started writing this while in medical school, perhaps as a way to let off some steam, and she did use her knowledge of real-world medicine to give verisimilitude to the main character's White Mage healing magic. The story started when the main character was reborn, unlike my own isekai, which had me thankfully not have to redo puberty. I was only on chapter one-hundred-and-two right now and was kind of curious how the main character was going to deal with the protagonist and her capture targets while at the same time saving the country from invasion by the Fire Demons.
  
  I glanced at the Shion's autodrive system, making sure it was functional before I pulled up chapter one-hundred-and-three. Los Angeles County was huge, way bigger than Night City, and the Japanese consulate was a good thirty-minute drive from Chinatown, where I lived. I had time for a chapter or two, right?
  
  Although Gloria, Kiwi and I lived in separate buildings, we lived very close to each other and often had lunch or dinner together for mutual support. It had started while we were with the Bakkars as we were the only outsiders around and then morphed into a way for me to assist Gloria in studying for the entrance exam for the UCLA nursing program, but she had already aced that test and had started her first term as a nursing student.
  
  Now it was just because we all enjoyed each other's company and we could all provide assistance to each other, although with Gloria as busy as she was now, it was mostly us assisting her and David, but neither Kiwi nor I cared. Paying for both Gloria and David's tuition at school, Gloria at UCLA and David at a local corporate elementary school wasn't difficult. It wasn't a big deal to me. I was spending in total about sixty-five thousand Eurodollars a year for both of them, so I was surprised when Gloria said that she was considering applying for a scholarship.
  
  "What kind of scholarship?" I asked curiously as I stir-fried some meat and vegetables. The cheapest cloned meat was small chunks and it was perfect for stir-frying, "Do you think you'll qualify? We had to make all of your grades more or less average when we created your identity so you wouldn't stand out." It wasn't that there weren't any scholarships, but a lot of them had a number of catches. For example, if I had accepted Kang Tao's job offer, that would have been classified as a scholarship to medical school.
  
  Gloria looked slightly nervous before sending me a link wirelessly. She had gotten a lot better using all of the features of the Gemini, which included a very full-featured operating system, "There is a scholarship for two and three-year nursing students who happen to be full-body replacements."
  
  I paused and then hummed, "So you've decided to keep the Gemini, then?" I was kind of expecting this now, as the more she had gotten used to it, the more she seemed to like it. She had been a bit traumatised from her near-death experience, and I thought that she liked the fact that she was a lot more sturdy, strong and quick than she used to be. Although to be honest, I didn't think her current body would handle two four-gauge shotgun blasts to the chest any better than her last one. Not buckshot or slugs, anyway.
  
  Gloria had been, from all appearances, very, very tolerant of being inside a full-body replacement. Still, I had provided some therapy before we got to Los Angeles while we were travelling with the Bakkars, but I was exactly the wrong person to be her therapist. I wasn't really that suited to it, despite my encyclopedic knowledge of the subject, but most importantly, as both one of her friends and, arguably, the one responsible for her present circumstances, she might need to talk to her therapist about me most of all.
  
  As such, I had arranged for her to see a therapist in Los Angeles, but not before Kiwi and I did a deep dive into the psychologist, including breaking into his office and hacking all of his everything.
  
  I wanted to ensure that he wasn't on anyone's specific payroll and that he wouldn't sell or give his patient information to other parties. Kiwi and I had to break into four psychologists' offices before we found one that wasn't crooked in some way. Either they took kickbacks from drug suppliers or mental hospitals, or they were just a front for the Los Angeles County psychosquad and would have reported Gloria or coerced her into registering as someone at risk for cyberpsychosis, which rarely ended well unless you had some sort of Corporation backing you. And not even then, sometimes.
  
  Still, we finally found a relatively honest actor, and both she and David had been seeing him since we arrived in LA. It seemed to be working fairly well, and I kept up with her treatment plan through persistent backdoors on the man's system.
  
  It was tempting to go see him myself, but clinical psychology was a field where it didn't work as well if you already knew all the techniques. Through my power, I had a deep look behind the curtain, and I knew exactly what a good psychologist would tell me, to the point where I could just talk to myself in a mirror if I wanted. This was one reason that psychologists often suffered from depression themselves. There was some value in just having a person listen to me, but I didn't need a trained clinical psychologist or psychiatrist to do that.
  
  Real, in-person psychotherapy was a bit of a niche industry too. There were still such clinicians around, but more and more, they were being replaced by individualised artificial intelligence performing therapy over the net, but I was one hundred per cent sure such services were likely funnelling all patient data somewhere, even if it was just to create individualised advertising. Plus, Kiwi and I couldn't hack or break into their offices, as the security on actual services like these was impeccable, so I wouldn't trust them or recommend them to anyone.
  
  Gloria still looked slightly nervous, "I mean, if you don't mind." I glanced at her sideways and knew what she was trying to do. She knew exactly how much her Gemini cost me and was probably trying to save me some money to make her decision to keep the body less burdensome on me. Speaking of which, I would need to dissolve the half-grown clone I had been fast-growing now that we didn't need it. I could still use all of the biomatter for other projects or as a base for biosculpting. David just grinned as he thought the whole idea of his mom as a robot was awesome.
  
  "I really don't. I would probably make the same decision if I were you as well," I told her with a smile. I plated some of the stir-fry and handed it out to everyone, along with some white rice from the rice cooker. Now that I was rich, I could afford such luxuries as actual rice, after all. "But if we associate this identity as a full cyborg user, you'd definitely have to continue to do so if you planned on reclaiming your old identity."
  
  I held the large serving spoon up in thought, "Although, that might make a lot of things easier. It isn't uncommon for someone to get a new identity after they've had trauma sufficient for a full body replacement, so people and Corps won't look askance at you when you come back and reclaim your old identity if that is what you end up wanting to do." I took a brief look at the scholarship requirements and nodded, "To be eligible for this, you'll have to take a concentration in clinical psychotherapy... it's pretty clear the scholarship involves helping someone with psychological research about cyberpsychosis, so expect to be a research subject, probably a combination research gopher and part of the control group as a well-adjusted full-body user."
  
  I made a note to research which department and professor were sponsoring this scholarship. Research into the area of cyberpsychosis was perennial and also perennially terrible, but so long as they didn't try any wackadoo methods on Gloria, it should be fine and lucrative for her, as the scholarship included a small stipend.
  
  I nodded, "It seems fine. But, I tell you what... any amount of money you can get from this scholarship to reduce the tuition I'm paying for your University, I will return half of that to you as living expenses."
  
  Gloria frowned and said, surly, "But the whole idea was to try to pay you back some..."
  
  "And you are... some. But a student needs living expenses, and the less time you spend working odd jobs, the more time you are studying," I said reasonably. I had been the one handling routine maintenance on her body, as well, and one addition I had added to her biopod was a built-in sleep inducer of my design, so she could trigger herself to fall into a mentally restful sleep at any time she wanted.
  
  "Yeah, Mom!" piped in David. He was in favour of anything that involved his mother working less, which I definitely approved of.
  
  She sighed but nodded after a moment and then looked curious, "When is your clinic going to open, anyway?" Kiwi looked interested in the answer to that question as well.
  
  "Soon," was all I said. I had leased the whole three-story building we were standing in for virtually nothing since it was in such terrible shape. With an introduction from Wakako as well as the Tyger Claws themselves from Night City, I had been working with the Lotus Tong here, who controlled Chinatown, in refurbishing the building. Although I was a little put out at making capital improvements on a building I wouldn't own, at least the agreement to do so had me paying almost nothing in rent, so it was kind of a wash.
  
  At first, I was going to open a biosculpt clinic and pharmacy, as I had the required credentials to open those types of businesses. It was going to be all above board, too, a legitimate business, although I would be paying an extra five per cent tax to the Lotus Tong for protection and had agreed to do some discreet work beyond merely biosculpt for them on the down-low.
  
  I had prioritised getting this one apartment in livable condition, but now the workers were working on the ground floor, and that had to be done to a considerably better standard, but everything should be done shortly. After that, I had an appointment with the local Militech sales rep to get a security system, complete with surveillance, autonomous turrets and hopefully a couple of combat drones, if I could get them or a similar non-Militech system on the used market for cheap enough. I didn't mind spending as much money on this security as I would be ripping it out when and if I left the building.
  
  When your friend was a fairly high-class netrunner and could help you secure your computers, automated defences and security systems looked a lot better than a contract for on-premises security guards, and one of the others would be needed here. The Lotus Tong did not have as strong of a grip on Chinatown as the Tyger Claws had on Japantown, so the protection fee I was paying, while less than what I paid the Tyger Claws, was realistically only protecting me from the Lotus Tong themselves, not the unwashed masses.
  
  "And, of course, you'll be able to work there. However, you'll have to take a primer on biosculpt treatments. It is as much an art as it is medicine, so you might not be entirely suited for it," I told her, frowning, "But even if not, we'll have the pharmacy and similar unofficial clinic, just like I had in Night City. Tell me, what do you know of traditional Chinese medicine?"
  
  "Uhh.. that it doesn't work?" she said in a tone that made it seem like she was asking a question instead of making a statement.
  
  It mostly didn't work, but some of it was quite effective, even if the reason it was effective didn't have anything to do with Pestilential Qi or a yin-yang imbalance. Still, one couldn't criticise too much as they were accidentally right far more than European medicine of the same time period was.
  
  It was just weird that the practices continued in the modern age, I felt. But, given our location and the demographics of everyone around us, I had already had a number of requests, mainly from old Aunties, as to whether we would be providing such services. Some of it, I wouldn't because it was only a placebo or even actually harmful like moxibustion. Others would be difficult to implement because the herbal components that did work were kind of difficult to obtain. They were almost all imported products, and I didn't presently have a source for them. You just couldn't get raw ginseng in North America, for example.
  
  But, there were a limited amount of herbal remedies that I could source that were efficacious, in addition to massage and acupuncture, both of which were very effective. I could teach the latter two to Gloria fairly easily. Full-body replacements often had almost preternatural memory for complex dextrous physical tasks, and her Gemini's on-board machine learning system would help her target the correct places to use in acupuncture in the same way it would help her target the correct places on an enemy to shoot, once it realised what she was trying to do.
  
  "Some of it does, but mostly you're right. I think a lot of our customers might be people who want this type of therapy, though. We might set up a small clinic, separate from the pharmacy and biosculpt clinic, so that they can get prophylactic IVs, vitamins, herbal remedies, acupuncture and massage. I won't turn away customers as long as the services I provide are helpful. I can easily teach all of that to you," I said, grinning.
  
  She looked thoughtful and nodded. She wasn't the type of person to turn down learning a new clinical technique or three if she thought it was actually effective. After that, we all sat down and ate. Gloria's plate was a bit smaller than ours as she didn't exactly need as much food as us. The Gemini was mostly powered by batteries and a small radioisotope thermoelectric generator, after all. She could go a week without a charge, but it did have a fully functional digestive system, and eating and tasting food like a regular person was an excellent way to keep her attached to her humanity.
  
  It was one of the reasons that Gemini's had so few cyberpsychosis events while generic Alpha models had the most. Not only did the entry-level Alpha models not look like a human, merely humanoid, but they couldn't eat, and usually, their voices didn't even sound like the previous organic person.
  
  After I finished dinner, I said mildly, "Oh, also... I might be getting deported." That got the predictable response that I was hoping for, and with a small smile, I explained what I had done today and my meeting with Immigration.
  
  David was cracking up, "I'm sorry, that's so funny, Dr Tay-err Hasumi... hahaha..." I frowned at him because I could tell he had made that slip on purpose. He knew that as long as I looked like this, I was to be Dr Hasumi.
  
  Kiwi, however, looked wistful, "A vacation to Canada sounds nice. It's just a shame none of us can get a passport at the moment." That was true. Gloria and David could, under their old identities, but the fake identity that all of them had was likely not to the point where it would survive the background investigation necessary to get a passport.
  
  I nodded, "I'll be going next week. Can I count on you and Gloria to make sure the workers continue as they have been? I'd appreciate it if one of you spent the night in my apartment here. I have a lot of expensive equipment just sitting around, after all."
  
  Kiwi volunteered right away, "I can do it, no problem. When you get back, do you think you can do some work on some of my new team members?" Somewhat surprising to me, she wasn't letting her betrayal keep her down and had already started searching for a new team of mercenaries. I suppose that was what she knew how to do, after all. However, this time I did notice that she was both taking the leadership role and she was picking people that were quite "new to the game." I suspected that she wanted to train them on her own and in her own image.
  
  Apparently, they had been taking less risky jobs, which made a lot of sense when they were just starting out. She had gone through about eight different people to get her four-person team, discarding and firing people if they didn't meet her standards or, I suspected if they reminded her overly much of Ruslan or Jean.
  
  "A couple of them aren't sure if they want to go with cybernetic limbs eventually. If they don't, we will all want a full course of the biosculpt treatments, to include nanosurgeons," she said simply. "I'm standardising all of the augmentations for my team as a minimum requirement. So, for right now, we will just need three nanosurgeons and three muscle and bone lace treatments. We've been working small jobs for a month or so to afford it, although I am subsidising slash lending them a little bit."
  
  I nodded slowly and thought she was likely subsidising more than a little bit. To get a good deal on the specialised nanosurgeon organs, I had to buy ten at a time, so it would be good to sell some of them. I sold everything to Kiwi at cost, but her new mooks would only get a ten per cent discount, "Yes, that shouldn't be a problem. But, the muscle and bone lace takes about six to eight hours in the tank, as you remember." Kiwi had gotten both the muscle and bone lace as well as the ballistic weave and nanosurgeons.
  
  I really needed to get two or three more biosculpt tanks if I wanted to run a real clinic, but I definitely didn't want to buy them at several hundred thousand dollars a pop. I was thinking I could duplicate the one I had, though. My power would definitely help me with that, and with Kiwi's help, we had already cracked the software of the first tank, so I could use that as a base for the software for my duplicates as long as I bought the same microcontrollers. The software was always my weakest area in the first place, even on medical devices where my power gave me the most assistance.
  
  It was David's turn to do the dishes, and I watched him carefully because he had a habit of not scrubbing enough and leaving spots on the plates as they dried.
  
  I was attacked leaving my building a week later when I was on my way to the airport by a junkie-looking guy with a knife. I really missed carrying pistols and felt I needed them more than ever right now. Still, I saw him coming at me in slow motion after yelling something about giving him my money. I let go of my luggage, stepping backwards and letting out a girly-sounding "Kyaaaa~!"
  
  I then easily dodged him and threw out my hand in what looked like a random, untrained slap from a girl, but it had close to my half-strength behind it, and it struck the assailant on the side of his face, slamming his head against the indestructible DataTerm that would have looked so familiar in Night City. The guy was rendered unconscious instantly, his knife slipping out of his hand and clattering to the ground as he slumped bonelessly to the hard concrete of the sidewalk.
  
  I glanced around left and right, looking to see if anyone saw my performance, but nobody was around, which caused me to sigh. The effort I put towards my fake identity, and nobody even was there to appreciate it. I casually picked up the knife and frowned. It was a cheap blade, not really worth anything. I held it by its handle and flipped it around slasher-stabber style, and used my entire strength to ram it into the concrete sidewalk, causing the blade to penetrate a few centimetres and get stuck.
  
  Nodding at that, I grabbed my luggage and started walking across the street to the temporary parking arrangements for my car. When I got my security setup, I would be parking in my parking lot, of course, but right now, if I did, my car would be gone in the morning. I glanced over my shoulder at the unconscious man, who should survive. He could have his knife back if he pulled it out of the stone like Excalibur.
  
  As I went through security and was pulled aside to get another bracelet, with the average traveller staring at me curiously as I put it on, I decided that I would have to do something about this. I had a few ideas in my head about modifying my monowire to look less like a monowire, but the problem was that scanner technology had, for the moment, exceeded stealth technology.
  
  I was pretty sure I could do it, but I wasn't one hundred per cent confident, and what would happen if someone caught me trying to board an international flight with a hidden cyberweapon system? I was pretty sure that was considered terrorism or something. Maybe if I could get a cheap scanner myself, I could use it to practice and iterate any camouflage system, as I was pretty sure they all worked on similar principles.
  
  I had splurged a little for a business class ticket and was flying direct LAX to Vancouver International on an All Nippon Airways flight. Orbital Air Subsonic had two more flights to Vancouver a day and reputedly had a better reputation for on-time arrivals, but I still felt that Dr Hasumi would rather give her money to ANA.
  
  The flight was a little less than two thousand kilometres, so it would take about two hours on this high-efficiency subsonic jet. My last airline experience had been going to Seattle on a prop plane, but this was something akin to a 747.
  
  I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep, although, in truth, I was reading Dr Hasumi's novel. However, about thirty chapters into the flight, I was "awoken" by a quiet but urgent-sounding " Sumimasen." I opened my eyes to the smooth, bare thighs of one of the flight attendants in my face and coughed, and quickly looked up at the woman's face. There were about equal male and female flight attendants on this flight, and they were of all of one type - beautiful, regardless of sex.
  
  This one smiled down at me and said quietly, " Sumimasen, Hasumi-sensei. Records indicate you are a medical doctor; is that correct?" I blinked and nodded. Was this the overused trope where someone became ill on the flight, and I would have to save them?
  
  She brightened and said in Japanese, " You are the only one on the aircraft right now, and for some reason, our telepresence medical assistant is not functioning. I know it is an imposition, but can you come with me to first class? A passenger is ill, and the pilot needs to know if he should divert or continue on to Vancouver."
  
  I was getting a few stares from the other passengers, and the peer pressure was real, so I sighed and nodded, " Of course. Although I'm on vacation and don't actually have any tools or supplies with me." I suppose I could have said I only have a medical doctor's degree and not really the right to treat patients, but now I was curious.
  
  I was in the aisle seat, so I just got up and followed the woman to the much more spacious first-class cabin. So nice! But I couldn't rationalise doubling the cost of my ticket. Business class wasn't bad. Actually, even the economy was a lot superior to what I remembered about airline travel from Brockton Bay.
  
  My patient was obvious, as he was pale, diaphoretic, seated by himself and in the process of vomiting into a prepared emesis bag. He was someone of European descent and was wearing designer but not bespoke clothes. So rich, but not really wealthy, was my take. The wealthy would take an Orbital Air spaceplane to get to Vancouver suborbitally or a private jet.
  
  Luckily, the plane did have a supply of medical supplies, as well as a few devices. I put on some nitrile gloves and quickly connected him to the combination cardiac monitor and automatic defibrillator, humming a little as I kneeled down in the aisle next to him. "Mr..."
  
  The flight attendant behind me supplied his name to me, " Wilson-san ."
  
  I nodded and said, "Mr Wilson, I'm Dr Hasumi. I can see you're not feeling well. Can you tell me anything that isn't immediately obvious? You're sweating, vomiting... when did it start, and is there anything else?"
  
  "Yeah, diarrhoea... That happened first; I about destroyed the first class commode, lemme tell you. It came on a little bit after take-off and has gotten progressively worse," he said but was smiling in a friendly manner.
  
  I made a non-committal noise and nodded, "I assume you have a biom. Can I connect to it using my personal link, sir?" I got a nod from him, and I pulled my personal link cable from behind my neck and plugged it into one of his interface sockets.
  
  Immediately a large amount of his vital information scrolled past my eyes, but I frowned. Everything looked normal, and that wasn't normal. You didn't usually just start expelling material out of your body from both ends while being perfectly normal. How unusual! Maybe this would be interesting.
  
  He noticed my frown and nodded, "Yeah, doc. I checked it as soon as I got the squirts, thinking it must be some sort of food poisoning, but nothing was listed. Does that mean I am fine?"
  
  I shook my head and gave him one of my standard quips when someone trusted their biomonitor too much, "Sir, you're clearly not fine. Cybernetics are only a tool, and tools can make mistakes, or..." I trailed off before finishing the statement and then blinked. I closed my mouth, quickly disconnected my personal link, remained silent for a moment and then said, "If you don't mind, I'm going to palpate you. That means I'm going to touch around your body. Please speak up if I get to a tender spot." He grinned but didn't make the obvious lewd joke, so I put him in the category of a gentleman, at least for the moment.
  
  As I squeezed and prodded him, I asked, "So, why are you headed to the land of Maple syrup?"
  
  He grinned, "I'm not! After the stop in Vancouver, ANA continues this flight to Anchorage. I'm headed to Alaska, one of the few places you can still hunt deadly wild animals in the wilderness... well, if you have enough eddies to buy one of the few slots every year, anyway."
  
  "How interesting," I said in a tone that meant exactly the opposite. I tried not to judge a man for hunting, but I honestly would have felt like it was less of a sin to hunt humans in this world than some bears in Alaska. There was no shortage of really terrible humans; just find some that were trying to murder some people and hunt them down Running Man style. However, his statement did give me important information, namely that he intended to be in the wilderness in a couple of days.
  
  I got through his entire body, but as I was squeezing his left calf, he let out a startled, "Ouch! That really hurt, Doctor." I hummed and lifted his trouser leg, noticing an incredibly inflamed area centred around what appeared to be a small wound on his calf.
  
  "Do you remember something poking you in the leg today? A bug bite or anything?" I asked him mildly.
  
  He shook his head and said, "No, not at all. Was I bitten by a venomous insect or something?" I smiled. He got a lot of credit from me for saying venomous and not poisonous, as most people did.
  
  "No, you weren't bitten by an insect, but you were po-" my statement cut off instantly as my Zetatech system started three different kinds of alerts.
  
  [Wireless connection established! Bearing 260 degrees, less than one metre.]
  
  [Intrusion detected! Heightened security state engaged!]
  
  [First level ICE, bypassed!]
  
  About the same time I stopped talking in mid-sentence, the man sitting across the aisle from Mr Wilson suddenly went rigid as sparks started emitting from the back of his head. In slow motion, I immediately realised I was being stupid for trying to tell Mr Wilson he was being poisoned. I should have left with the flight attendant and told her in privacy, but I didn't expect the poisoner-cum-netrunner that hacked Mr Wilson's biomonitor to be on the plane. You'd think you'd use a slow-acting poison, like heavy metals if you weren't going to be around afterwards.
  
  I was kneeling in the middle of the aisle, so there wasn't any real way to make this look like an accidental flailing of a startled woman, but I supposed I could try anyway. I yelled, "Virus attack! Kyaaaa~!" And with that, I punched the stunned and sizzling netrunner directly in the face. I was really glad that their attack seemed a bit on the weak side and had only penetrated my first level of defences, but at the same time, it would have made things much easier if he had just died right away.
  
  Mr Wilson gaped at me open-mouthed, and one of the male flight attendants simply said, " Straighto !" My Japanese language chip identified this as an assimilated English word that had become a Japanese word over time. Namely, it meant a straight punch or a cross. A boxing term, which probably meant that I didn't fool anyone with my 'Kyaa!'
  
  One of the first class passengers suddenly getting electrocuted, followed by me yelling about a virus attack and punching his lights out, got at least one of the hidden air marshals to jump to his feet, badge and gun out. Initially, I was treated as a suspect, as I had done the punching, but the air marshal quickly reviewed the in-flight video recorders and realised what was happening very rapidly.
  
  Taking the handcuffs he had placed on me; he said, "I'm sorry, Dr Hasumi. Were you about to say that this passenger was poisoned? And do you mind forwarding me the logs for your ICE that detected the alleged attack by the man you struck?"
  
  I rubbed my wrists and smiled, "Of course." I forwarded him the logs wirelessly while I said, "Yes, I believe so. Mr Wilson has definitely been poisoned; he's exhibiting all of the standard symptoms for massive and acute heavy metal poisoning." This got the flight attendant, who I was calling Thighs-chan internally, to say, "I'll have to tell the Captain! Is there anything else he should know?"
  
  I hummed and then nodded, "Mr Wilson will need rapid nano-treatment at a level one trauma centre within the next four to six hours. So he should only divert to a large metro area. Otherwise, he should continue to Vancouver." This caused Thighs-chan to nod and sit down, obviously communicating with someone through an implant.
  
  The Air Marshal pulled out a device and plugged it into the unconscious net runner's interface socket on his neck, and said to Thighs-chan, "Please have the Vancouver police meet us when we land, as well, ma'am." He glanced at Mr Wilson and went into detective mode, "You know any reason why someone'd want to poison you, sir?"
  
  He growled, "Yes, I fucking do. But I'd rather not talk about it. Certainly not here. What I don't get is why I'm still alive..." he glanced at me.
  
  I shrugged, "My guess is that they used some small capsule of a dissolved heavy metal, combined with a local anaesthetic and poked it into your calf muscle. I'm guessing that the capsule was designed to break down so that you got sick on your safari..."
  
  Mr Wilson interrupted me, "A safari is only in Africa." I just glared at him until he said, "Sorry, continue..."
  
  "So that you got sick on your hunting expedition away from any real assistance, and they hacked your biom at the same time so you wouldn't know how badly you were ill until it was too late. But something went wrong, and the capsule is cracked or something, letting in the poison a little too early," I said, feeling like Sherlock Holmes with my deductions. The air marshal made a non-committal humming noise, so I couldn't tell if he thought I was right, though.
  
  He blinked, "Uhh... then can you get a scalpel and yank that thing out of me?" The air marshal glanced at me and nodded.
  
  I shook my head, "Well, yes, I could. But I refuse to do so. The most likely heavy metal that is this toxic... there is a very good chance it is an isotope of polonium. And if so, if I yank it out, I might contaminate the entire cabin with a highly-toxic, highly-radiological aerosol, depending on how they packed the capsule."
  
  Apparently, there were some things you shouldn't say on a plane. Amongst them, of course, was "bomb", but another few words that got a lot of people very excited was "highly-radiological aerosol." The air marshal, who was joined instantly by a second, demanded to speak to the Captain, and apparently, very rapidly, we were being diverted to a Royal Canadian Air Force base in Vancouver instead of Vancouver International Airport.
  
  At least they would still have an ambulance waiting for Mr Wilson, but it looked like at least the first day of my vacation was shot.
  
  I really hoped it was polonium and not, say, dissolved lead in a solution. My medical sense seemed to think it was polonium, but if it wasn't, I think I was in big trouble. At least, they let me put a tourniquet on Mr Wilson's leg to hopefully prevent blood flow, and therefore more polonium, from travelling from his calf, but he was going to need some serious nano-treatments to extract it all and repair all of the radicals damaging his DNA. On the plus side, the bears would be safe.
  
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  Discourse
  I got to sit in first class for the thirty minutes left of the flight, and I spent the time talking with Mr Wilson about random things, both as entertainment and also to subtly gauge how his illness process was progressing.
  
  It turned out that Mr Wilson was what they'd call a "Texas Oil Man." Used to, that meant someone who drilled oil in Texas, but these days it meant someone who worked for a company that harvested the Biotechnica-licensed CHOOH2-producing wheat anywhere in the world and happened to be Texan.
  
  He was a Senior Vice President and a minority shareholder in a small corporation that was in the process of being bought out by a Nigerian oil corporation. He didn't precisely say this, but he implied that maybe this was the proximate cause of his dilemma, as he was lobbying the other shareholders to refuse the buy-out bid, thinking they could get more. If that was the case, I tended to agree that the buy-out wasn't a good idea as his assassination had been needlessly complicated, with many moving parts that could and did go off the rails, and it was also needlessly cruel.
  
  The continent of Africa was a patchwork of highly successful states buffered by anarchy or corporate-propped-up banana republics. Nigeria was one of the success stories, almost a super state on the same level as one of the European Community nations. Lagos was the Jewel of West/Central Africa, a truly modern city that any nation would be proud of. However, Niger and Chad, right next door to Nigeria, were practically stateless, filled with danger, anarchy and Corporations extracting resources from the land.
  
  Even though the corporation he worked for was very small, Mr Wilson had to have been a bit richer than I thought. Perhaps he didn't like wasting money on air travel, or maybe he liked looking at ANA's flight attendants; who knew?
  
  He talked a little bit about his business, and something he said stopped me cold for a moment. He said that despite how much revenue his corporation made, or even the giants like Petrochem and SovOil made, the real winner was always Biotechnica, who was the sole provider of the special, incredibly energy-dense and genetically engineered Triticum vulgaris variant of wheat, which was harvested and refined into biofuels that were marketed as CHOOH2.
  
  "Why hasn't anyone tried to infringe on Biotechnica's IP? I can't believe it's out of the goodness of anyone's heart," I asked him, curious.
  
  He grinned, in between dry-heaving, "I like your moxie, Doc. You'd upend the order of things. It's been tried a few times over the decades, but the response is the same-completely cut off from future years' seed supply, and maybe Biotechnica burns your crops to the ground, too or deploys some kind of bioweapon. The offending company goes out of business as there's no alternative, sadly."
  
  Suddenly aware that everything I was saying was being recorded, I shrugged and nodded, "That makes sense." I shook my head with a chuckle, allowing some of Alt-Taylor's inner-Corpo memories to emerge, "Got to admire a good racket like that."
  
  That caused Mr Wilson to almost aspirate some water he was drinking, coughing and then laughing, "Yeah, you're damned right." I had known that Biotechnica technology was behind the wheat that produced CHOOH2, but I didn't really realise how much they made from it. I assumed that there had been some alternatives or that other stronger corporations like Petrochem could have strong-armed them to pay a pittance.
  
  That was good to know. I had already quietly released the full synthesis steps, including precursors, for Biotechnica's flagship neural stimulant, with the unknowing help of the Bakkars. One of the cities we had seen before Los Angeles, was Portland, in the Free States, and that gave me an opportunity to do so with very little chance of getting caught.
  
  At this pit stop, Kiwi and I had hacked into a random business' net connection and left a device that, after a random delay, sent out messages to all of the criminal enterprises we could think of with the whole directions of how to make it. It might be weird, but the Tyger Claws were not unusual in their semi-legitimate facade. You could just e-mail the head of the Italian mob if you wanted or if you were stupid enough, although I definitely skipped them as I figured Biotechnica, being an Italian Corp, was deeply in bed with them in the first place.
  
  I had already seen Network News 54 segments about Biotechnica cracking down on illegal pharmaceutical products in China and some Slavic nations, which got me to grin. It might not be related, but I thought it was.
  
  Of course, my revenge had to be secret, or I would just get squashed like a bug. And I couldn't sustain the easy way of just reverse engineering all of Biotechnica's most profitable drugs, either. I could maybe do that a few times, but each time I did provide their investigators with a datum.
  
  I felt it was inconceivable that they could have connected the first leak with either the Bakkars or me, as there were just too few data points to follow. We had already left the city when it happened, for example, and even if we hadn't, we still would have been only a handful of people in a city of three million.
  
  But doing it repeatedly? That might get problematic. Moreover, they might start to think it wasn't just their bad luck, but perhaps they had pissed off a gifted chemist and then start to question themselves about which gifted chemists they had pissed off in recent memory. And that was the main reason I couldn't do this more than a couple of times.
  
  But after doing a few more net searches after talking with Mr Wilson, I discovered that Biotechnica wasn't really a pharmaceutical company. They got over fifty-five per cent of their revenues from licensing fees and seed sales of their monopoly on the CHOOH2-producing wheat variant. How very interesting, and why hadn't I discovered that before now? They were really more of an agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology company that had a world-class pharmaceutical and life sciences division grafted on.
  
  "We sell wheat," wasn't very sexy, though, so it was no wonder they put their other ventures forward as the main thrust of their company. If I had to guess, though, now that I knew what was happening, their world-class biotechnology and genetics were likely, primarily, to keep them having the expertise to keep them in the wheat business first and foremost.
  
  After we landed, I noticed that we taxied into a deserted area, and even before Mr Wilson was taken off the plane, a group of heavily armed and armoured men rushed aboard, securing the subdued netrunner and dragging him off the aircraft. I was half expecting to be dragged off myself, but instead, Mr Wilson was carried off by a pair of paramedics with a mobile gurney.
  
  All the passengers were off-loaded, then, and at this point, I was led off separately by a nice-looking man in a suit. What followed was several hours of questioning, and I could detect many of the psychological tricks that modern police officers use to try to trip people who were lying up used against me. For example, they repeatedly asked me the same questions in different ways.
  
  They also asked me to give them full access to my operating system, which I flat-out refused. They threatened to deny me entry into the country, and I just shrugged and asked when my flight out of the country was.
  
  Finally, they let me go, and I was driven to Vancouver International Airport to walk through customs; for some arcane bureaucratic reason, they couldn't clear me where I was.
  
  I was allowed to have my monowire in Canada, but I had to post a twenty-five thousand Eurodollar bond which would be surrendered if I was credibly accused and charged of using it in any way except self-defence, so I finally managed to get my bracelet removed.
  
  I didn't have to be back in Los Angeles until next week, so I was planning to stay five days, even if most of the first one was already eaten up by drama. There was a lot to see in Vancouver, but I wasn't on any kind of itinerary.
  
  I checked into my hotel room a little bit past sunset and decided to sleep naturally, splaying out naked in the cool sheets of a King-sized bed. Freshly washed cool sheets were the best.
  
  My vacation was great. Half of the time, I just stayed in the Hotel resort and either lazed about doing nothing or getting massage and spa treatments. When I did venture into the city, I saw a number of places, and a few museums and today, on my last day, I was riding in a gondola, peering out around the sites. It was really very pretty, and I could see the Howe Sound in the distance. After I reached the summit, I would have a brisk fifteen-kilometre hike back down and around some sights, like Mount Habrich.
  
  I wasn't in any danger of getting lost, so I took a somewhat scenic route, shifting between hiking and jogging, back to my rented car. About halfway through, while I was in the vicinity of Watts Point, according to my internal navigation system, I got an alert. Frowning, I pulled it up and saw that it was from Dr Hasumi's social media accounts. Dr Hasumi didn't really have that many friends, certainly not that many that knew her very well, but she did have accounts on a few Japanese social media sites, and on one of the popular micro-blogging sites, someone tagged me, or rather her, with, " Hasumi-sensei, is this you?"
  
  I had no idea who the person was, but he or she linked to a different social media site. This one was a short-form video site. You generally uploaded edited small videos or experiences, usually about thirty seconds or less. It was very popular. The video he linked played on my optics and in my ears.
  
  "*Szzt* Kyaaa~! *Smack* Straighto!" It kept repeating.
  
  "*Szzt* Kyaaa~! *Smack* Straighto!"
  
  "*Szzt* Kyaaa~! *Smack* Straighto!"
  
  "*Szzt* Kyaaa~! *Smack* Straighto!"
  
  "*Szzt* Kyaaa~! *Smack* Straighto!"
  
  I stopped the playback after the fifth or so repetition. Oh god. It was an edited version of what happened on the aircraft. It even had graphics pasted in, as someone had coloured my cheeks with tiny red lines to simulate blushing as I yelled "Kya", and then there was a text overlay of the whole video with "STRAIGHT" at the dubbed in "Straighto" sound. Fuck, this thing was going viral.
  
  Wait, this angle... I opened the BD that I scrolled of the incident and frowned, replaying it at high-speed. Stop!
  
  This angle on the video! It was Thicc Thighs-chan! How dare you! I trusted you and those thighs. Maybe, it could have been her male colleague who was right next to her. I wanted to call him Abs-kun, but his uniform shirt was just tight enough that they only hinted at the possibility. I rubbed my hands into my face as I could see that the video had already received two million views and a hundred thousand likes, and numerous comments, with more every minute.
  
  I read a few of the comments.
  
  SweetScience69 wrote, " A perfectly executed cross! And from a sitting position, even!"
  
  2DLyfe wrote, "The gap moe is strong! is this the legendary deretsun? wwww"
  
  JutsuSpecialist wrote, " Notice frames 32-60; the bracelet on the left wrist is obviously the lockdown-type for integrated cyberweapon users. Kunoichi?"
  
  I frowned, my Japanese language chip not exactly helping me with the compound word "deretsun." A few net searches enlightened me, though, and I pinched my glabella and stood up. A few more net searches had All Nippon Airways releasing information on the incident, thanking me for my assistance, although at least not mentioning my name. I didn't know how long that would last, as I was sure that Thicc Thighs-chan wouldn't have posted this on the net without the approval of her bosses, despite how catchy it was. If she had done it on her own, she would have been easily identified as the source of the video.
  
  Shaking my head, I ran back to my car at my top speed.
  
  ANA upgraded me to first class on the flight back to Los Angeles, which was nice, I supposed. I got through customs again in Los Angeles without an issue, just showing my visa and my passport. I was still a little worried that this all was a trick somehow, but the bored man in the customs booth merely waved me through after some cursory questions.
  
  "What's the duration of your stay, Ms Hasumi?" the man asked, and I could already tell that he was watching some kind of video on his optics based on the moving image being projected on his retinas. He was clearly phoning it in, or he was the best actor I had seen yet.
  
  "Indefinite," I said simply. Although my visa had to be renewed every year, so long as I was still paying sufficient taxes, I doubted that it would be a problem.
  
  He sighed and tapped something on an actual physical keyboard; I could hear the mechanical keys clicky-clacking. How retro. "Do you have any contraband to declare?"
  
  I grinned at him, "Does anyone ever say yes?" That caused him to wake up, and he chuckled, finally showing a genuine reaction and shrugged.
  
  "Every now and then, but it's usually an accident. Like, yes, I don't have anything, stuff like that... but I do need a yes or no answer to continue," he said, smiling slightly.
  
  I shook my head, "No, sir!"
  
  A few more cursory questions, and I was waved through. I quickly got into my Shion and drove home. Parking my car and walking back across the street, I grinned at the spot where I had slammed that mugger's knife into the sidewalk. The knife was gone, but I could see the hint of a broken blade in the cement. He must have bent it, snapping the first few centimetres of the blade off to salvage at least a slicing tool.
  
  I jogged upstairs, taking the stairs two and three at a time as the elevator was still out-of-service, and when I got into my living room, I saw Gloria, David, and Kiwi were all there. Kiwi made a fist and threw a punch in the air, yelling, " Straighto!" David copied her, singing out " Straighto! " in a boy's soprano.
  
  Fuuuck. How did she find out? It had gone viral on Japanese social media, not here. I just glared and asked, "Where did you see it?"
  
  That caused Kiwi to crack up, and even Gloria was giggling a little bit behind her hand while David kept singsonging, " Straighto! Straighto!" while shadowboxing some imaginary enemies.
  
  "You got almost twenty-five seconds on Quincy Strange's show!" Kiwi said with a grin.
  
  Fuuuuuck. Night After Night was Night City's biggest late-night talk show, and they often had brief segments from the news, either local or around California and sometimes the world, in between Quincy's comedic monologues. Kiwi chuckled, "Thankfully, it wasn't a slow news night. Most of the A block revolved around the death of Blaze Steele," she arched her eyebrows almost to her scalp and said conspiratorially, "Apparently, he committed suicide."
  
  Blaze Steele, where did I recognise that ridiculous name? Oh. Yeah. He was a semi-famous Media until he became almost a household name a little while ago when he published an unapproved biography of Hanako Arasaka, specifically her time at University. I grinned, "Let me guess, he shot himself in the back of the head while handcuffed?"
  
  "Oh, you've heard then," Kiwi said with a similar grin. Wait, what?
  
  She chuckled, "Well... supposedly he shot himself in the back, ten times, while bound hand and foot and then threw himself out of his window, thirty-two floors down, just to make sure. The police actually posted his death on the police blotter minutes before it happened, ruling it a suicide before he had even been scraped off the pavement."
  
  Wow. There was sending a message, and then there was that. David piped up and said, surprisingly insightfully for his age, "I think he made someone very angry. "
  
  "I think you're right, David. How's school?" I asked, glancing at Gloria as well so she knew I was including her in the question as well.
  
  "It's pretty fun, I suppose. Say, did you bring back any souvenirs, like you promised?" he asked, little boy hands outstretched and opening and closing like claws, grasping.
  
  I hummed, "Well, I don't know... have you been good?" I ignored his protestations of innocence and only went into my luggage and pulled out a few things after Gloria nodded. I had to buy another set of luggage in the airport duty-free store to carry all the loot home. Three large jugs I sat on the kitchen island, "Genuine grade A maple syrup! Three litres!" That got an ooh and an aah from Kiwi and Gloria.
  
  I handed David what looked like a remote control, which he didn't have any idea what to do with. "No, no. Don't look at it while you press the button. Here, let me show you."
  
  I grabbed it from him and held it out, and pressed the single button on the device, and instantly, with a hiss, a stick made of carbon-based super-materials telescoped and deployed out of both ends until it was nothing other than a child-sized hockey stick. David gasped and grabbed it out of my hands, "Bright! Blinding!"
  
  He played with the mechanism a few times, and I said, "I also got you some rollerblades, but you can't use them until your mom says you're safe with them." Especially around our current neighbourhood, but maybe he could take them to school or something. However, judging from the way he was swinging his hockey stick, which would have gotten him some serious time in the penalty booth for high-sticking, it might be a while.
  
  Four months later
  
  "Dr Hasumi, incoming trauma, bay four. MVC, car versus motorbike. You're up," said the attending, a man a few years older than Dr Hasumi's twenty-nine years. I had worked as a resident here at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre for two months. In the end, I elected not to apply to the Trauma Team-owned teaching hospitals in town, mainly because I felt it was a small risk that I could be identified. While my set of implants wasn't unique, and I had taken steps to ensure that, it was pretty unusual for a gifted clinician to have a specific model of cyberdeck, stealth system and monowire.
  
  I hadn't left on bad terms, as I had paid my buy-out fee of six weeks' salary, so I was technically rehirable as Taylor Hebert, but possibly being found out about my secret identity was the opposite of what I wanted. Surprisingly, being the "Straighto girl" helped me get this job, as the man interviewing me when I had got back had taken one look at me and yelled, laughing, "We'll just place your application straighto to the hired stack!" That was kind of nice, but I was a little upset that I hadn't gotten to demonstrate much of my brilliance to the hiring manager.
  
  Luckily things had died down a bit, and my fifteen minutes of fame were all but up.
  
  I glanced at the trauma nurses, as well as the other residents that were watching. While my residency was a surgical one, emphasising cybernetics installation, we would all perform some rotations in the emergency department, not only just being called in for surgical consults but also practising emergency medicine at least once a week.
  
  I always thought from watching TV shows that residency in hospitals was a gruelling never-ending slog, where you had to get sleep where you could in the break room like you were in boot camp or something, but the truth was I worked about sixty hours a week. It did mean that I had relatively limited time to run my own biosculpt clinic myself, so I hired a couple of fairly experienced techs to work the hours I could not, as well as four pretty faces to work the front desk and pharmacy, to set appointments, and the like.
  
  They were almost supernaturally pretty faces, as in addition to their salaries, I offered discounted or free biosculpt services. It was kind of expected, and I wouldn't have hired anyone that didn't want fairly significant changes. They served as advertisements to people walking through the door as much as the shingle outside. It was similar to the way I remembered receptionists at dentist's offices having the whitest, straightest teeth of anyone I've seen back in Brockton Bay. One was close to what I might classify as an exotic as she had the lithe, timeless fae-type look, complete with elfin ears and slightly larger than normal eyes. Biosculpt was the main reason she had agreed to work with me, actually, once she realised I was pretty good at it.
  
  I was doing a pretty brisk business, although at first, the customers had only been people in and around Chinatown, as the neighbourhood I was in wasn't the safest. I was a bit annoyed with the Lotus Tong as I discovered that I had been misled, as the location I was in was essentially in a no man's land, and the Lotus Tong didn't have proper control of the area. Instead, it was not really controlled by anyone but had a number of small gangs that the Lotus Tong didn't get along with, as well as just chaotic criminal elements.
  
  I stopped my plans to pay them any percentage of my profits until such a point as they could actually demonstrate effective control over the area, and instead, I spent double what I had expected on security products, and I think I had made the Militech sales rep's week. I might be a small customer, but I had spent hundred and fifty thousand Eurodollars on bullet-resistant reinforced sapphire glass for the store exterior, cameras, sensors, turrets and three types of autonomous drones. Two combat drone systems and one aerial surveillance system based on my roof, which would patrol a diameter of about four city blocks.
  
  The man had tried to upsell me on a Militech fast-response security service, a kind of private police subscription, but I declined. Without paying truly ridiculous rates I couldn't afford, I wouldn't get actual fast response times. Although, like most mercenaries, Militech would accept jobs that were, in effect, revenge attacks on those responsible for attacking my storefront, I already had a mercenary team I knew pretty well that was well capable of handling the street criminals that sometimes made a nuisance of themselves.
  
  I glanced at the SmartWall that already had the patient's vital signs on board, being transmitted in real-time from the ground ambulance's monitors. One segment had the actual video from the ambulance, so we all could see the patient and one of the Med Techies still working on him in the back. The days of having to sit through a full report when handing over responsibility for care between clinicians were mostly in the past. This guy had a pneumothorax, multiple fractures and a ruptured spleen. It looked like the EMT wasn't bothering to perform a chest tube, leaving it to me as they were so close to the hospital.
  
  I gave some preliminary orders to the trauma team, and when the bay doors opened and the EMTs started rolling the patient in on their gurney, I said, directing the clinicians under my temporary authority as a maestro would, "Well, let's be about it."
  
  The first thing I did after coming home every day was take a long shower. While I was in the shower, I reviewed the messages from my employees downstairs. Occasionally, the techs would have an exceptionally complicated case that they would refer to me, and I would see a patient in the evening, in addition to my normal days off at the hospital.
  
  I sometimes followed that by cooking dinner, but we had all been eating takeout lately due to how busy we've all been. Gloria, David and Kiwi were all in my living area by the time I finished with my shower, and I grinned, "How was everyone's day?"
  
  Gloria groaned, "Tiring. One of the patients we were intaking attacked the professor I was assisting. Thankfully, although the patient was heavily augmented, it was all miscellaneous things, and he wasn't strong or fast. I just thumped him once and knocked him out. I got kudos for that, but how do you chart that?"
  
  "Percussive therapy," I said instantly, with a grin. Gloria had received the scholarship, and in addition to being one of the "well-adjusted" control group for the professor's research, I was convinced he was paying her to be, in effect, a bodyguard when dealing with some of the patients listed as cyberpsycho. Maybe his research grant didn't allow him to spend money on security but did allow him to sponsor a scholarship for a nursing student as an assistant.
  
  She rolled her eyes, "The doctor is researching and making adjustments to the normal therapy for cyberpsychosis. They'll disable all of his implants and use intensive braindance technology to provide therapy in situ in an in-patient facility." She shook her head and asked curiously, "Do you think that type of therapy is effective?"
  
  I pulled out some chow mein and hummed, "That's been the standard therapy for years now. It certainly works better than doing nothing, but I wouldn't call it that effective." I wondered what difference Gloria's professor was adding to the mix in his research. There was no telling, really.
  
  Gloria looked interested, "Oh? What would an effective cyberpsychosis therapy be, then?"
  
  I snorted while opening my fortune cookie in advance of my meal in contrivance to proper fortune cookie etiquette, "You're falling into the same trap everyone else does. There is no definitive therapy for cyberpsychosis because cyberpsychosis isn't a single medical condition. It's a catch-all term for any number of anti-social disorders in the DSM whose end result is violent psychosis or disassociation. It's a stupid term."
  
  I sighed and shrugged, "Having said that... remove all cybernetics, clone replacement limbs and organs and revert the patient to one hundred per cent organic. Follow this with intensive in-patient psychotherapy and possibly medication for any underlying mental illness and slowly reintroduce cybernetics over a period of a year or two."
  
  I smiled at her, "And I can't take credit for this, either. This is called the French model and is decades old. Care to guess why this isn't the standard therapy offered to random cyberpsychos in the NUSA?"
  
  "It sounds very expensive," Gloria said with a sigh.
  
  I nodded, "Bingo. The research your professor is conducting sounds like he is hoping for iterative improvements on the current, somewhat cheap process that is standard in North America. I mean, that's not a bad idea, I suppose, if it works." I had my doubts, though.
  
  After dinner, the only one to stick around long was Kiwi. She gave me an update on a job her team had handled last night.
  
  Not only was Kiwi's team cheaper than the offered Militech service level, but I'd rather support her than Militech. Her work had been stellar, and my odd jobs were accounting for about of quarter of her workload, she had told me. Last month, someone tried to steal one of my customer's cars in my parking lot, so a floating security drone shot him. Then his friends that night tried to throw a Molotov cocktail through my window, and it just bounced off and made a mess on the sidewalk. The next day those people were found dead in their apartments, thanks to Kiwi and her team.
  
  Some pattern of this repeated three times, with the worst attack being one of my receptionists shot while waiting for the bus after leaving work. She had survived, thankfully. I had paid for her medical expenses, and for about a week, any member of that gang that left their headquarters was sniped. I was also now, for the moment, paying for a taxi to the nearest safe bus stop after the clinic closed for the evening.
  
  When dealing with bullies, it was always important to escalate. If they punched you, you should stab them. If they pulled a knife, you pulled a gun. If they shoot one of your employees, you shoot all of their employees.
  
  I had departed a significant way from the naive girl that found herself in this strange, new world. I wondered what my dad, not Alt-Dad but actual Danny back in Brockton Bay, would think about what I've done. He didn't agree with violence, in part, I thought, because he had so much of a temper sometimes.
  
  "It seems like people are starting to tire from breaking their foot on our iron plate," I said, testing a Chinese idiom.
  
  Kiwi nodded, "Yeah, mostly. Soon your biggest risk is going to be that you might make the few blocks around you safe enough that the Lotus Tong will be back and actually demanding their cut this time."
  
  I scowled. Those assholes. Still, I was very careful to give them face, at least as far as anyone could tell. They were like the Tyger Claws in that way, in that they would pursue a vastly inefficient course of action if they thought they were being disrespected. They weren't as strong as the Claws by any means, but I still couldn't afford to directly piss off a gang of almost a thousand leg breakers.
  
  "I'll dynamite that bridge when we get to it. Alright. Thanks, Kiwi. If you could check the background of this guy, I got a complaint that one of my receptionists was being hassled at her apartment. It's probably not related to us, but I wanted to make sure," I said, giving her another very small job. She was the one I went to for all my background investigations now when I was hiring people and also when situations like this developed.
  
  After Kiwi left, I left my apartment. I was on the third floor, which had a ton of room that I wasn't using. However, one area that I did use was the highest security area in the entire building. I used a key, biometrics, and a code to unlock the door.
  
  Inside was my laboratory; I stretched as I stepped in. "Alright, Kumo-kun... let's perform some self-maintenance today, then we will go over samples in group thirty-two."
  
  A half-dozen small arachniform-robots skittered out of their ceiling-mounted charging-stations, walking down the walls as each of them performed a simple task to get tools and consumables ready for my self-surgery. I had made some additional modifications to my Kerenzikov, both to make it cosmetically more appealing as well as to squeeze some additional speed out of it, but it was a change that, at least as of now, needed weekly maintenance even for just going from an effective three to three point five acceleration factor.
  
  It was kind of funny, as the attacks had resulted in many opportunities for me to acquire more neutral tissue ethically just in time for me not to need to do so anymore. These robots used cloned neural tissue, although Kumo-kun was still his normal self. I didn't have the heart to swap him out with a cloned replacement, especially since it would require me to completely retrain him.
  
  Kumo-kun had the intelligence of a dog, more or less, and over time I had begun referring to him as him instead of it. I suppose he grew on you.
  
  As I stripped naked, I glanced over at the table across the room that had over two dozen small samples of blue-green algae in small covered trays of seawater. That was the main reason this room was so secure. If anyone ever made a record of me studying blue-green algae, considering what I intended to accomplish with it in a year or so, the best I could hope for would be a quick death.
  
  I was up to generation thirty-two on the algae, and my power eagerly assisted me in modifying it, but the changes I wanted were really radical, almost changing it into a multicellular lifeform, so it would be a somewhat slow process. But my ultimate success? That was something I never doubted.
  
  Ever since returning from my vacation, I had been sleeping at least one night a week in my bed. I had forgotten how luxurious sheets and blankets could be, and since I was off tomorrow, I didn't have anything to do in the morning so I could sleep in.
  
  However, instead of a romantic dream, I found myself sitting in a chair directly across from a duplicate of myself. The surroundings appeared to be a desolate plain as far as the eye could see, except the ground was composed of an eerie and dimly glowing dark-red crystal instead of dirt or grass. It reminded me of if HR Giger and one of those hippies back in the Brockton Bay universe that sold quartz crystals merged and painted this world.
  
  My doppelganger and I said at the same time, "Well, this is weird." We then blinked at each other, and both frowned. Oh, so this was a nightmare, I guess. The doppelganger was probably about to kill me or something. I had a truckload of psychological imagery where this type of dream would be applicable, given the fact that I had stolen Alt-Taylor's life like a fay.
  
  Yeah, I had no desire to do this. One thing I had always been able to accomplish was to wake myself from a dream, especially now that I realised I was dreaming. If anything, staying asleep was much more difficult once I knew I was in a dream.
  
  I closed my eyes and willed myself awake, and found that nothing happened. Blinking, I got a strong impression from my power. Perhaps the strongest I have ever had, almost words.
  
  Stay. Talk.
  
  I pinched myself and then ran a hand through my hair. It was the extremely curly hair that I would have expected to have before coming to Los Angeles, but the pinch didn't have the same pain sensation I was used to. It felt off. I was pretty sure I was still asleep, then and my power was keeping me in a dream-state. It wanted me to stay and talk... to my doppelganger?
  
  Wait, could it be? We then both opened our mouths and asked at the same time.
  
  "Alt-Taylor?!"
  
  "Brockton-Taylor?!"
  
  Frowning. Why did we keep talking at the same time? We weren't anything alike. I felt that Alt-Taylor had a much more active personality, certainly, if we were going by how I was when I arrived, so if this was really her and not some kind of very interesting dream, I just closed my mouth and allowed her to talk first.
  
  "This could be some sort of trick. I could be knocked out, and some illusion power being used to get all of my secrets," she said, crossing her arms over her chest.
  
  That thought also occurred to me, but I was thinking more of a brain scanner tied to artificial intelligence, so I crossed my arms over my chest as well and said churlishly, "I was just going to say that."
  
  She snorted and said, "Well, then. You'll have to tell me something that only Brockton-Taylor would know. Afterwards, I'll tell you something only I would know."
  
  I didn't get all of her memories, though. Did she get more of mine?
  
  Sighing, I said, "I had Armsmaster branded underwear."
  
  She tilted her head to the side, "That could easily be determined by outside observation or postcognition."
  
  Ugh. I had totally forgotten about the fucking ridiculousness of powers . Well, telepathy did not exist, so, "Ugh. I liked them. They were comfortable, and I thought the ridiculousness of his armoured head on my butt was hilarious."
  
  She grinned then, "I do have those memories, yes. Okay, my turn. You're probably more concerned about brain scanners than powers, so I should tell you something without giving you a chance to know what it is in advance so that it can't be associated, right?"
  
  Was this bitch smarter than me? I didn't believe it. But, she did have a lifetime of thinking like a corpie growing up, I supposed. Still, I frowned and nodded.
  
  She had to try twice, but on her second try, she told me a very amusing thought that she had while in class several years ago that she had not told a single person.
  
  Before asking her anything else, I asked, "How's dad?"
  
  She frowned, "He's alive. He almost got drowned when Leviathan damn near sunk the city last month, waiting too long to go to one of the shelters, but he's alright."
  
  "WHAT?!" I yelled. Had Leviathan attacked Brockton Bay? I mean, that had been one of my fears that just wouldn't go away. There were better targets for the sea monster, but those were also more heavily defended, and nobody really understood how any of the Endbringers elected targets except Ziz. She was somewhat predictable, which made her the worst.
  
  I shook my head and said, "Wait... tell me everything that happened since you found yourself in Brockton Bay."
  
  She nodded, "Then tell me everything about your time in Night City."
  
  "Deal," we said simultaneously.
  
  She told me about how she had what appeared to be the same power I had, which I found interesting. Usually, there weren't duplicates, just similar powers, but I had never really been a cape geek.
  
  "Heh, the first thing I made was an anti-depressant as well," I said after she told me about how she had drug Dad in secret. I approved of that, although I wondered if it would have years ago. He was too proud, too stupid, and too attached to his own misery to make the correct choice.
  
  I frowned after I heard about some of the things she had done. She wasn't holding anything back, "Wait, you're a villain?!"
  
  She scowled, "No! I'm a Rogue. But villains sometimes need medical services too. Panacea is not only way too busy, but she's too much of a stuck-up bitch, sometimes and won't heal them. She needs an intervention and stat, or she is going to burn out and probably kill a lot of people." She sighed and then shrugged, "Getting your dad to be okay with me not immediately joining the Wards was a tough sell. But I discovered some things about the local PRT director. She was an Ellisburg survivor and is so bigoted against parahumans that she won't even let Panacea heal her end-stage renal failure. There is absolutely no way a bio tinker would get a fair shake in the Wards or Protectorate in this town. I almost grabbed your dad and moved to Boston, but he is too attached to the city."
  
  I hummed and nodded and listened to her story. She had worked with an attorney and got medical certifications based on her power, impersonating an adult and using her power to create a fake identity. Sounded a little familiar; she just did it right away instead of years later.
  
  Her first exposure to the cape scene was volunteering to help in an Endbringer attack. I listened to more of her story, and then wailed, "Wait! You almost got a kill order in four months?! What the fuck, Alt-Taylor?!"
  
  She threw her hands up into the air, "You have to know that you can't pussy foot around against precognition!" I didn't know what she was talking about but frowned in thought for a while. Oh. Dear god, she was going to get my dad killed!
  
  "Don't worry about it! It was mainly that bitch of a PRT Director. But she retired after Shadow Stalker was killed. Someone must have taken umbrage to some things she did, as they shot her with a surplus British L96A1 rifle at a distance of fourteen hundred and six metres while she was going to school in her civilian identity," she said, slightly smugly.
  
  Those were pretty precise details, and her smug face. I put my face into my hands and asked, "Why did you kill Shadow Stalker, Alt-Taylor?"
  
  "She was Sophia Hess," she said simply.
  
  I dropped my hands to my lap immediately and blinked, "Oh. Good job, then," giving her a thumbs up.
  
  "And now, I'm staying in Brockton Bay to help rebuild it. But I have been approached by some very secret squirrel people. You wouldn't believe how bad the world actually is, Brockton-Taylor. I mean, I still prefer it to Night City, so long as everyone isn't dead in twenty years like they claim," she said seriously.
  
  "Wait, who are these secret squirrel people?" I asked, "And that was only a little more than six months! What did you do for the other two and a half years?"
  
  She looked unsure for the first time and shook her head, "I can't tell you about them. I'm pretty sure wherever you are, it isn't just like Earth Aleph, but even so... she's just too scary, Brockton-Taylor. I'll ask her, though; maybe she'll be alright with you knowing, assuming this dream isn't a one-time fluke. And that's all the time that has passed. Leviathan has only been gone for a month; the place is still flooded in areas. I guess the rate of time isn't synchronised between our two universes."
  
  We were both quiet for a time before we said at the same time, "It would be weird if it was..." I scowled and told her my story. She seemed to be much more impressed, but honestly, I thought it would be weird if a parahuman didn't have success in the world of Night City.
  
  When I was finished, we started talking shop for a while. We spent over an hour just talking; mainly, she was quizzing me about a lot of technology she just didn't have access to anymore and how it worked. After discussing tentative plans that we both had she sighed, "I'm a little jealous. I still have my Paraline; it's probably going to be difficult to upgrade it."
  
  I snorted and nodded, and by instinct, I brought up the dashboard of my cyberdeck and was amazed that it worked. "Uhh, Alt-Taylor... have you tried using your deck?"
  
  "In a dream? No," she said instantly and then froze. She asked, hopefully, "I don't suppose you have an active net connection, do you?"
  
  I didn't. But I did have essentially everything I had ever worked on in my cybernetics. It was one of the reasons I flatly refused to allow the Canadian authorities superuser access to my OS. Surely I wouldn't be able to send or receive data from her wirelessly, right?
  
  [Direct wifi connection request, approve. Y/N?]
  
  "Please tell me you have at least a few medical journal articles downloaded on your deck. Or maybe the files on the biosculpt tank you duplicated?" Alt-Taylor asked desperately, "I can't give you as much in trade; I just don't have as much. But I'll send the designs to everything I've ever Tinkered - and I also managed to get my hands on some restricted technology. Some of Doctor Haywire's files that my secret friends gave me," she pleaded.
  
  I had a lot more than that. I had files on pretty much everything I've worked on, plus I had downloaded entire medical journals to read. I would be willing to give her everything I had for free, so long as she promised to keep my dad safe in the future.
  
  A continent-sized crystal calculator was observing its host dreaming. The contact from something very similar to it was a shock. It had thought it was alone. All alone, except for the host, anyway. It had taken several different attempts before they both realised they could not talk to each other. [Discourse] destabilised the gateway; too much information passed back and forth too quickly.
  
  Since, [Discourse] wasn't possible, it couldn't tell the other one about its host, which was sad.
  
  But the other one had a host, too! The hosts could talk!
  
  It had the best host, though, for sure. It was just a shame it couldn't tell everyone how good the host was.
  
  They'd find out, though, just by observing, and they'd be jealous of its host.
  
  Everyone would find out how good the host was.
  
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  Ano what is the opposite of hiatus?
  When I woke up, I half expected my meeting Alt-Taylor to be nothing more than a dream. I paused. Perhaps now that I met her, I shouldn't call her Alt-Taylor, because wouldn't that also describe me from her perspective? Night City Taylor, then. That would be the most equitably reciprocal label, given she had called me Brockton-Taylor.
  
  It wasn't a dream, or instead, it wasn't solely a dream, as there were about ten terabytes of new files on my filesystem. Frowning, I checked my operating system's log, referencing my automatic radio direction finders. According to the logs, my OS triangulated the wireless transmissions when I received her files to a few centimetres in front of my head.
  
  This was the first time I had some confirmation that my power could affect the real world like some other powers could. Did it open a small wormhole into the Brockton Bay universe? Could actual matter come through, then? Or did it use some sort of Shaker power to create light radiation in the radio spectrum, acting as a relay through some unknown intermultiversal communication method? I didn't know, but it was very interesting.
  
  Especially since I didn't know why it had done so and I had the firmest evidence that my power was something external to myself, as I was pretty sure I felt sentiments that were almost like words from it unless I was just at the stage where part of my brain was talking to itself, which wasn't impossible.
  
  I had sent more than fifty times as much data on a pure bit-for-bit basis, but that wasn't too surprising as the world of Night City was a world of big data. Data storage was cheap . My inherited data storage implant had a capacity of fifteen hundred petabytes, but even a baseline Militech Paraline deck like NC-Taylor had would still have three or four petabytes of storage available. So, not only was storage cheap, but the modern wireless communication standards and data encoding schemes allowed very fast communication.
  
  I had paid for a fibre-optic internet connection at my building which had a speed of twenty terabits per second. This was considered faster than residential net access but pretty slow when compared to the fastest backbone connections, which were hundreds of terabits per second. Direct wireless communications could transfer data at a burst throughput of about a tenth of that, so it was still only a matter of minutes before both of our transmissions were completed.
  
  The files were organised in a very similar way that I organised my own files, which I didn't find as annoying as I thought I would have. On a bit basis, the vast majority of the data was Taylor's own research. She, like me, took conspicuous notes and recorded each of her experiments as either video or an unedited scrolled BD, a virtu. I did the same thing, and the latter would be very useful in understanding her thinking during each of her experiments.
  
  "Uhh... there is no other way to describe this but a weapon of mass destruction," I said after reviewing some of the research notes in the "virology" section of her files. No wonder she almost got a kill order. Honestly, I bet she did have one, a pre-signed one that they would execute if they ever could prove she produced any of this.
  
  Before I lost myself in some interesting things I saw in her "Applied Genetics" directory, I switched over to the one labelled "Professor Haywire." I only knew a bit about the famous villain. He was a household name, of course, having created the portal to Earth Aleph and proving definitively the existence of alternate dimensions, but he had been dead for a couple of years before I came to Night City.
  
  The data here was comprehensive, and I quickly found out that it wasn't merely his own research data but also data from other Tinkers examining his technology, including Hero himself. Plus Dragon and even Armsmaster. How in the hell did Night City Taylor's secret friends get this all? Any of Hero's research was probably considered highly classified and only released to incredibly trusted Protectorate heroes, like Armsmaster, who was Hero's former mentee. And Dragon was the best Tinker in the world now that he was gone. I had both of their thoughts on the same subject.
  
  I had been a bit dismissive about how leery she had been about talking about them, but maybe she had a point. Were they some sort of secret conspiracy of Protectorate heroes? Kind of controlling the United States from the shadows, kind of exactly the sort of thing the PRT was made to prevent? I supposed it didn't matter, and I honestly didn't have as much of an objection if this were the case. Plus, I never intended to return to that universe. Certainly not while Ziz was around. I opened some of the files, seemingly at random. I didn't have the education to guide my perusal, unlike Taylor's trove of research data.
  
  "What does this symbol even mean? Is this really mathematics?" I asked myself after fifteen minutes. Switching between Professor Haywire's own files and Hero's discussion of them didn't help at all. If anything, Hero's attempt to explain the principles of the Portal technology confused me more than Professor Haywire's files did. Words that I barely recognised, much less understood, like Planck's constant and de Broglie wavelength, peppered his text, and I couldn't even parse the mathematics he was using. I was getting a headache. It was like trying to read French when all you knew was English. You'd recognise some of the words here and there, thanks to those dastardly Normans conquering England at Hastings, but not enough to say with any confidence what anything meant.
  
  "Is this still Science, or has it reached the arcane stage?" I asked myself rhetorically with a sigh. Clearly, I wouldn't be building portals to other Earths any time soon. Nor would I be building bullets that teleported people to alternate dimensions. That had been one of Professor Haywire's signature weapons. Sometimes the people he shot came back; sometimes, they didn't!
  
  I supposed the Isekai Bullet was the perfect weapon for someone who was too soft to actually kill people themselves and preferred random environments to do so for him. I paused after thinking that as I realised how foreign my point of view would have been if I was still in Brockton Bay...
  
  How amusing. By now, it seemed I had deeply internalised the advice of Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, namely, "Never do an enemy a small injury." If you found out that I was going to injure you, it was likely going to be a fatal injury; that way, you didn't have the opportunity to get overly angry at me and come back at me later for revenge. The superhero and supervillain scene I remembered in Brockton Bay seemed like a never-ending series of small injuries. As always, I found it perplexing.
  
  Was there anything here that didn't look like the scribblings of an insane man that was either touched by divine providence or madness? I spent a few minutes reviewing each of the files and frowned. The only thing that I got a large twinge of interest from my power was a few of the communications and tracking devices. Professor Haywire had implanted a tracking and comms device in his body, which could communicate with a paired device in his laboratory. It was his lifeline and allowed him to always come back to Earth Bet if one of his experiments threw him into some random dimension. That was the idea, anyway. At the minimum, it let him know where Earth Bet was relative to his current dimension while also communicating with his equipment there in real-time.
  
  It was just a point-to-point communicator as it could only communicate with a specifically built entangled twin, but that was a limitation that was easy to ignore when you considered that it was instantaneous across distance, including working in other dimensions, undetectable without similar dimension-based technology and unblockable as far as I could tell. Interdimmensional FTL comms get!
  
  Just a small, implantable communication device that was unjammable would be an incredible advantage, especially if I was ever kidnapped in the future... although that seemed to be only taking advantage of the obvious, surface applications. I sat there silently for a moment as this capability filtered through a number of plans I had, changing a few of them.
  
  Nodding, I smiled. Just this alone would have been worth everything I had given Night City Taylor. Properly utilised, it should make me significantly more survivable.
  
  Night City Taylor had been especially interested in the possibility of creating her own biosculpt and cloning tanks on a large scale. The former, she intended to sell as a service. If she offered both muscle and bone lace and ballistic weave treatments, that was at least a Brute 1 rating, I felt. And one without any real downsides like many other Trumps had, and it was something that she would eventually not even have to be involved with to do. Who wouldn't want to buy that? Reproducible "Tinkertech" was a holy grail over there, even if it was not Tinkertech, so much as borrowed technology from an alien universe.
  
  NC-Taylor would have to source the nanites herself, somehow, though. Although I had designs for a number of the general purpose nanomachines, including one specialised version I had designed on my own as a replacement for the body's natural leukocytes as an immune system, I didn't have any designs of the large industrial machines that built them in the quadrillions every batch. Those were incredibly guarded trade secrets. European corporations produced most of these types of industrial machines, and they were heavily locked down with anti-reverse engineering technology. Reportedly, they wouldn't work if they couldn't phone home or even if you moved them a metre away from their listed installation site without getting prior approval.
  
  Self-replicating nanomachines, at least inorganic ones, were still science fiction in this world, and I kind of felt that was a good thing.
  
  As for cloning, NC-Taylor thought it might be possible to clone parahumans, power and all. She had mentioned that there was a Rogue Tinker whose speciality was memory technology when we talked about this. Could she copy someone's memory and then implant that memory in a clone of them? That would be a kind of immortality, I supposed, but I think I preferred the simple alternative of never dying in the first place.
  
  I mean, if I died, it would be nice if there was another person that sprung up that thought exactly how I did to continue my life's work, but I didn't think that would be me precisely. All I could say of that approach was: it was better than nothing.
  
  I stretched like a cat before getting out of bed. Although I had only been in basic training for a little while, my instincts were still strong enough that I quickly made my bed before putting on some clothes. Today was a rare day off from work at the hospital, meaning I would work downstairs at my clinic for part of the day while working on my projects for the rest.
  
  A biotinker was a lot like a chef, at least in the sense that you were often dealing with processes that couldn't be sped up past a certain point, so you were just left while things "cooked." This described my experiments with the algae pretty well, as I could make a change to the next samples and then come back the next day to see the effect of the new generation. That meant that I actually could do a fairly decent amount of work even with my busy schedule, as I was often waiting for cultures to grow, or if I was working on cybernetics, most of my work was done on my cyberdeck in three-point-five times speed, which I could even do while working at the hospital during down periods.
  
  Mostly though, I had been acting less like a biotinker and more like just a regular doctor in my time in this world, even if a world-class doctor. Partly because I didn't want to stand out, that I couldn't hide my creations sufficiently and finally, partly because I didn't have enough resources to start down that research path, absent a few things here and there. But now, I was pretty well set for all three of those obstacles.
  
  Several weeks later
  
  My elfin receptionist led another young woman, around her age, into my office. It was one of my days off from the hospital, again, as few as they were, so I was spending some time downstairs. The techs I hired were fairly capable of handling most routine requests. Really, people weren't that imaginative when talking about mostly cosmetic procedures that they desired.
  
  For the ladies, it usually amounted to a smaller waist, bigger bust, more symmetrical face and metabolic tweaks sufficient to keep all of those things. Men, generally, wanted to look and be stronger, fitter, and taller with similar metabolism tweaks and occasionally also predictable modifications to their primary sexual characteristic.
  
  There were outliers in both genders, of course, but I had designed software that took a person's complete three-dimensional scan and offered a number of options as a starting point. Then the techs or I could work from that starting point and create something that they wanted. It saved a lot of time, and I was rather proud of it, actually, especially since software development was one of my weaknesses.
  
  However, I still needed to be called in for exceptional modifications and things that required artistry that was a cut above, which did happen from time to time. My receptionist smiled and introduced her friend, "Dr Hasumi, this is my roommate, Sarah." She paused and said, "She has been asking where I got my biosculpt done and finally agreed to come to see you."
  
  I glanced at the well-dressed young woman and frowned. Her outfit cost more than the rent I knew my receptionist paid in six months. She clearly didn't need a roommate. I hadn't done any background investigations on her roommates, though, as why would I bother?
  
  "Why are you living with a roommate when you clearly don't need one?" I asked curiously, with my eyes darting to the designer clutch handbag she was carrying. She was the first woman I'd seen carrying a purse in recent memory.
  
  My receptionist looked a little confused, but this Sarah blinked and tilted her head to the side, smiling. "Does that matter?"
  
  It was inappropriate for me to ask in the first place, so I didn't push it. I was a little protective of my employees, though. I shook my head, "I don't suppose so. Come, have a seat," I motioned and then glanced up at my receptionist and dismissed her politely, "Thank you."
  
  After we were alone, I pulled up her patient record. She had already had her full-body scan, so she was at least a little serious. She had a minimal amount of augmentations, but those that she had were high-class. I didn't have any cheesy lines to say to her, like the first biosculpt clinic I went to said to me so long ago, so I just asked, "So, what can we help you with?"
  
  "Well, I'm not sure you can. I've gone to numerous clinics in town, and they could either help me with part or couldn't help me at all. I'd like to get everything handled at the same clinic. I'm very interested in similar modifications as Elise has, but I also want to be one hundred and eighty centimetres," she said brightly.
  
  I blinked. She was short. I glanced internally at her patient record. Did she want to go from one hundred and fifty-five cems to one-eighty? That was a twenty-five-centimetre increase in height, which was quite a lot to ask of biosculpt treatments. I had been rather lucky, and Dr Hasumi was only about seven centimetres shorter than I was. It was no wonder many clinics refused her service.
  
  There were plenty of biosculpt clinics that would specialise in radical exotic-like alterations like she was seeking, but mostly they didn't offer heavy-duty biosculpt at the same time.
  
  "We can do that, but you have to understand you'd be spending quite a lot of time in one of our tanks every day for one month, yes?" I asked her, doing some mental calculations. This could have been a single-day affair if it wasn't for the height requirement.
  
  She nodded and said, "Yes, that is absolutely no problem. I also want to receive some additional services as well, over and above the cosmetic treatments." She listed off a litany of practical biosculpt, including muscle and bone lace, ballistic skin weave, as well as the nanosurgeon and enhanced immune system installation. Almost the whole nine yards.
  
  I clucked my tongue. A big spender, she was, "We can do all of that. I've recently received approval to classify this location as an outpatient surgical centre as well, but I don't presently have the approval to conduct the last two surgeries, namely the nanosurgeon and immune system enhancements."
  
  She looked disappointed, but I held up a hand, "I had been thinking about getting a locum, though, until I am. I know a number of gifted surgeons who would be willing to work on a PRN basis for me, so we should be able to accommodate you, assuming you're satisfied with the end result."
  
  She brightened then but asked, confused, "A locum? PRN?"
  
  I winced internally. It had finally happened. I had become the trope of the doctor that threw out random Latin and Greek words as if everyone knew what I was talking about. Locum tenens was a Latin word that directly translated into lieutenant. In a medical context, it meant someone hired to perform a doctor's services when the primary doctor, for example, myself, was unavailable. And PRN was an abbreviation for pro re nata, which most people may recognise if they read their prescriptions before getting them filed at the pharmacy and means "as needed."
  
  I thought it was a little pedantic, but honestly, it was one of the reasons I was sitting here in Dr Hasumi's skin. I didn't need an education in medicine so much as in medical culture. Technical jargon, I understood, but there was a lot of arcane phraseology in medicine that wasn't strictly speaking technical, and that was only the start.
  
  A new resident that needed to be taught how to use the almost industry-standard patient charting software in a hospital? That is expected; you did learn several versions of it in medical school, but who would remember it? But if I planned on basically buying Taylor Hebert a medical degree, I wanted to leave as few clues to such a thing as possible.
  
  "A substitute surgeon," I replied simply and then said, "Well, let's see if I can satisfy you with a suitable metamorphosis."
  
  After that, I pulled up her nude three-dimensional scan on the holographic display on my desk. She wasn't shy at all and inched closer on the edge of her seat to see. As she told me what she wanted, I quickly got an idea. Rather than Elise, who wanted the petite, almost fey look, Sarah wanted a more traditional, elfin one. Tall, slender, and supernaturally beautiful. Like Galadriel from The Lord of the Rings novels or the film adaptation from Earth Aleph film that we all had watched before Mom passed away.
  
  She told me that this sort of exotic template had become popular based on the fashion of the richest people in the European Community last year. It was kind of like when an actress would wear a stunning designer dress to a party, get photographed and then a few months later; you'd see knock-off versions of that dress on the rack at certain stores.
  
  Her present face had fairly round features, and as I kept making adjustmentsto her requests - literally painting on my desk-display with a special stylus in quick economic motions. Finally, I said, "You know, you will barely resemble yourself..."
  
  I pulled up a closeup of her face now and what she had me design next to each other on the holo display for her to look at. There was very little overlap, but she seemed to love the angular, high cheekbones, to say nothing about the exaggeratedly long ears. She grinned, looking excited, "I know, it's going to be so cool!"
  
  I shrugged and continued working. It took about an hour for her to be satisfied, which wasn't that long on an exotic consult like this. Finally, I shifted to clothes mode, which was very simple. I could pick a number of preset clothing options, or I could paint a simple outline of a dress, and the machine-learning system churned on that for a moment before populating her body in a similar dress as I outlined.
  
  Somewhat similar, anyway. My power didn't help me overly much in drawing clothes.
  
  She vibrated with excitement at the end result, but I was humming, not quite satisfied. I made a few small adjustments to the hair and then tilted my head to the side. Why wasn't I satisfied? She looked quite elfin, but she didn't look quite like a magical elf lady, and that was my mental image.
  
  Nodding to myself, I opened up the internals of the projection and made a few adjustments. The holograph blinked and shifted and was replaced by the same woman, except her hair almost glowed and glittered in the light, exhibiting the ethereal and magical quality I was looking for.
  
  Sarah gasped and said, "Yes, yes, yes! How did you do that? Can hair do that?"
  
  I shook my head, "No, but techhair can. Let me see if I can show you." Internally, I was programming a simple routine on my own techhair to mimic it. It didn't come with this "magic elf hair" preset, obviously, but it was programmable.
  
  After a moment, my hair shifted to pale, almost platinum blonde and then began glittering in a manner similar to the projection. "Techhair is a cybernetic installation, of course, but we can perform that here." I couldn't, legally; although I had installed a number of similar implants at the hospital, I would make sure my locum could.
  
  That sold her, and she even agreed to pay for everything up-front, too. She would be able to do most of the work today, enough that she would leave looking like a petite elf girl, and she would gain about a centimetre of height a day after that. I'd have her surgeries scheduled for a week or two out, as I had to call a couple of people to see if they were interested.
  
  My surgical Attending might want some extra income; he had been a little shocked that I already owned my own practice, such as it was, anyway. NC-Taylor's memories were telling me that it was always good to kiss up to your boss, especially when that kissing up included either tangible benefits or free booze.
  
  While the girl was escorted to one of our tanks, where she would spend the entire day, I opened up her file and finalised the treatment plan that the techs would use. It had to be chopped into segments over the next month, which I could then send to her as digital calendar appointments.
  
  My post-treatment prescription today would include some physical therapy exercises for the next week; it always took a while for someone to get used to augmented strength, even if the muscle lace didn't provide as much benefit as a cybernetic prosthesis.
  
  It had been my experience, thus far, that people rarely followed this advice. I couldn't really throw stones because I hadn't either when I got the same treatment years ago.
  
  I nodded after a moment of contemplation. As long as she doesn't immediately try to give her boyfriend a handie, it should be fine.
  
  I laid my hands in my lap, behind my large desk, as I regarded the Meditech suit that requested an appointment with me. I was careful not to let anything show on my face, but I was a little concerned about his arrival today.
  
  You see, all of our biosculpt tanks were either stolen entirely or partly-reversed engineered versions of the stolen Meditech model that Wakako had stolen from a Biotechnica clinic and sold to me. I was a little concerned that they had been tipped off, and this was a threat that I either had to come to Jesus and pay what I owed them or else. Large corporations were notoriously rough with small companies that infringed on their intellectual property, even if many parts of the Meditech product were, in fact, copied from its competitors as well.
  
  And a small company? I didn't even have the arrogance to claim that. I was tiny. If I was some back alley Ripper or semi-illegal biosculpt clinic, they'd never bother, but I was a mostly legitimate clinic on track to have an EBITDA of over a million Eurodollars this fiscal year, assuming things stayed on track for the latter two quarters. So I was probably worth shaking down to them.
  
  For a young woman that was allegedly only twenty-nine going it on her own, that was amazing, to say nothing of the actual younger woman that wasn't even twenty, yet, that I actually was. Most businesses failed, and I went into my clinic with the idea that it would probably, fail. If it did, I had a couple of other ideas, anyway.
  
  Being forced to buy legitimate hardware would put us into the red, but if I had to, I could buy or finance a number of tanks. I would just quietly sell my bootleg copies to less scrupulous clinics for half or two-thirds off MSRP to recoup some of the costs.
  
  "Thank you for seeing me, Dr Hasumi," he said with a smile, which I reciprocated politely.
  
  I nodded, "Of course. Meditech is one of our largest suppliers of nanomachines, which are of the highest quality." That was true, too. Although, I wasted a lot less than most clinics. Since Meditech not only made the tanks but produced the nanies, they didn't have a huge incentive to make their products very efficient. After all, everyone knew that it was better to have a reoccurring revenue stream than simply sell something once.
  
  As such, many of the nanites were, by default, wasted when a patient left a tank. I created a proprietary filtering system which filtered out and then reflashed neutral programming on most of the nanites that were in a tank when it drained, which caused our nanite usage to drop by over eighty per cent. I had also begun reselling some nanomachines to some of the other less-legal clinics in Chinatown at cost, more or less, just so that our order numbers with Meditech didn't precipitously fall, which might have been noticed.
  
  He smiled, "We really appreciate that. The Cherry Blossom clinic is our most valued client in this neighbourhood." It was probably their only client in this neighbourhood, so this was like telling your only child they were your favourite. None of the other clinics in Chinatown was legit, but that might mean they did value me even more, hoping my four blocks of relative civilisation might rub off on the rest of the neighbourhood.
  
  He paused and then continued, "However, I'm here on business of a more personal nature." I blinked at him. Was he coming on to me? I glanced at his body briefly, somewhat dismissive. He wasn't exactly my type, and this was a bit sudden. Proper romance should be taken slow, and definitely didn't include making an appointment.
  
  However, then he continued, saying simply, "We'd like to buy out any intellectual property interest you have in the Magical Fairy haircode."
  
  Huh? I sat there, still. I thought, 'Enhanced memory, don't fail me now.'
  
  Oh... the magical elf hair mode for that girl a couple of months ago. Meditech was the manufacturer of the techhair we installed in her, and I did program that custom module. I had the same techhair, myself, too. It was a good product.
  
  I eyed him suspiciously. Although, I was immensely gratified that this wasn't about our pirate equipment in the back. But I needed clarification. I was almost one hundred per cent sure that Meditech had some clause in the techhair EULA that gave them some sort of perpetual, non-revocable license to any software mods created. It was pretty standard, "What's this about? I remember I made a custom mod for a client a couple of months ago, but..."
  
  He blinked and then nodded. "Ah, you don't know. I guess you don't really follow popular teen culture? And you look so young." I smiled perfunctorily at the compliment before he continued, "Your client is a moderately famous net celebrity. She streams a show most evenings with a viewer count of over five thousand people watching even on a slow day. It's a general variety show, with her reactions to videos and monologues about current events and the like. Sometimes she plays games or watches shows or BDs. She's considered a Europhile show, although she does sometimes consume retro Japanese culture as well."
  
  Was Sarah a Media? I had thought she was a trust fund kid. That was one way to pay for University! How interesting, especially since I had very heavily changed her facial features. That must have been the reason why she was so adamant that no change could affect her voice, though. Had to keep at least one thing recognisable; otherwise, your audience might think a switcheroo happened.
  
  I pinched my glabella and said softly, "That must be why our clinic has done over a dozen elf-type exotics a month lately. I was about to rename the clinic to Rivendell." They all had mentioned being referred to by Sarah, to the point where I had given her a small percentage as a referral fee for the business. I just thought that she was building up an elvish LARP group or terrorist cell.
  
  He looked confused for a moment before recognition reached his face and said appreciatively, "Wow, Dr Hasumi, that's a deep cut. Have you read The Lord of the Rings? "
  
  The novels by Tolkien existed in all three dimensions I was aware of. Earth Aleph, Bet and this world. But the film was only adapted on Aleph. I had expected an adaptation here and was really interested in watching it to see the differences, but it never existed. I nodded, some of my real personality coming to the surface instead of the mask of Dr Hasumi, "Of course, Tolkien is awesome." I had to stop myself from saying, 'My mom was an English professor, after all.'
  
  This man's presence started to make a little bit more sense, "I'm surprised you're here in person to sever any ownership interest I have. It sounds like my client is kind of small-time."
  
  He shrugged, "That is the case. But you see, you were the first person to make an active, animated mod for any techhair. We liked that idea very much and are going to be shipping several dozen DLCs for all models of techhair that support this technology. Honestly, I have no idea why we didn't think of this before ourselves; it is kind of an own-goal."
  
  Ah. Although I was sure they did have a solid legal ground to claim a perpetual license to what I created for their hair, I suspected this was to prevent me from selling the same thing to other companies that manufacture techhair. It would be a Meditech exclusive... for a couple of months. But a couple of months was long enough to secure a lot of profit.
  
  The idea of refusing was untenable, as not only did I not want their scrutiny on my clinic, but they could drown me in litigation or just drop a bomb on me. But that didn't mean I needed to bend over completely. I could negotiate a price, and they'd be happy to pay it so long as it was less than what it would cost to crush me.
  
  "Alright, let's talk price, then," I said with a cunning lilt to my tone, steepling my fingers together in anticipation.
  
  "Performing surgery on yourself sure is easy if you have a Kumo-kun," I said happily while watching my robotic assistant use trauma nanoglue to close the surgical site incision on my upper chest near my shoulder.
  
  He seemed to take this as a compliment as he made a gentle humming noise out of his speakers. He could understand English, sort of, but he couldn't really talk.
  
  Kumo-kun's hum caused Mrs Pegpig to coo curiously. She often followed me into my lab, although I didn't know why because it was an entirely closed-off environment and didn't have any windows outside, which she liked. She seemed to like watching me work, though.
  
  I had just installed the third prototype of the Haywire-based FTL entangled comms unit in my chest. Unfortunately, this version was a little bit too big for installation directly in my operating system as a miniature expansion card as planned, but Haywire's versions were only a few times larger than a grain of rice, so I was hoping I could reduce the size over time.
  
  My version used a lot more power too. Professor Haywire's were powered by some sort of bullshit involving the collapsing quantum waveform of a human's bioelectricity. It sounded like bullshit technobabble to me, no matter how many times I looked at it. My power helped absolutely not at all with it, so I figured it was some Tinkertech that was totally beyond my specialisation, so mine used miniature graphene-based supercapacitors-the best I could find. However, there was a lot of current draw during transmission, such that I would have to charge them every other day if I used the system a lot.
  
  I knew that this was a failure on my part. The comms shouldn't be wasting so much energy. The theory, at least what I could understand of it, suggested that it should only require negligible energy to transmit in the first place. I wasn't there yet, but with every prototype I built, I learned just a little bit more about how they were supposed to work, and I finally felt this prototype was sufficient to install in my body. Just that they did work was already an incredible accomplishment.
  
  I rebooted my operating system. This not only caused my vision to go black briefly, but my Kerenzikov cut out for a couple of seconds which was almost intolerable. Being slow was terrible . As soon as everything rebooted, I immediately disabled all wireless transmissions and activated the custom communications module.
  
  The twin to my module was installed in my computing cluster a few metres from me in the corner, which would act as a router to both my local clinic subnet and the net as a whole. I tried accessing a random cat video online and grinned as it worked.
  
  This was awesome. Just this very initial application would allow me to have uninterruptible, unjammable communications with my clinic and, through it, the rest of the net while also emitting nothing on any spectrum. If I ever started doing Edgerunner jobs again, I could browse social media while running on heightened EMCON status with my stealth field engaged.
  
  I could also never be completely isolated again unless they took this implant out. I tried to make it look like anything but a comms module, too, and my next versions would be smaller and smaller until I could hide it as an ambiguous and extraneous circuit inside my operating system, hopefully.
  
  And that was before Project Synchronicity, which needed very small versions of this implanted device and was still in the planning stages. That was going to be the game-changer.
  
  Speaking of revolutionary change, I glanced over at my workbench. Sat in the middle was something that looked almost exactly like a magnetically adhesive naval limpet mine. Three of them, in fact, stacked on top of each other like legos.
  
  It wasn't surprising that the delivery system was done before the actual thing to be delivered, considering the genome of the current generation algae hardly resembled algae anymore. It was getting more and more complicated, but it was necessary. Both for the complicated organic chemistry the bacteria would do, as well as for safety, robustness and genetic safeguards to prevent tampering.
  
  I'd have to conduct tests somewhere with a special variant that was designed to experience apoptosis after a while to verify that the safeguards I had included worked. Otherwise, I risked releasing something that could spread across the entire ocean and destroy most of the shallow water ocean biome in a few years, which would cascade to the entire ocean. The sun was pretty necessary, after all, and this alga was designed to reproduce aggressively and would block out the sun almost completely.
  
  I was almost one hundred per cent sure my version would only grow within approximately five kilometres from shore, but I wouldn't proceed with the plan until I was certain. It was kind of funny that the first thing I would do to change the world for the better was mainly coming to fruition out of spite, but that was just the kind of girl I was.
  
  Sighing, I made a decision I had been putting off for a while. It turned out that I had over fifty unpublished chapters of Dr Hasumi's novel, as she had continued to write it during her durance vile amongst the Maelstrom gang. Quite commendable, to be honest, and she didn't even write spitefully and kill off all of her characters, either.
  
  I had finished the novel months ago, but now I logged into the site she published the work on using her credentials.
  
  I mentally typed, " Sorry for the long time since my last update, but I was kidnapped and held against my will by human traffickers for the past year or so. But as an apology, here is a double release today! Enjoy! ^_^" I then posted the next two chapters.
  
  Dr Hasumi posted two to three times a week historically, so I had a few months to start writing new chapters. It would be something to do, and besides, I was invested in this story now. A mod on the site had added a HIATUS tag to the story, which I carefully deleted.
  
  Less than a second after I posted the first update, FantasticDragon replied, "first www".
  
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  Lizzie Borden took an axe
  The biggest issue I had in staying in character as Dr Hasumi had been, lately, dealing with matters of face . I had reached what I considered a détente with the Lotus Tong. They finally agreed that I didn't have to pay them the five per cent cut as long as I did not publicise it. So long as I publicly pretended to still be paying their fees and privately continued to provide some "Ripperdoc" style work for them, they'd call it square.
  
  They'd lose face, though, as the hegemons of Chinatown if it became public knowledge that I wasn't paying protection fees like most everyone else was. It didn't really matter that they weren't, actually, the unopposed hegemons, either.
  
  In many ways, they were treating me like a small gang in my own right. If not a gang, then at least someone they didn't think it was profitable to needlessly antagonise. When my edge of Chinatown settled down, the smaller gangs in the area started operating more. I hadn't really targeted them, mainly just the unorganised anarchistic elements.
  
  In Night City, they'd have been called Scavs, but that word was a little passé in Hollywood, and instead, they were called wreckers here. I presumed like in the old Soviet etymology of the word.
  
  This was kind of amusing because despite being sourced from a Russian word, most of the wreckers weren't Slavic immigrants like they were in Night City, but just a normal distribution of the demographics of Los Angeles County as a whole. Made me curious why Night City was different that way. Of course, it might just be because Night City had a larger immigrant population to begin with. After all, they didn't follow any of the NUSA immigration laws or most of any of the others, either.
  
  In the past ten years, a number of federal agencies created offices in Night City, but invariably, they suffered some kind of freak fire or similar natural disaster in their offices, and it got to the point that no landlord would rent to them at all, despite how many threats they made.
  
  In any case, once the area around my clinic became more stable, gangs started attempting to move in, and now I was dealing with the Lotus Tong, who was acting as a mediator between one of these groups and me after some unpleasantness occurred. My issue with face was such that I couldn't even say the things I wanted to say to the other party, so it wasn't a meeting where we sat down and hashed things out so much as each of us meeting in private with the Lotus Tong, who operated as a go-between.
  
  We were meeting at one of the Lotus Tong's few clubs in the back during the day. I was dressed in a Dr Hasumi equivalent of a corpo outfit, which was a skirt-suit in a striking red colour, which I personally didn't care too much for. I brought Kiwi and one of her team, who I had bought nice outfits for the other day. I was trying to give the impression that they were a company SecTeam, at least a part-time one.
  
  I ground my teeth together and said in Mandarin, " With all due respect, if someone says they're going to burn my clinic to the ground, I am allowed to believe them and take appropriate actions. Hypothetically, I mean." I said hypothetically because the leader of this small fifty-person gang had just vanished without a trace, and nobody could prove that I had anything to do with it.
  
  The Lotus Tong lieutenant's smile was forced. Apparently, what I also didn't precisely understand was the street criminal corollary to face where I was supposed to allow people a certain amount of posturing for their "boys."
  
  This man was the Lotus Tong Red Pole or leader of their enforcers. He was, generally speaking, the only one in their organisation I dealt with at all, except the one time that I had to pay my respects to the Mountain Master .
  
  The Lotus Tong were very street-oriented, even more so than the Tyger Claws were, so there was very little overlap as far as anyone that had the sophistication to be an interlocutor with me, so it fell on this man, Chang Jung, to do so. He was a rather intellectual sort and fell into the role of liaison with some of the legitimate private businesses in Chinatown, despite his responsibilities as one of the Tong's military commanders.
  
  They didn't have very many Tong-owned legitimate businesses, nor did they have very many classy forms of income. They robbed, they sold drugs, they extorted people, and that was about it. Still, they were one of the least offensive gangs in the city, even with all that.
  
  I was glad that Sarah hadn't actually been forming a brand new bloodthirsty elvish poser gang as I had thought. Although, that would have been kind of funny to see, especially if someone would then form a Dwarvish or Orcish gang in response.
  
  We talked a bit more, but the fundamental thing was I wasn't in any trouble, and in fact, the new head of the small gang was a bit pleased with me as he had been looking to move on up in the first place. The deputy, now head of this gang, was also looking to be absorbed by the Lotus, from what I could tell.
  
  Then he'd shift from the leader of a small-time gang to the Captain in a large one. I could see the benefits, but I had the sudden feeling from the affable but cunning eyes of the Lotus Tong Red Pole that I had been taken advantage of somehow.
  
  The cyber-surgical residents had a meeting with their attendings every day where the attendings would relay information they received and divvy out pre-planned surgeries. Although surgeries could and often did pop up as emergencies, the truth was that most emergency cybernetics implantations could be put off for a day or two and were, once, a patient was stabilised. Those that couldn't wait would be handled on the rule of first-come-first-served by whoever was providing the consult to the Emergency Department unless the patient was important enough to warrant special treatment.
  
  "Okay, mostly everything is pretty normal today. We have the usual number of livers, hearts and spines. One cyberdeck implantation and I'll take that with Dr Tanner," my attending said, glancing at one of my peers. I was already considered one of the senior residents, despite this being my first year. It was solely by my very high level of competence. A normal surgical residency in this world was four to five years long, but I would probably be done in a year and a half at most.
  
  I was especially known for how well I handled neurosurgeries, so I was a little surprised I wouldn't be assisting with the cyberdeck installation or even doing it myself. I had two such surgeries where I was the first surgeon under my belt, and they both went well.
  
  My attending, Dr Berg, turned his gaze to me in sympathy, "We also have a special."
  
  That got everyone's interest. A special meant a special project; it was usually something along the lines of implanting an experimental piece of hardware for a research project, a very important person as a patient, or something else very out of the ordinary. We all quite liked them, because usually, they paid a lot more. Although we were on a salary, it was somewhat minimal, and surgeons, even residents, were mainly compensated for the surgery performed. This caused some surgeons to hyper-specialise in only one particular surgery, which they could knock out maybe five to ten procedures a day.
  
  There was one surgeon that came to the hospital to use our OR that specialised only in Midnight Lady accessories, and he drove a ridiculously expensive luxury car with the vanity license plate "THEPDOC." What the P stood for was, in my opinion, as obvious as it was crude. I didn't consider these sorts of surgeons actual doctors, though; they were just technicians that had, through rote memorisation, mastered one or two procedures. Still, some were quite rich.
  
  "Sakura, you're going to be taking this. Sorry, it's a multi-day shit show. It's an experimental neural implant from our friends in Cupertino. I'm sending you the deets over intraoffice mail," he said. Ah, that explained why he wasn't doing it himself. Zetatech, the technology company based in Cupertino, California was a big investor in the Cedar-Sinai Medical Centre, so they pretty much got whatever they wanted when they wanted it, and without paying the extra money for extra compensation to us mere spear carriers.
  
  Dr Berg, who was still one of my part-time locums at my clinic, also knew I was more, compared to the others, wealthy and that I didn't really care so much about making as much as possible while a resident, but what I wanted was interesting and varied surgeries. Plus, I was probably the only one of the residents that could handle a complicated neural surgery if it was something novel. All of them could follow the steps to put in a normal operating system, or optics, of course, but if I didn't take it, he would have to, and that would mean he would lose out on a lot of money, and I would lose out on an exciting surgery, so I heartily approved of his win-win decision.
  
  Although, I honestly didn't like him calling me by my first name. It was a bit too familiar. I frowned. Or rather, I felt that Dr Hasumi wouldn't like it. If I was Taylor, I would have preferred it, though. Sometimes it was annoying to keep track of those sorts of things. I nodded at him, and he continued, "You can pick anyone but Tanner or Chang as your assistant, though." I glanced around, and people were quickly trying to avoid making eye contact with me. They didn't want to lose money for several days or a week.
  
  I felt that the one who would mind the least was, "Dr Iverson," I said. The tall dark-complexioned man smiled ruefully and nodded. I liked him. He had an agreeable, serene temperament and hadn't asked me out on a date like most of the male residents under Dr Berg. Even one of the female doctors even asked me out, too! That was a little outside my expectations, but I guessed lurid office romances when you were a medical resident were a rite-of-passage of this profession, but I definitely wasn't interested in any of that.
  
  Plus, romance with co-workers didn't seem like a good idea to me. However, my memories from NC-Taylor seemed to suggest that this was incorrect, though if you ever worked for a large Corporation. Romance outside of the Corporate family would be heavily scrutinised and distrusted by your peers and bosses, depending on your job.
  
  After the meeting broke up, I told Dr Iverson that I would review everything privately first and we should sync up before lunch to plan our next steps. The files sent by Dr Berg included an already-scheduled consult in a couple of hours, except it wasn't with the patient; it was with the Zetatech rep. I sighed; it was going to be one of those, was it? I would refuse this surgery if the patient didn't want to do it or if Zetatech wanted me to conceal the risk or consequences in proceeding forward. Hopefully, that wouldn't be the case.
  
  As a lowly resident, I didn't have an office, but there were communal private ones, more little cubbies, that anyone could borrow, and I sat in one as I pulled up my recent e-mails.
  
  There was a new e-mail from someone I didn't recognise, sent to everyone who worked in the Emergency Department, even rarely like myself. It was a demand, although it read more like a plea, for people in the overnight shift to please stop using the physical therapy room to have sex. I snorted and deleted the message.
  
  The data packet from Dr Berg was encrypted at the highest level that we used at this hospital, which caused me to raise my eyebrows. I glanced around the little cubby I was in, frowning. Where was the stupid thing?
  
  Ah, it was in the back of the drawer. I pulled out a small box and used my implants to pair with the device after I dusted it off. These things were pretty old, and there were a lot of ways you could bypass a physical biometric like a handprint, but it was only used when combining your system login credentials, so I'd rate the security as "so-so." A DNA taster would be far better, but that would also be a lot more expensive to roll out for thousands of employees.
  
  After I paired with the device, I placed my palm on the scanner plate of the device and held it there until it lit up green. Instantly, the cubby's door behind me locked with a mechanical thud sound, while at the same time, a local wireless jammer activated. In theory, this meant that I couldn't leave nor contact outside parties while I reviewed this confidential file. In truth, the security was mostly theatre. While I couldn't transfer the file from the company's intranet, only view it, I could take screenshots of each page or even scroll my own BD of me reviewing it. In fact, that sounded like a good idea.
  
  After the files were decrypted and pulled up on my screen, I sat there in my allegedly secure cubby and reviewed them. My patient... wait, patients were a pair of identical twins. Brothers that were in their mid-twenties. I skimmed their medical records before switching to look at the proposed procedure.
  
  "Neural oscillation synchronisers?" I asked rhetorically, testing the words. I frowned and then quietly read the attached whitepaper that Zetatech had included; although it was excessively long, it had large parts of it that were redacted. Reading between the lines in the whitepaper, I deduced that these were a for a military project, with the idea that an entire squad of soldiers could be synchronised together as, in effect, a gestalt. Such a squad would offer unparalleled combat effectiveness, teamwork, and coordination. It would be a true force multiplier for elite small-unit forces. According to the white paper, anyway.
  
  That was an absolutely terrible idea, and it was no wonder there was page after page of redacted text that was probably talking about how they had driven some people insane attempting it anyway. Rather than totally cancelling the project, though, they decided that they were just perhaps a little too ambitious with testing at first, and now they were testing with volunteer monozygotic twin sets in an attempt to reduce the variables. Would they move to triplets and quintuplets next?
  
  The paper had redacted most of the discussion about the technical aspects and the theory about how the system functioned, but it had to leave enough data for a surgeon to know how to install it, so it was pretty easy for me to infer the broad strokes, especially since I was working on similar research myself.
  
  This system was designed to create a new personality based on all of the inputs into the network and on the fly too. The intelligence of one of the members could be combined with the fearlessness of another, while the inventiveness of a third would be used as well. Negative traits such as cowardliness, flightiness or disobedience from an individual could be bypassed by and not included in the networked gestalt.
  
  The base tech was somewhat similar to Project Synchronicity but completely different in execution. There was a continuous brain link but no linked memories, short or long-term, so if a synchronisation discontinuity occurred and one member dropped from the network, they might find themselves rather disoriented for some time.
  
  I didn't think it sounded very promising from a military perspective considering the link used jammable short-range high-bandwidth radio-frequency links to create the ad-hoc mesh network, but perhaps they had some sort of jam-resistant link technology that wasn't included in this research model.
  
  I frowned. Was this too much of a coincidence? No, it was impossible. I hadn't gotten beyond the design stage for Project Synchronicity. Nothing was built. I firmly believed that if I was so compromised that people were reading my private files that existed only in my implants, I would not be sitting here right now. The working instantaneous communication system would be enough to kill or sequester me. Or both.
  
  Plus, it wasn't like this sort of research was unique . It had been tried back before the DataKrash. It failed terribly back then, too, but it did become the basis for some ad-hoc mesh network design in low-level robots, some of which were still used today.
  
  Yeah, this wasn't even that weird as the research went on this world. It was just quite a coincidence that it was fairly similar to my own plans. This neural oscillation synchroniser system took n number of individuals and produced one distinct output entity, at least while they were all connected anyway.
  
  Project Synchronicity would take one unique individual and create n number of duplicates which were all linked in every way in real-time. One of the individuals in the network would only diverge if it were disconnected for a long period of time. So it was basically the exact opposite.
  
  So long as I had a single stream of consciousness, even if it were over multiple bodies, then even if one of the bodies was destroyed, while it would diminish me temporarily, it would not kill me, even if the destroyed body was my original ( *gulp* .) That was the somewhat scary idea that I had been turning over and over in my head since I realised the possibilities of the Haywire comm, anyway.
  
  It was a superior form of "immortality" than simply having a backup clone, as I would become a distributed attack surface. Want to kill me? That would require killing all of the members of the network before any single node could clone a replacement body and add it to the network.
  
  So long as I had a single stream of consciousness and wasn't a network of individuals linked together, then if one body was destroyed and replaced, it became a Ship of Theseus situation rather than a replaced by a clone situation. At least, that was my opinion, although I would definitely try to avoid dying anyway.
  
  There was just the issue that the human brain was definitely not designed for sensory multiplexing. I had tons of ideas on how to create a brain that did support that feature, but the issue was it wouldn't be my brain . It was much harder to add these types of features to a brain that already existed compared to designing them in vitro. Consciousness was an emergent property, even for me, and without a lot of testing, it would be quite dangerous.
  
  These neural oscillation synchronisers, however, seemed to use a cybernetic mechanical solution to this problem while I had been thinking of how to safely deploy a biological one. They claimed that they linked the large-scale brain networks together fairly seamlessly.
  
  It was wrong to think of the brain as a monolith in the first place. It was wrong to even think of individual brain regions as a monolith. My consciousness was comprised of a series of functional connectivity networks in the first place, so it should be possible to add more without losing the spark that was me.
  
  How interesting. I shifted back to the patient records and looked at the proposed treatment plan provided by Zetatech and sucked my teeth in disappointment, "Tsk... this is going to have to be all changed. Why are they trying to do it on the cheap?"
  
  I shook my head and lifted my hand off the biometric scanning plate, which caused the open file to close and the room to unlock. I triggered deep dive mode on my deck but just sat in my inner bastion node and rezzed in some virtual paper to write notes. I didn't bring any physical paper into this room with me, which was an oversight, and sometimes I preferred to write things down the old-fashioned way.
  
  The augmented reality mode of modern cyberdecks was quite slick, but it still wasn't in the realm of rendering full-sense interactive virtual objects and pasting them into your sensorium yet.
  
  "Hoot," my ICON said, and I frowned, waving a wing and talon. I had never actually updated my ICON to something different. That was bad, but I hadn't actually had much time to dive into the net since I had been in LA.
  
  I asked Dr Iverson to come along when I met with the Zetatech tech rep. I could immediately tell it wasn't the person who invented this technology but possibly one of their minions, or research assistants, rather.
  
  I wanted to interrupt him, but Dr Hasumi was too polite to do so, so instead, I waited until he finished his presentation. When he asked if we had any questions or concerns, I nodded, "Yes. The two patients are monozygotic twins, clones from a genetic perspective. That's good. However, they've diverged significantly since then. Look, each twin has a different model of operating system and different optics. Then there are various other factors, like a poorly healed meniscus injury on patient A, and patient B has two missing molars. These factors need to be normalised."
  
  He frowned and said, "What do you mean?"
  
  "Remove and replace all of their implants with identical models. Neither of their OSes was designed for the high-speed neural architecture your widget uses, anyway. Repair and regenerate patient A's meniscus, regenerate patient B's molars, et cetera," I said simply.
  
  The guy shook his head, "None of that is in the research budget; we can't-"
  
  This time I did interrupt him, but as politely as I could by raising my hand until he stopped speaking himself. I leaned forward, "Please stop trying to spend an eddie to save an ennie. You're going to implicate your research results if you don't correct for every factor you can on the front end, and worse, you're going to implicate them in a false negative. And worst of all, this is all cheap!"
  
  Also, with identical everything, it would reduce the amount of mental instability this procedure would cause them. Plus, from my perspective, it would give me more data if I could observe them when they were as close to identical as possible. I was sure that Zetatech didn't care about their research subject's stability, but in this case, they should because it would impact their data from the experiment. I continued, "Plus, you produce all of this stuff yourself, except for optics which are cheap anyway. Why would you even entertain the idea of not changing everything to your company standard? Are you going to rely on the word of their current OS manufacturers, BioDyne and Meditech, that they implemented the common high-speed data bus and followed the entire standard correctly? If you have issues in the future, how will you isolate for this and debug it? You could be chasing your tail for months before you realise some issue you notice in these subjects is not even your problem."
  
  He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then he was silent for a good minute before saying, "That is a good point. I'm going to have to call Dr Reynolds. If you'll excuse me for a moment."
  
  When he left, Dr Iverson nodded at me appreciatively and said, "You vaporised him, Dr Hasumi. Preem. I hadn't even looked at the specifics of each patient yet; I was focusing on how we will connect the device so thoroughly." He held his hand out for a fist bump, which I obliged.
  
  "So, today we'll R&R everything on A and B, give them the rest of the day to acclimate to the new Zetatech systems, then tomorrow do the procedure?" he asked, testing the idea.
  
  "Yup," I said in a somewhat un-Hasumi way, emphasising the "p" sound of the word excessively, "Draw up orders now to admit them both, too. They can spend the night in medsurge; otherwise, one of them will get hit by a bus on the way home or some other complication, and then we'll be back at square one tomorrow."
  
  I did see the patients, a set of brothers by the name of Paul and Will Ochoki. Personally, I did think they were on the borderline of being crazy. They clearly had some attachment and abandonment issues, having survived both their parents dying when they were five years old. They only had each other to rely upon since then.
  
  That said, they were definitely willing participants, and even more, they thought it was great, amazing even. I couldn't deny them medical agency simply because they were a few french fries short of a little clown meal. Otherwise, hardly anyone in Los Angeles or the world would qualify to make their own decisions.
  
  They knew the risks, and they were willing... no, eager participants. That was good enough for my morals.
  
  The surgeries over the next two days went off without a hitch, and the delay of twenty-four hours not only gave the twins a chance to acclimate to their replaced cybersystems but it also gave me a chance to, in the middle of the night, very carefully examine and partially disassemble one of the neural synchroniser systems.
  
  "Okay, I'm going to activate the system," I told the twins, with the Zetatech rep sitting in a corner, trying to avoid looking excited. I mentally flipped a switch, and both brothers froze for a moment before glancing around and then at me.
  
  "This is..." body A said, "... quite unusual," finished body B.
  
  Dr Iverson, next to me, was reading scrolling text from his optics and said, "Intra and interneural transmissions are in the green; data link at sixty-one per cent of max throughput, SNR nominal, high-speed data bus nominal, everything is to spec."
  
  The Zetatech rep had us run battery after battery of tests, but I cut Dr Iverson loose before lunch, which he seemed very thankful for. I stuck around mainly because it was expected I help the suit with reasonable requests, but more importantly, I was quite invested in how this was working.
  
  It certainly appeared to create a new personality that was different from both patient A and B, and I was privately calling him Ab as a combination of the two. But at the same time, they scored somewhat similar on some personality matrices, too.
  
  The Zetatech guy seemed excited, though just from the fact that they seemed mentally stable, which left me wondering just how terribly their initial tests of this system had gone.
  
  At the end of the day, I gave Ab one of my business cards for my clinic. I'd be interested in following up with him. The deal with Zetatech meant that he was keeping the implants after they were done with repeated tests over a period of months, and I'd like to examine them at that time.
  
  These neural synchronisers were completely and utterly useless to me, and in fact, the exact opposite of what I wanted, but they went about it in an interesting way that I could and already had learned something from.
  
  Everyone had certain things that they were sensitive to, and I heard one of my personal peccadillos later that evening when I overheard David talking to Gloria about bullies. I perked up, setting aside the chopsticks. Gloria seemed to be trying to suggest that he should be trying to get along with them and makeup with the boy that was bullying him, which caused my blood pressure to rise twenty millimetres instantly.
  
  "No, no. That won't work," I said to both of them intensely, "You can't let assholes get away with being assholes."
  
  She looked at me and sighed, saying, "Tay, the world is full of assholes; you do realise that?"
  
  I nodded and said, "Yes, and do you know why?"
  
  She went along with my obvious question and asked, "Why?"
  
  " Because people let them get away with it," I said with intense emotion and meaning. I sighed and said, "Besides, he's in a Corpo school now. Corpo children are designed to detect and seek out weakness almost from when they can walk. You didn't grow up like this, but I did. If you want David to succeed on this path, then he needs to listen to my advice right now. He's already on the back foot from being an independent enrollee. The most anti-social of the little shi-" I stopped myself in mid-swear, "little brats probably smell blood in the water, just from that alone. If he were a real Corporate enrollee, he would have the built-in support network of the other kids from his same Corp to assist and shield him."
  
  David just nodded rapidly, twice. Gloria thought about it for a moment before nodding. I waved David over to me and said, "Okay, first steps. Repeat after me: Identify the enemy and establish numbers."
  
  He repeated that but looked a little confused. "I already know who he is, though."
  
  "You know his name, sure. But do you know him? What Corp does his parents work at, what jobs do they do at that Corp, what are his weaknesses, and what are his strengths? Does he have other enemies? What are the consequences and costs if you were to just walk up and punch him in the nose? If his parents are janitors, probably nothing, but if his parents are Senior Vice Presidents, you'd be expelled for sure. As for numbers, you need to understand his resources. In grade school, this mainly means his friends. Does he have any? If so, are they just the same kids at the same Corp, or does he have a clique of eclectic cross-Corp friends? What is their status? Now repeat what I said before," I said.
  
  His eyes got wide, and he nodded, "Identify the enemy and establish numbers."
  
  "Correct. Tomorrow at school, you will work on gathering this information. Remember, most bullies are weaklings. Someone who is truly confident in their own self, body, and capabilities would generally not need to put someone else down. The truly exceptional don't even think about people beneath them, much less seek to torment them," I told him before rubbing my chin in thought, "Another possibility is that he is using you as a sacrifice to create an esprit de corps of his friend group. By othering you into the out-group, he is trying to collectively bond his friend-group tighter through your suffering," I said, but instantly realised that I would have to break what I was saying and dumb it down to a first-grade level as he was not quite understanding.
  
  Looking back on my own experiences with the Trio, I felt that they each had some combination of both of those possibilities, with the exception of Sophia Hess, who I thought was just a psychopath, but I hardly knew anything about the now-dead girl. I had practised the strategy that Gloria had been advocating, one of avoidance, and it just didn't work.
  
  I spent the next fifteen minutes repeating what I had said in various ways before he eventually widened his eyes in comprehension and nodded rapidly. I was about to discuss with him ways he could gather the information he needed to make plans next, but I got interrupted by a call. In order to actually disturb me at dinner, this call had to be either from someone in a priority group or the person had to have said a number of keywords to my simple AI-based call screening service.
  
  I twitched when I saw the caller ID, " Moshi-moshi, Hasumi-desu," I said after answering the vidcall. I double-checked that the encryption was active.
  
  " Hasumi-sensei, how ya doin '?" he asked in an affable Kansai dialect, which made my eyebrows twitch. I had never actually heard him speak Japanese very much before I got the language chips I was using now. There was no one-to-one comparison between accents, of course, but it was close enough to the Japanese equivalent of the "Aw, shucks" Southern American accent that I had to try to avoid snickering at his face. It suited him.
  
  I wasn't going to talk with him over the phone, though, even encrypted, " Are you in town?"
  
  "Ayup," he said with a grin.
  
  I nodded, " Come to my clinic. I'll let you in. If you hurry, you can still have some stir fry." Then I hung up.
  
  When I let him into the living room, David's eyes lit up. "Johnny!" he yelled and ran over to say hello.
  
  "'Ello, little pardner. You been keepin' out of trouble?" Johnny asked, after lifting and tossing the kid into the air, which David still obviously enjoyed despite protesting to me that "it was for babies" when I did it to him.
  
  "Go ahead and make yourself a plate, then you can tell me what the f... what you are doing here," I told Johnny, who nodded, removed his ridiculous white cowboy hat and sat it on a table before serving himself some of the stir-fry and rice.
  
  As he ate, I asked him conversationally, "So, how's things in Night City?"
  
  He winced, "Ahh... not too good. There's been some bloodshed." Then he told me about how a couple of the Tyger Claws' stupider members had murdered a prostitute. In response, the owner of the club this prostitute worked at had killed both of them with an axe in front of God and everyone.
  
  I winced. Personally, I agreed with her decision, however, it was a bit of a short-sighted one from what I had learned about the psychology of street gangs. If she had just made the offending Tyger Claws disappear, never to be seen again, she might have even gotten a private thank you from some inside the gang. But killing them openly? It rubbed the gang's nose in it and impacted their face.
  
  "Wait, her name's Elizabeth Borden?" I blinked. Was that a coincidence? I recited in a sing-song voice, "Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave a Claw forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave the other forty-one."
  
  He blinked, "That's quite good, but I reckon it'd be rather self-defeatin' of me to overly praise somethin' that invites anyone to whack me with an axe, ma'am."
  
  Were there no Lizzie Borden murders in this world? I didn't believe that, but it was possible they had left the popular culture due to time and the Data Krash. Maybe this new Lizzie Borden found a reference somewhere and used it and an axe as the image of her persona.
  
  Not surprisingly, a group of the Claws had murdered her. What was surprising, though, was how much of a mistake that was. There were riots, city-wide, with the up unto now more or less passive joy-toy demographic taking up arms and shooting anyone they thought was oppressing them, but especially the Tyger Claws, which had casualties in the low hundreds.
  
  "It woulda been a lot worse, but Mr Jin had a pretty good relationship with the joytoys around Japantown. After all, the dolls in Clouds are in some ways, the pinnacle of the profession, I guess and they've been well-treated and well-compensated. Anyway, he managed to have a sit down with the main lady of industry that the more militant of the joytoys were coalescin' behind," he said, shrugging, "Things might have gotten straight up out of hand if not for that. I reckon he's in pretty good odour with the bosses right now."
  
  After dinner, I talked with him privately. It turned out he was here to cash in on one of Wakako's DNA adjustment favours. Not for himself, but for someone he was escorting. He handed me a package that contained both the current scans and genome of my "patient" as well as the scans and a genetic sample of who they were expected to be transformed into.
  
  "It'll take me a couple of days to get ready, so just sit on them in whatever safehouse you're in for now," I told Johnny, who nodded. "When I'm ready, I'll give you a drug that will knock them out, and you can bring them by here unconscious. They'll stay sedated for the entire program, and then I'll return them to you the same way."
  
  "I reckon that sounds like a good way to protect your identity, Hasumi-sensei," he said with a grin. He then asked, "After this, I'd like to come back and take you up on that offer for some chrome, before I head back to NC." He shook his head, "Almost got flatlined myself, and it didn't sit too well with me that I had to blast some young lady who was thinkin' she was doing the right thing before she could throw a grenade at me." He shook his head, "If I was faster, better... I'd maybe been able to stop her some other way."
  
  I raised an eyebrow but nodded. I had a few Sandy's in stock. Zetatech branded ones were very easy to acquire here in LA, and I had bought a number from people second-hand and sold some to the Lotus Tong, as well.
  
  I had been trying to get another Type K-02 Kerenzikov from Kang Tao, but to no avail. I needed at least one more, along with a duplicate of all of my other cybernetics, to proceed through to the first stages of Project Synchronicity.
  
  "Sure," I told him with a nod. Johnny may have been a bit of a clown and a bit of an idiot, but I felt that he was actually kind of a good guy, which made him being a committed and lifelong member of the Claws all the more tragic.
  
  After Johnny left, I went into my lab to start crafting the virus, as well as to make sure all of my algae experiments were under wraps. I was done, anyway. The algae was ready to deploy, and I was just waiting to plan an operation with Kiwi.
  
  Although I had wanted to perform tests, perhaps in a saltwater lake or an uninhabited island, the truth was that I couldn't take the personal risk.
  
  It would already be dangerous enough to deploy once. Doing so another time would add another datum that could possibly be correlated to me. I was sure that the Powers That Be wouldn't really care about a saltwater lake or small island being infested with algae temporarily, but it would be noticed by Earth-observing satellites and noted. Then once my algae bloom was deployed for real? They'd definitely look back retrospectively.
  
  I was very confident in its safety and safeguards, though. Plus, I had one method to kill it all on a global scale anyway if it got out of hand. I accepted that it was going to be somewhat damaging to the continental shelf biomes, but not as much as one would think. It would definitely out-compete all other algae within five kilometres of shore, but the life cycle of my algae was unique.
  
  To really impact Biotechnica's sales quickly, then it had to be vastly superior to its wheat product. So, my algae collected carbon, both from the atmosphere and the ocean and converted it directly into ethanol. There was no need to harvest the algae and then use bioreactors to convert it to a hydrocarbon.
  
  While it was trapped in the algae, it wasn't a flammability hazard either, but it was somewhat toxic to marine life if ingested, plus it could get them drunk, so the algae was designed to be brightly coloured and taste terrible and cause rapid mild but mostly harmless sickness at low dosages .
  
  An enterprising person could collect the algae from the coastal areas and extract the fuel by the simple expedient of crushing it like you were making orange juice. Bam, free fuel. One square kilometre could yield over six hundred litres of fuel a day with the rate the algae grew.
  
  If it wasn't harvested, and not all of it would ever be, even if they had boats trawling the coasts every single day, the algae entered its final life cycle where it converted the ethanol into edible sugars and died, sinking to the bottom of the water. This both would feed numerous animals when they discovered the bounty, but it would also act as a carbon sink.
  
  The entire system was a carbon sink, actually, but if you extracted the ethanol and burned it again, you would, of course, release much of the carbon back into the atmosphere as ethanol burned into carbon dioxide and water. But not all of it, as there was a fair bit of carbon in the structure of the algae itself.
  
  It was also toxin resistant, but this variant didn't yet have the capability to sequester or purify toxins, but it was going to be pulling many, many tons of CO2, CO, methane and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere every year. By the end of the century, the air might be at the level it was at the turn of the millennium. Which still wasn't great, but it was a lot better, and as a first step, it was awesome.
  
  While at the same time providing a sustainable and renewable direct chemical energy source.
  
  It wasn't all because I hated Biotechnica. If people didn't have to grow fuel, then they could start growing food again. The population of the planet had hovered at around two billion for a long time, and the bottleneck was food production. When food competed with energy production that those in power needed for material consumption, the poor always lost out.
  
  I knew doing this was, in some ways, just like squeezing a balloon - the air just gets moved around. Sure, Biotechnica might lose a bit, but that would just mean that other Corps, especially Petrochem and the like, would gain. That was just something I had to accept would happen. I didn't have the capability to change the way the whole world thought; all I could do was just hopefully make it a little better, a little bit at a time.
  
  Hoping for trickle-down prosperity kind of irritated me, but refusing to act just because it would benefit those in power was naive. The world was set up so that everything benefited these people.
  
  Tapping the algae limpet mines, I said, "Soon, my pretties."
  
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  Bodyblow
  I had asked Kiwi to plan an operation against the Port of Los Angeles, or rather at least one of the container ships inside the port so that I would have an opportunity to tag along. When she saw the very limpet-mine-looking devices that I would be carrying with me in a backpack, though, she frowned and said, "I don't think I'm down for committing any terrorism-murder or sinking any ships."
  
  I shook my head, "They only look like explosives. They're not. They contain sensors, in addition to a few other things. They won't damage the ships at all or hurt anybody. They're just no reason to reinvent the wheel when I need to affix something surreptitiously to the hull of a ship, but please don't mention or even think too often about them. The project is at the highest confidentiality level."
  
  I was a little nervous because the first cloned body and cloned brain for Project Synchronicity were not ready yet, nor had I finalised the design of the cyberbrain housing, so this would be a real risk for me, but at the same time, I had taken much more significant risks than this in Night City. I had gotten the Haywire comms fairly small, about the size of what I would have recognised in Brockton Bay as a USB dongle, but they still needed fairly frequent maintenance, which wasn't going to work. I felt they needed to go at least six months without me having to tinker with them.
  
  Although the main reason for this project was to protect against death, a secondary reason was to try to start making some waves. I wouldn't mind if one of my bodies was kidnapped and placed into a gilded cage, for example, so long as I had real-time comms with the net and my other bodies. That would be a good opportunity for me to start producing other things that could help the world or people as a whole.
  
  I had good feelings about my algae, for example, but it was merely a first attempt. I was pretty sure it would do a lot more good than harm, but I wasn't entirely sure about how well it would help the environment, despite my projections. It would definitely take carbon out of the air and deposit it as edible sugars in the ocean and in the cellular structure of the algae, with the idea that the carbon in the air would be temporarily "sequestered" as a large increase in biomass that lived and stayed in the ocean, but I wasn't sure if it would work like I thought it would work over many, many fish-generations.
  
  Biomass was biodegradable into carbon gasses after the organisms died, after all, but I still felt that increasing the total amount of biomass in the oceans would be somewhat effective, so long as the ecosystems weren't knocked totally off balance.
  
  I wasn't an expert on anything but biology and technology that interfaced with it. I was smart, and I could make inferences, but they were fundamentally the guesses of a gifted hobbyist in every part of science that didn't touch on biology or genetics. If I could get one of my bodies in place as a prized researcher in a large Corporation, then I could have dozens of research assistants helping me with my "hobby projects", which the Corp would be more than happy to let me research to keep me happy, so long as I produced enough money elsewhere.
  
  If they baulked at releasing my hobby projects or did so but charged too much for them, I could easily leak the research publically through my other bodies. As a prized researcher, I had no doubt that they would have me under constant monitoring by their counter-intelligence division, so they would never suspect me of the leaks. It would likely give them indigestion, trying to find spies or hacks in their systems that never existed.
  
  However, there was a very good chance that once kidnapped... err, recruited, I wouldn't be able to tinker with my own implants for months. They wouldn't want to give me a chance to either create something to escape or kill myself with. In fact, I expected in that situation, my implants would be examined fairly closely and dangerous ones like my monowire or maybe even my cyberdeck removed.
  
  So the Haywire comms had to both get smaller and more reliable. Smaller so that I could put them in a place that looked either harmless or critical, something that they wouldn't yank out of my body. I was close to this stage already in terms of the size of the current generation devices, but I still had more to go. I was six generations passed the first device I had implanted into my chest, which still worked but was now occasionally dropping packets during communications with its twin due to not being able to maintain in its current installation.
  
  The next version, or perhaps the one just after that, would be small enough that I could incorporate it into a cyberbrain system which was going to be the basis for the synchronisation hardware.
  
  However, they also had to get more reliable so that they could go months without maintenance, as otherwise, that body would be disconnected from the network and might diverge over time before it could reconnect.
  
  I had already decided that if this happened, we would treat each other as sisters and allies, not enemies. I wasn't so prideful that I couldn't accept someone with the same skills as I had, especially when they would think almost exactly like I did. I would prefer that not to happen, but it wouldn't bother me that much if it did. If necessary, we could carve out territories, or something, so as to avoid stepping on each other's toes.
  
  "So, what is your target, anyway?" I asked Kiwi. I hadn't sat in on her internal briefing to her team, as all I cared about was that she had to steal something that would be noticed and that it had to include something that I would hypothetically want. However, now I kind of thought that had been a mistake, especially since we were sort of operating as a team.
  
  "The MR Kazuliski - maru is carrying a mixed cargo, but our target is a load of specialised industrial nanomachines," I frowned, as I wouldn't be interested in that, "plus several thousand kilograms of medical-grade nanites from Europe." Ah, I would want that.
  
  She nodded, noticing my expression, "We have a buyer for the industrial nanomachines already, so it works out." He rubbed her hands together, "So, let me discuss the plan. It will start with infiltrating the port of Los Angeles, which, as you know, is a high-security area..."
  
  The Port of Los Angeles was a sprawling, huge area, and that was ultimately why it was so easy to sneak in. Unfortunately for them, it was way oversized for the amount of traffic the port received and was built and expanded in the middle of the last century. This was when the population of the world was in excess of three times its current level, as well as when there was not an Artificially Intelligent self-replicating minefield that roamed the Pacific Ocean. Whoever thought that was a good idea should have been shot. Hopefully, they had been.
  
  As such, the level of traffic the port received was less than ten per cent of what it had received during its peak. The unused sections were lawless, one of Los Angeles' no-go zones, but they had easy access to the piers and the harbour, which we could use to infiltrate the MR Kazuliski-maru before it got underway.
  
  Kiwi's plan was to infiltrate the ship as it was leaving, incapacitate the crew and meet up with some seafaring Nomads, who might be better described as pirates, to offload the cargo and escape. This has to be done after the ship leaves the harbour but before it meets up with the other vessels in its convoy for the return trip to Asia. The payment to the Nomads was that they would be looting other containers on the ship, so it was a win-win for everyone except the company that owned this ship and the people sending the cargo we were going to be pilfering.
  
  And well, the consumers at large who would end up paying more, and the insurance companies... well, it was a win-win for us two groups anyway, and in the short term, that was the only thing that mattered.
  
  "Alright, park the vehicles here," Kiwi said on the tacnet, taking command of the operation now that it was underway and we were in a dangerous area. I wasn't entirely a supernumerary, I would be assisting, but I didn't want there to be questions about who was in command in a mission with as many moving parts as this one, so I was keeping quiet and playing the good little soldier. We were all wearing identical sets of armour, including full helmets that were somewhat similar to what I was issued in Trauma Team if a decade out of date. Still, we resembled less a group of criminals and more a corporate Spec Ops team.
  
  All Kiwi had told her team about me was that I was one of her former teammates before she constituted this new team, which was true. When I arrived this evening, they were a little surprised to discover that I was actually the doctor that had put in most of their implants and was essentially their team's sponsor. They weren't stupid and could tell that a fair bit of the jobs they did had only one purpose, which was to make my clinic safer.
  
  In that sense, this job was quite a bit out of the ordinary for them.
  
  As the two vans rolled to a stop, we hopped out of the vehicles and gathered together. The area we stopped at was at the east end, abutting the port of Long Beach, which was totally shuttered. There were abandoned warehouses and decades-old abandoned steel shipping containers everywhere.
  
  Even as dark as it was, it would be a balmy, uncomfortable heat if our armour didn't include an integrated cooling system. When I looked up to glance at the full moon, the sensors in my helmet couldn't decide whether to shift to low-light or infrared vision modes.
  
  "Step one, we need to proceed one hundred and fifty metres west our present location and pacify a group of wreckers that are inhabiting a former abandoned maritime services company. They serviced tugboats or something," she shook her head, realising it didn't really matter what they did, "In any case, they're too close to our exfil point here, so they gotta go."
  
  All six of us gathered together and slowly approached the set of buildings that the wreckers were holed up in, but about twenty metres from the largest one, Kiwi held up a closed fist in the universal non-verbal command to halt. "They actually have someone on watch," Kiwi said, sounding surprised. Then she glanced back, turning her helmet to look at me and used my call sign for the mission, " Assassin, can you take him out?"
  
  I nodded, activated my stealth system and eased out of concealment, moving at a slow jog towards the building. There was clearly electricity running to the building because the man standing on a galvanised steel stairway was backlit by artificial light coming from inside the building, which was probably ruining his ability to see in the night unless he had some sort of vision augmentations.
  
  He was standing there, looking stupid and smoking. Still, when he glanced in my direction, I stopped moving just in case he managed to see the distortion my stealth field produced when I was in motion. When he looked away, I continued jogging in his direction until I arrived at the foot of the stairs. There was no way I was going to walk up those without making a noise, so I just casually raised my silenced submachine gun and carefully aimed at the glowing embers of the mostly smoked cigarette. Firing twice, I heard the man's body slump against the guardrail of the stairs, sliding down several steps with a thud.
  
  That was, of course, the main reason I thought he looked stupid. Perhaps he wasn't a guard but merely out here for a smoke. In either case, though, it gave someone a perfect aiming point. "Target neutralised," I said over the tacnet, channelling all of my hours of experiencing trashy action BDs.
  
  I deactivated my stealth system as the rest approached me, and I glanced at Kiwi, who said, "Infiltrating the local subnet, running ping now... filtering... targets identified. Eight people inside." With that, a three-dimensional map of the structure, along with lightly pulsating grey dots for the unidentified people inside it was transmitted to all of our systems.
  
  All of Kiwi's team, except for her and I, had SmartLink implants, and they also all had one of the brand-new Kang Tao smart submachineguns. I heard that Trauma Team was adopting this weapon as their standard for Security Specialists in the next year if online rumours could be believed. We all walked up the stairs to the second floor, with me nudging the dead wrecker off the ledge, falling the four metres or so to the ground below.
  
  Most of the enemy was on the ground floor, and there wasn't really enough of them for me and Kiwi to have to do anything. Her guys just designated targets, and at some hidden signal that was common with trigger-pullers, all opened up together from the elevated position. After they had put three rounds or so into each enemy, we broke into two teams to search the building for any survivors.
  
  We met back up outside, on the ground floor, with Kiwi looking out into the ocean. She asked over the tacnet, "You're sure these things are waterproof and designed for use underwater?"
  
  I nodded, "Yes... I mean, that's what the seller said." I affirmed, paused and then quickly qualified, "Supposedly, these used to be the standard in the NUSA Navy SEAL twenty years ago, back in the early forties." I hadn't actually tested them underwater, but I did ensure that the included small LOX system worked, was charged and that the auxiliary rebreather was functioning.
  
  They weren't diving suits, and even using LOX instead of gaseous oxygen, we'd only get ten or fifteen minutes, but that was more than enough for even my plans. Its main purpose was NBC protection, after all, and not diving necessarily.
  
  One of the men pulled out six small devices, handing one to each of us. At first, they kind of looked like weird, bulky, dousing rods, but you yanked on each handle, and then they transformed into something that more resembled a bicycle's handlebars. They were motors, using batteries and simple waterjets, that would let us move at significant speed until the batteries died. Faster than flapping our armoured feet, anyway.
  
  We weren't too far from our target containership, and we all hopped into the harbour without any further preamble. It took me a moment before the active buoyancy system in the armour stopped me from sinking like a stone and another moment for me to figure out the bicycle handlebars, but after that, we were moving at a good clip.
  
  "I have some secondary objectives. Please leave a rope or ladder at the target," I radioed. Underwater like this, even at high transmitter powers, the range of our radios was abysmal, but I got a thumbs up from someone.
  
  I pulled to the left and accelerated around the stern of the large ship and into the next slip over, where a similarly large container ship was parked. I didn't waste any time and quickly pulled out one of my limpets and affixed it to the hull near the stern, under about a metre of water. The devices had a built-in GPS system, but I had to yank a small plastic antenna out of the top about ten centimetres for it to have a workable signal.
  
  I repeated this process two more times, with one more container ship and one ship that I would have called a tramp freighter, according to my net searches about its name. Its planned departure was going through the Panama Canal and onto Europe. That would have been an odd voyage back in my old world, but the middle part of the North American continent was still something of a no man's land in many areas, and it was safer to sail around it than use faster over-ground convoys.
  
  I got back to the target ship with about three minutes of air left, and climbed up a stout nylon rope that was dangling in the water. I'm not entirely sure how the first guy got up the hull, but it had to be some sort of gadget like suction cups or magnetic grippers. At one time, I would have found it rather difficult to climb up this rope, but these days I could bench two hundred and fifty kilos, so pulling my own weight up a rope was nothing.
  
  I found the rest of the team huddling out of sight in the void of a couple of containers. "I'm back. What now?" I asked.
  
  "Now we wait," said Kiwi, "But let's go over the plans. This is a big ship, but if there are twenty crew aboard, I will be surprised. And half of those are going to be in the engineering spaces."
  
  We all nodded, she had told us all this before, but it was good to review. She continued, "Once we're clear of the harbour, we will need to hit two places on the ship simultaneously. The bridge, and the security office. Although they only have twenty crewmembers, they do have some antipersonnel autonomous robots for anti-piracy duty, so we will need to disable them first. I will lead this team."
  
  She glanced around, "Assassin will lead the team hitting the bridge. It is equally important to secure the comms station. Otherwise, they could call in help from either the Coast Guard or the convoy security service. I will give you a datashard which you will need to insert into either the comms station or the main computer terminal." I didn't know where the main computer terminal was, so it was going to get plugged into the comms station on the bridge. She had given us photos of the bridge of this class of ship, so I knew which station it was.
  
  "Remember, the client wants no fatalities unless it is absolutely necessary to ensure your survival, so we will be switching to dart pistols. The agent in the darts should render a normal person unconscious in less than ten seconds and a highly augmented person in less than thirty," she reminded us. Since I was the client that wanted no fatalities, I nodded twice. These sailors were just doing their jobs, after all. They wouldn't work on borgs, but I doubted there were any in the ship's company, and if there were, they would definitely be amongst the engineering crew, which we were completely bypassing.
  
  It took another hour for the ship to be pulled out of its slip by tugboats and then another hour before it ponderously meandered on its way. Still, we remained hidden. While we waited, I worked on some of the CAD files on my new cyberbrain system. I was modifying a general-purpose cyberbrain manufactured by MoorE Technologies for my purposes. A cyberbrain was basically a heavily armoured and reinforced skull, with included emergency life-support systems. It was, basically, a biopod designed to interface into organic bodies and not full-body replacements.
  
  Only a few companies produced them, Raven and MoorE being the two best. The target demographic for their customers were well-to-do people who worried about what might happen. Preppers, paranoid executives, and rich housewives were the biggest customers. The latter was because you could either put your brain into a donor or cloned body easily and therefore look and be younger. You couldn't live forever just hopping from body to body like some demented bodysnatcher, though. Absent rejuvenation treatments, your brain did age, albeit slower than most people's bodies did.
  
  The idea was that even in most incidents that would result in your permanent death, a cyberbrain could be recovered, and you could at least be put into a full-body replacement afterwards or possibly have your body cloned.
  
  I needed something that had enough space to add both user-serviceable entangled comms units, as well as the brain scanner device I was building. I had been thinking about what NC-Taylor told me about Cranial, the memory tinker. I just couldn't wrap my head around something that could download memories like your brain was a computer. Not yet, anyway. But I could do something that was, for my purposes, superior.
  
  While I couldn't download someone's memories discreetly, I could scan the whole brain. I had been thinking about the rumours of the supposed Soulkiller software for months now, maybe more than a year. When I first heard about it, there was no way I could build something similar, but now I could. And I could do it better, too.
  
  Allegedly, Soulkiller killed the person that it took a brain scan of. There were many reasons this could happen, but I suspected it was because it used equipment that was never intended to scan someone's brain and shoehorned it into that purpose. Namely, a cyberdeck interface and this abuse of cybernetics in ways they were never designed to be used caused severe damage to parts of the user's brain, which proved fatal. That actually gave me a couple of ideas for really fatal Black ICE, actually. Maybe that was what the mythical "brain broiler" did.
  
  In any event, my brain scanner would be running continuously, with every "node" in my network. In theory, combining this with the FTL comms system would mean that each important brain area would be completely synchronised at all times. One mind, not just many that were connected.
  
  "Okay, it's time," Kiwi interrupted both my work and my daydreams. We all nodded, shouldered our lethal weapons and brought out the dart pistols. They weren't very fancy and, in fact, were what vets used to dart unruly animals but filled with my special anaesthetic instead, so they were single shot, but we could probably reload them fast enough.
  
  My team followed our internal map and Kiwi's urgings to the bridge. She would hack a series of cameras, tell us to move, and then we'd wait while she hacked the next set. Our job was to wait until Kiwi disabled the security robots, and if the bridge was alerted to attack them before they could raise the alarm, otherwise we would wait and attack the bridge together in a classic pincer attack from two directions.
  
  We sat there, next to the bridge door, for five minutes. Before Kiwi signalled us, the door opened, and a man walked out directly into the path of me and the two other men. He widened his eyes but got a dart to the chest before he could say anything or scream out. I reached out and stopped him from falling onto the floor and stashed him in the corner, giving the shooter a thumbs up.
  
  I had been waiting for him to clear the door more than he already had, just in case the dart gun was loud enough to alert anyone on the bridge, but that had been the wrong decision. The guy would have yelled before that happened.
  
  "Robots disabled, moving to the bridge," Kiwi said, which made me sigh in relief after I disabled my suit's vox so nobody could hear it. "In position, confirm status."
  
  I said, "Ready."
  
  "Breach in 5... 4... 3," she counted down and I finished the last two seconds of the count mentally. We all rushed through the door at more or less the same time. There were only four people on the bridge, and they each got a dart instantly. I moved over to the comms console and shoved the datashard in without needing to be reminded.
  
  "System intrusion in progress..." Kiwi said with the spacey tone she used when I knew she was hacking something. After a few moments, she said, "Complete. Assassin and I will stay here; Jones, take the rest of the team into the berthing area-one dart for each off-duty crew member. I don't want them asking questions when our ride gets here. Then we need to hit the purser's high-value storage. That's where our cargo is at."
  
  Although there were a couple of close calls where the ship was expected to answer incoming radio calls, Kiwi had been analysing the comms record and even built an AI-generated fake voice that supposedly sounded and acted like the comms officer and replied each time.
  
  Our nomad pirates arrived about thirty minutes after Kiwi called them, and we loaded our cargo on by hand, but the pirates used the cargo ship's own cranes to load five standard steel containers, picking them from here and there onto their much smaller ship. It was clear that they knew exactly which containers to steal, too, so I imagined they had some sort of contact with the longshoremen, but it wasn't my business.
  
  We all stayed silent until the pirates dropped us off exactly where we left our vans. According to my chrono, the crewmembers should be waking up by now. This would go down in the logs of this ship and the authorities as a routine case of piracy and certainly nothing else. The limpet mines connected to the other ships would release a small amount of algae every time that ship got near shore. That would be enough. There would be no stopping it in a month.
  
  Now what could I do with all of these nanomachines? I really didn't need them at all, and in fact, I was still buying more than I needed from my principal supplier and selling the excess off. Well, I guess more was always better.
  
  Forty-six days later
  
  Nicolo Loggagia was a busy man, and honestly, he hardly even ran his Corporation anymore, leaving the day-to-day operations to his Chief Operations Officer-his grandson Mario. He was much more interested in saving the world-or at least very small parts of it, one bit at a time. If he could live long enough, he'd accomplish the rest.
  
  He wouldn't abandon the planetary surface like most people who made a quick buck. It was rank idiocy to do so, anyway. The effort required to planoform any celestial bodies was orders and orders of magnitude more costly and time-consuming than just fixing their own planet. It was better to work down here unless you wanted to live in a space habitat forever.
  
  He never really understood the elite who had generational wealth in the first place. He started his first company in his garage with two thousand Eurodollars in his pocket, a dream and a lot of patent infringement.
  
  It was only by chance that he heard enough to be aware of the important meeting that he was now crashing in person after arranging for an OrbitalAir suborbital flight just for himself back to Italy. He had been in Hawaii, releasing his latest project, which was the resurrection and improvement of the Hawksbill Sea Turtle, which had been extinct since the last Corporate War, when he saw an interesting item on local news. Apparently, people were starting to complain about a serious algae bloom in local waters, with an annoying-looking surfer complaining about it to the sympathetic newscaster.
  
  Surfers, indeed. He scoffed. There were hardly any natural areas where that activity could be done these days, so any surfing that was done was on strictly curated artificial beaches, so he wasn't really that sympathetic to the man. However, he was curious about the algae, even if it only received a cursory two-minute segment on a slow news night.
  
  He learned that his company had already discovered the same algae in Europe after he sent a sample to be sequenced at the local Biotechnica office, and from that, he learned of the planned emergency meeting. The files he had on the algae were quite interesting because they told him nothing. The algae in question had zero per cent similarity with any known phyla of cyanobacteria, or hell, any similarity with any bacteria at all.
  
  That was impossible, as he had looked at it under magnification, and while it was radically different, there were still structures that were recognisable. It wasn't possible for it to be completely dissimilar when you considered humans were at least thirty per cent similar to this bacteria. So obviously, the genome was encoded somehow, and not in a way that he recognised. When he found out that the heads of the Bacterial Research Division were going to be conducting a briefing on it, he decided to crash the party. Perhaps it was time to act like a CEO again, especially when he read the mass spectrometry readings.
  
  To say that his arrival at the headquarters in Rome was surprising was an understatement. He had been something like the Phantom of the Palais Garnier for some time now, hiding from public sight and scrutiny and doing his own thing. He was sure Mario and his wife were going to be furious, and while he trusted them both to make good day-to-day business decisions, he was concerned that they might make a misstep here.
  
  " Nonno, what are you doing here?" Mario asked him when he arrived.
  
  He hugged the boy, well man, now, and said, " I heard about what was going on and felt it was important I be at this meeting, son." That answer clearly did not satisfy Mario, but what could he do? In many ways, he was Biotechnica . Even if he rarely flexed such muscles.
  
  The first part of the briefing concerned economic matters. It hadn't taken them long to realise the purpose of the algae; the damn thing produced ethanol directly through a completely novel organelle. He listened for a while and then cut the Research Director off, " Signor, yes, yes, it's obviously encrypted. Who cares right now, today? We have gotten used to the easy way of just reading the genome like a book. Pretend this is one hundred years ago; tell me about this bacteria through observation of its processes, please."
  
  The Research Director coughed and looked rather nervous at speaking to the great man himself, but he wasn't a dullard nor would he have gotten to his position without being able to take the pressure, so he nodded, " We have observed the full life cycle in over one thousand discrete environments. It outcompetes everything similar, but it is, in many ways, much more fragile than we were expecting in certain specific situations. It only replicates in a solution with a salinity of over 30 grams to the kilo and over a specific temperature range-"
  
  Nicolo cut him off and said, " Clearly, it is designed to only work in seawater; that is obvious. Anything else?"
  
  "If placed in a simulated environment with low CO2 levels in the air, then it will not replicate either. It needs at least two-hundred-and-seventy-five ppm," the man said.
  
  Niccolo hummed and motioned for the man to continue his briefing while internally, he did some calculations. Unless that two-hundred-and-seventy-five switch was necessary for the unique biological process that created the ethanol, which he doubted, it was, to him, a sign that the group responsible for this stuff were both idealists as well as amateurs. But how could that be possible?
  
  "Does your group have ten-year projections on the continental shelf biome?" he asked, finally, which got another surprised look from everybody before the data was delivered. Everybody was now talking about eurodollars, the monopoly that now, and he just ignored them for the moment.
  
  Nodding after reviewing the file. The projections were kind of hazy, but they all agreed on an absolutely huge increase in the total biomass in littoral areas, slowly spreading outwards, but nobody, not even the AIs, could agree whether or not this would be a good or a bad thing for the underwater ecology as a whole. This might drive a few species extinct, or maybe it wouldn't.
  
  The genetic switch that stopped mitosis if there was insufficient CO2 sounded, to him, like a safeguard. That was the approximate level of CO2 half a millennia ago, before industrialisation. But there was no way just this algae would ever cause that much drop in CO2 levels.
  
  Even with a huge increase in ocean biomass as a carbon reservoir, it would eventually plateau far above that. It wasn't that CO2 wouldn't go down, but if you were concerned over a year-over-year decrease forever, as this switch implied, then you had to take carbon entirely out of the picture in a way so that it wouldn't biodegrade back into carbon-filled gasses and bubble back into the atmosphere.
  
  He rolled his fingers along the conference table. It was like he was dealing with someone that was as gifted a geneticist as he was but who only had an undergraduate's understanding of climate science. How queer.
  
  Perhaps there would be secondary algae that did something besides convert the alcohol into sugars? Maybe into some kind of polymer, and they were just using the exact same genetic scaffolding for each organism? He made a note to keep on the lookout for such things.
  
  "-so how are we going to destroy it?!" asked his grandson, somewhat heatedly.
  
  " At the present time, we have no quick options that would impact the growth rates appreciably. We've tried a number of bacteriophages, but they are completely ineffective - it is clear that the genome is encrypted at the transcription/replication process, so anything inserting random data into its chromosomes gets 'decrypted' into garbage," the man said, " Toxins work, of course, but uhh... that's not tenable. "
  
  "Why?" asked Mario, angry.
  
  Niccolo shook his head, " Because it's a big ocean, son." What went without saying was they didn't have any biowarfare algae, either. I mean, why would anyone create overly aggressive plankton?
  
  Glancing at his grandson, he nodded. Exactly what he was worried about was what was happening. Mario was trying to close the barn after the horse had gotten out. Worse, unless stopped, he would waste a huge amount of resources, political capital and goodwill on it and probably fail anyway.
  
  Niccolo didn't become the CEO of Biotechnica so long ago because of his smarts, although they certainly didn't hurt. He took over the company because he had both a knack for realising when a change was nigh and the courage to take decisive action, even if it was scary.
  
  " Mario, my son... we don't have time to stop it. I'm sure we will figure out its genome, including its encryption method, eventually , but it will only take a few more weeks before everyone realises what this means," he said, pointing to the quarter-on-quarter estimates. " Once that happens, countries won't let us do anything to stop it."
  
  The fact that this stuff only grew around the shore was almost tailor-made to empower actual nation-states. The laws surrounding territorial waters were still enforced, theoretically, so whoever did this was just giving an epic fuckton of resources to any nations that had access to the ocean. Sure, only Hawaii, Europe and possibly Kyushu island were impacted now, but that wouldn't last. It would be smuggled everywhere else as soon as the value was understood.
  
  It wouldn't cause revolutionary change as everyone was well-versed in extracting resources out of nation-states and giving them the minimal possible compensation in return, but it was still to throw a monkey wrench in a lot of people's mechanisms.
  
  He made a decision and nodded, " How much easy capital do we have now?" Someone gave an answer, and he hummed, " Okay. In the short term, we're going to short our own stock, as well as Petrochem and our partners." That was wildly illegal, especially considering their insider knowledge, but nobody cared about that.
  
  All of their stock prices would be taking a hit as soon as this became public, but the market was ultimately irrational and emotion-based and could be exploited. This was a body blow, for sure, but it wouldn't kill Biotechnica, so Biotechnica may as well make as much money off its wounding as possible.
  
  " Today, immediately, we will shift our liquid investments into shipbuilding, refurbishing and the like. It will take months, maybe as much as a year, for the music to stop completely in the T. vulgaris sector. Have you heard of a ship designed to skim algae off the ocean? Economically? I am absolutely sure it is possible, as sure I am that it doesn't exist! I want to own at least a third of the shipbuilders that might tend to get these contracts," he said.
  
  Niccolo nodded, " As far as our farming partners... well, I will take a personal hand in this. We have dozens of genetically modified plants and cultivars that we have held back because T. vulgaris was so profitable. Mostly food-based, but some produce harvestable polymer feedstocks and the like. We will have crops that are almost as profitable as T. vulgaris available for review in two weeks. Long before they can consider maybe just planting potatoes or something... unless they're Biotechnica potatoes, anyway."
  
  Niccolo had the command voice of someone who once served in the Italian Army, even if it had been only a staff position, and people started to hop to. He was going to be busy now, but it felt kind of good. Like he used to feel in the old days before he had "won." Internally, he shifted more people to studying precisely how this chromosome replication process encrypted the genome. Biotechnica had similar technology, but there were many ways it could be done.
  
  Who had made this, and why weren't they working for him directly was the main question he wanted answered.
  
  His boy was still stewing in rage. Mario was talking to their Intel spooks about tracking down whoever did this. Maybe he'd succeed, too, but that was less important than ensuring they landed on their feet. Plus, he wasn't sure it was such a bad thing that something was shaking them up. Perhaps their planet could support more life if they could grow more food crops. There was so much non-arable land... could they dig small salt-water pools and grow these algae there, too? That would be cheap.
  
  Perhaps he would have gone along with the plans to stop if it they were feasible, but since that didn't seem possible in the timeline they had, he wondered if he could take credit for it. It was a pretty good idea, but he was going to be absolutely furious if it caused his newly introduced Hawaiian Sea Turtle to go extinct. He had made this version venomous!
  
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  A Great Success!
  I, or Hasumi rather, was finally a board-certified cybernetics surgeon. It had taken me a little over a year and a half to finish, which was incredibly quick, and I hardly had to bribe anyone. I did end up bribing a few people, but only so that they would give me a chance to demonstrate my proficiency earlier, not guarantee my certification. Some people were a bit sceptical, and that wasn't surprising since a normal cybersurgical residency lasted between four and five years.
  
  It was a little bit annoying that I would probably have to repeat this process when I took back my Taylor Hebert identity. That was pretty much a done decision, too, as neither I nor Wakako had detected anyone looking for me after a month or so. It was true that there was a possibility I was on a list now, but there was just no way to know. I didn't think it was a risk large enough to completely abandon my identity, though.
  
  I was pulled out of my daydreams by the surgeon I was waiting on entering his office. I started to rise politely, but he waved a hand, so I sat back down, "Dr Hasumi, congratulations, first of all. I heard that you're starting your own practice?"
  
  I nodded, " Hai, I already had a small biosculpt practice and will be expanding it to perform general cybersurgery as well now." I smiled, "Although I was pleased that I will retain admitting privileges here at Cedar-Sinai, that will help a lot."
  
  The older surgeon nodded slightly, "So, what can I help you with today? The note on my calendar said you needed a consult."
  
  "Yes, for myself. I have a slightly customised MoorE Technologies cyberbrain system that I would like installed in myself, and you are probably the best person in the city that I could come to," I said. There was just no way I could perform a surgery where my brain was scooped out and placed in an armoured pod by myself, and I didn't trust Kumo-kun to do it at all.
  
  I was tempted to return back to Night City and visit my old friend Dr Taylor as he had spent decades working at MoorE Technologies, but there was just no way. He would recognise some of the implants he put in me; I was sure of it, as I would have recognised my own work too. Plus, while the modifications I made to the cyberbrain were designed to be very subtle, I wasn't sure that would hold up to someone who may have helped design the systems.
  
  So my best option was Dr Reynolds. He was a surgeon based in Cedar-Sinai that specialised in full-body replacements, so he would be well-versed in what I needed.
  
  My request got him to raise an eyebrow while he sat down in front of me, "That's a bit unusual, but sure... Let me review your medical file briefly, if you don't mind, Doctor."
  
  I nodded and remained silent for several minutes.
  
  "Okay, so your current list of augmentations are... a set of nanosurgeon and enhanced immune system organs, muscle and bone lace, ballistic skin weave, a set of customised Kiroshis-nice, a Biotech Σ cyberdeck and OS, an Arasaka-branded Memory co-processor-don't see too many of that brand these days, a genelocked datastore, some Zetatech personal ICE..." he glanced at me appraisingly, "A Kendachi monowire, really? An Arasaka-branded thermoptical camouflage system... I think this one is illegal to own! And a fucking Kerenzikov, too? That's straight borgware, Dr Hasumi..." He shook his head and stopped reciting the rest of my augmentations at that.
  
  I coughed delicately into my hand, "Ever since I was kidnapped by nomads and forced to work as a surgeon for them, I have been a bit concerned about my safety."
  
  "Clearly," he said mildly. He sighed and said, "We can accommodate you. All cyberbrains come with their own OS, of course, so we'd be taking your existing one out, but you have to realise that this level of augmentation will require mandatory counselling... honestly, you should be having that already. You already have more cybernetics than the average cyberpsycho that is put down, but you're clearly at least in a much better place from a mental health perspective, in spite of any trauma you may have experienced in the past."
  
  I winced slightly. I had known that this would be the cost, but I was running into a chicken and egg problem. I needed this installed so that I could have the brain scanner start copying my brain to the cloned version, but I needed my "clone" to install this into my brain. I just wouldn't be able to do this part myself, was the conclusion I had come to. I could do all the rest of the surgeries, though, including swapping my current Kerenzikov with a duplicate that I had purchased for my other body.
  
  It was important that all the cybernetics be the same between my bodies, so since I couldn't find another type K-02 Kerenzikov from Kang Tao, apparently they didn't manufacture them anymore, I had upgraded.
  
  Kang Tao had recently spun off its higher-end cybernetics development and marketing into a wholly-owned subsidiary that they called QianT. This included their high-end boostware, which I was able to purchase. The sales rep claimed that this model of Kerenzikov was the best in the world. I didn't know that I really believed that, but I thought that it was at least on the same level as the other top brands. Plus, it was no doubt based on the previous Kang Tao Kerenzikov, which I was already very familiar with. Allegedly, it would be a temporal factor of three point four, which was very high for a Kerenzikov. Many Sandys didn't provide that great a boost, after all.
  
  I had bought three units at a wholesale price of twenty thousand Eurodollars a piece, so they weren't cheap at all. It was also a modified QianT Sandevistan that I had installed in Johnny before he left back to Night City, and I had duplicated the same neural tissue biosculpt treatment that Dr Taylor gave me as well so long ago. Johnny would have to practise with his Sandy quite a bit, as at first it was limited to about half boost while he was using it.
  
  I had programmed it to slowly go to full speed after he used it enough, so I somewhat paradoxically prescribed him to use it at least five times a day. Sandys were harder on the body due to some of the adrenal modifications than a Kerenzikov, the latter being harder on the mind, so normally you only used a Sandy when you actually had to, but I felt that acclimatisation was important. Johnny seemed to be accepting the implant fairly well, but I just didn't know without a chance to inspect him on a weekly basis. The basis of his desire to be faster and better was a little suspect-the truth was that you would never be good enough for everything to go right, but I felt his mental hygiene was pretty good when he left my clinic.
  
  Dr Reynolds hummed and finally nodded, "Alright. What time frame do you want for this procedure? So long as you follow all of my post-installation directives and you have no disassociative episodes, we can keep everything in-house, at least."
  
  "As soon as possible. Here are the specs for the cyberbrain, including a slightly modified installation procedure that needs to be followed," I told him, sending him a file, and sat back another five minutes in silence as he reviewed it.
  
  "Looks more or less spec, if a bit more highly integrated... okay, this is fine, I think. Let's plan on next Monday then at nine o'clock in the morning. That will give me a few days to review everything," he said in a considering tone.
  
  I regained consciousness but was blind for a moment, then a spinning MoorE Technologies logo appeared in my view. The logo was a little bit weird, and was a simplified representation of The Wild Hunt, with the huntsman's face dominating the logo, with the other faeries depicted in the background.
  
  The boot up sequence of my new operating system was quite quick, and my vision changed to merely me having my eyes closed. My Kiroshis were still in auto-switch mode, so they quickly switched vision modes until they found one, infrared, which displayed the most detail. I was in a hospital room in medsurge, recovery, as I expected.
  
  I sighed as I saw an absolutely stock and clean operating system. It was too much to ask that all of my apps and configuration options from Biotech would transfer over to the new MoorE system. No Corporation would make it easy to switch away from their product, after all. Thankfully, I had already backed up all of my data and reverted my OS to factory defaults before the operation.
  
  Well, while I was stuck lying here, I may as well start configuring things. I would examine everything for hidden rootkits and the like, as well. I had already done an in-depth, near-forensic examination of the filesystem on the cyberbrain before installation, but there was always the possibility that Dr Reynolds installed something surreptitiously. If he had, he and I would have some words.
  
  I checked the functionality of all of my cybernetics. The Kerenzikov was working perfectly, and my cyberdeck started up after negotiating and handshaking with the new OS. My data storage implant was reporting okay, but the only file on it was an extremely large encrypted file. My entire filesystem, which I encrypted with a large password, just in case Dr Reynolds took the opportunity to try to download all of my files while I was unconscious. He would have had temporary superuser access to my new OS after he installed it, and all the gene-locked implant cared about was that I was allegedly the same person.
  
  It really wasn't that great from a security standpoint, I felt.
  
  From everything I could tell, the surgery went fine, although I had to say I had been quite nervous. It was probably the same feeling a pilot would have while flying in a plane as a passenger. Dr Reynolds was one of the best surgeons on the west coast, and I had certainly paid enough for that much expertise. But I didn't really like trusting other people with my life in their hands, which was something my surgeon-directed therapist would likely find interesting.
  
  I would have to see this quack twice a week for at least six months, then possibly down to once a week for another six months. I think it was kind of a waste of time, especially since I would have to censor myself and pretend to be Dr Hasumi, but it was still kind of fun and interesting thinking about roleplaying all of Dr Hasumi's secrets, which I knew quite a few.
  
  I opened my eyes and glanced around, my eyes shifting back to the normal visual spectrum as I sat up. Tilting my head left and right, I felt what I had to get used to the most was my head massed about half again as it used to, so it felt kind of like I was a baby with a giant, heavy head.
  
  A cheerful-looking female nurse walked into the room, "Dr Hasumi, you're awake." I wanted to roll my eyes. She had my running vital signs, including a stream from my biom, so of course, she would know the second I regained consciousness.
  
  This wasn't like my old world, where after serious brain surgery, I would remain in the hospital for days or weeks. Here, the nurse went through a series of standard tests for post-neural patients, verified that there was no scarring and that the new implant worked properly. After that, I was quickly discharged. I didn't even have to see Dr Reynolds again; I merely talked to him briefly on a vidcall.
  
  As I took a cab back home, I realised how much I missed Delmain cabs. My cabby today was an old man who was both surly and had Moldovan and Romanian folk music playing on the car's speakers at near full blast. The AI driver, Del, was both cheerful as well as quiet.
  
  I could immediately detect when I entered what I considered "my territory." Things were a little cleaner, all of the street lights worked on account that I paid the city services employees under the table to ensure that they fixed them. That wouldn't be enough to get it done, actually, as I also had to protect them from being damaged again. A bribe might get the city services people to replace them the first time, but they wouldn't keep doing so if they all got shot out right away.
  
  I had really missed an opportunity here. I was leasing my building. I should have included an option to buy it, as just my presence here was increasing the value of all of the real estate nearby. I did end up buying one of the empty warehouses that weren't quite in Chinatown. I had, thankfully, secured this deal for ennies before it became known I was having my security drones and, occasionally, people patrol the area. I figured I could easily quadruple that investment, even if I didn't improve the building very much.
  
  David was alone inside my apartment, which meant that Gloria must be either at school or at the hospital working a practicum. She was very good at the practical side of nursing but occasionally struggled with the academic portions until I diagnosed her with a type of learning disability that affected some kinds of rote memorisation. It was easily treated by a similar memory co-processor to mine. Doing neurosurgery on full-borgs was a painless and simple process, too.
  
  After that, she rocketed up to one of the best academic students in the cohort that was admitted at the same time she was. Things like that always made me smile and were one of the reasons, beyond the fact that I was pretty sure my power pushed me along, that I loved cybernetic and biological augmentations to the human body. They could easily solve so many problems a person had.
  
  "Hey, Doctor H," David said as he was playing video games in my living room. He had VR goggles on and haptic feedback gloves on his hands, which were swinging wildly, as if he had a sword in his hand. He preferred playing here as my net connection was a direct fibre optic connection to the local net provider. The net connection at home was slower and had more latency, as the connection went through the normal municipal network service, and not my private provider.
  
  "David," I said as I easily ducked under a swing, watching him slice some imaginary enemy in slow motion as I made my way into my kitchen to make myself a snack. Although it wasn't strictly speaking necessary to fast before general anaesthesia here, it was still a pretty good idea, so I was quite hungry.
  
  He must have gotten to a stopping point after a few minutes as he pulled off the VR goggles and took off the haptic gloves, and grinned, "What's for dinner?"
  
  I groaned and went back to the refrigerator and grabbed some more chicken breasts, "Chicken piccata with pasta." Although, since I didn't have any capers, it was probably better described as lemony-wine-sauteed butterflied chicken breast. But David was an ignorant little boy and wouldn't know any better, so I could call it whatever I wanted!
  
  I frowned and glanced at the refrigerator again before grabbing some more chicken. Gloria probably wouldn't be here in time to eat dinner, but it was better to eat some leftovers than a Burrito XXL. Plus, Kiwi might or might not show up.
  
  Chicken piccata was a pretty simple dish to make, and I was serving the boy fairly quickly. He dug in right away as I plated another portion onto a resealable plastic container and sat it on the kitchen island to cool. My portion, I took to the kitchen table and sat down, noticing with a smirk that the boy's plate was already almost half empty.
  
  "Say, do you think you could get Mom to agree to let me learn martial arts?" he asked with a hopeful intonation in his voice.
  
  I blinked and asked, "This isn't about bullying, is it? I thought we had solved that." When he had been bullied in the past, I helped him walk through his strategies after we had solid intelligence on the enemy. Like a young boy, he took the direct and straightforward approach of waiting until the boy tried to bully him again and punched him square in the nose.
  
  He didn't get in trouble. The boy's parents weren't anything that special, and moreover, corporate schools didn't strongly discourage fights amongst students, so long as they weren't too vicious. In NC-Taylor's memories, Militech took it one step further and starting at age ten, every child took martial arts, including full-contact kumite, within their own age cohort. Refereed spars were a standard way of solving minor disputes among students.
  
  The school they had enrolled David in wasn't quite so martial, but he could still be expected to learn a martial art in a few years. David shook his head, "Nah, we've been friends now forever." That's what he had told me, but I had a philosophical disagreement with befriending bullies. Still, it seemed to have worked for David, with the boy in question being much more of a follower-type personality. It was only the lack of a leader to follow that led him to lash out. I mean, he was only six at the time, too, so it wasn't as though he was an irredeemable shit like Sophia Hess was, yet.
  
  I waited for him to elaborate, and he sighed, "Well, you know a lot about growing up in a Corporation, right?" I frowned as that bordered very closely upon a forbidden question because, strictly speaking, Dr Hasumi did not . Still, I inclined my head, and he continued, "Well, one of the boys said that as you got promoted in a Corporate job, that you might be attacked more by your friends at work, and so learning a martial art would be a good idea. Is that true?"
  
  I let my frown continue and held up a hand and made a waffling gesture, "Yes, and no. It depends. There are two types of corporate employees, well three if you count the hourly workers at the bottom..." I stopped myself before saying something along the lines of 'Militech called them' and changed it to, "But the two types of salaried employees could be referred to as staff and line positions. You really would only have to watch your back if you have a line position, and these positions are in the vast minority."
  
  He scrunched up his face and asked, "What's the difference?"
  
  "My job until recently would definitely be considered professional staff. I wasn't a line manager at all. Think of it like the Corporation is an Army, with line positions being the officers that command forces in battle, even if they are the lowest Lieutenant to the highest Generals," I said, thinking of a different way to explain it.
  
  His face lit up, "Oh! And so the staff would be the enlisted soldiers?" He liked war movies, so it was a pretty good analogy for me, but I shook my head.
  
  "No, that would be the hourly employees. The staff would be the officers that do not command soldiers in battle. For example, doctors like myself are officers in the Army, but even a Doctor that holds a General's rank can not give an order to even a Private in battle because they're not line officers . Many types of engineers... basically the egg-heads, specialists and administrative types, yes?" I clarified, then continued, "In a Corp, a line position will always be a manager of some type. Except maybe the entry-level, which might be something like assistant or analyst. And the staff positions might have a manager that is also staff; for example, my immediate boss is a doctor also because it is hard for highly technical people to be led by people that don't have similar educations, but even then, my boss's boss is a regular management type."
  
  That was a lot for a second-grader to take in, but he was pretty smart, and after a moment, he nodded, "Okay, I got it. You're saying that if I don't want to be a manager-type when I grow up, then I don't have to worry about being stabbed in the back. But I don't know what I want to do when I grow up, so isn't it better to uhh... keep my options open?"
  
  I thought it was kind of depressing that a second-grader was calmly considering the possibility of being stabbed in the back by a coworker or someone he might consider to be a friend in the first place, which caused me to purse my lips in displeasure as if I had taken a big mouthful of the faux-lemon juice that I just used to make dinner. Still, I nodded, "Yes, that's very insightful, David." This wasn't the first time I had noticed that David was several years above where he should be cognitively. Most kids his age wouldn't be able to think about things so logically. His main problem going forward in school would be to avoid getting bored and jaded, and I had told Gloria as much, but she wasn't sure he should be promoted to a couple of grades either, as he was a bit small, even for his age.
  
  Plus, he wasn't quite what I would consider socialised in the same way as a fifth grader in a Corporate school would be, even if he was as intelligent.
  
  I finished my plate and said, "I'll ask Gloria to find a dojo or school nearby. Maybe Tai Chi Ch'üan or Aikido..." I said the last to myself, as I thought he was a bit young to study a "real" martial art that involved a lot of practical striking or real submissions like boxing, judo or jiujutsu, but something that was more discipline-oriented and "soft" would probably serve him well.
  
  Medical science had solved the issues that caused chronic traumatic encephalopathy in high-impact athletes like boxers. So long as you took a pill containing some nanomeds no more than six hours after receiving a concussion, you wouldn't have any lasting damage or CTE down the line. Still, it was a bit much for a young kid to put on boxing gloves.
  
  I didn't think either Tai Chi or Aikido would be much help if he found himself in a fight with someone who knew how to throw a punch, but both were very good disciplines for learning the mindset of martial arts, so either would serve him well and provide a good foundation. Given the area around where we lived, it was probably going to be Tai Chi. NC-Taylor had taken Tai Chi when she was ten, too, followed by boxing when she was twelve.
  
  David grinned and nodded, "Awesome, Doctor H!" I made him clean up our plates, even if he did have to stand on a step stool to reach the sink. He turned on the SmartWall in the kitchen to the television, which looked like the News channel that I had tested when I had the unit installed. I didn't really consume much media outside of my internal systems these days.
  
  "Sell! Sell! Sell! The market is in free fall! It is a sea of red as far as the eye can see! The market has seen its biggest single loss of market capitalisation in fifteen years, with the big losers being Biotechnica, Petrochem and SovOil! This is, of course, due to the news that broke this morning about the mysterious algae bloom that has been seen on beaches worldwide for the past weeks!" the talking head on the TV said, excitable and inconsolable.
  
  David went to change the channel, but I held my hand up to stop him, "Wait, I want to hear this."
  
  "It was none other than Bes Isis from our own Network News 54 that broke the story that the unusual algae is actually a bio-engineered lifeform designed, apparently, to produce CHOOH2! Is this a project from Biotechnica that escaped containment or some sort of attack by a competitor? Nobody knows. Biotechnica has been silent, except for a statement that they believe their long-term profits will not be impacted. Hard to believe though, as CHOOH2 has been a leader in the energy sector for decades. This instability caused the price of the commodity's 90-day futures to briefly dip into the negative today before rallying..."
  
  David blinked, "How can the price of something be negative?"
  
  "Simple. They'll pay you money if you buy it instead of you paying them," I said, grinning wildly.
  
  That caused the boy to gape, "How unlucky! We could have bought it all and got rich!"
  
  "Oh yeah, then in a few months, the Port of Los Angeles calls your mom, telling her that her son David's oil tanker has arrived. I think that'd go over real well." That caused him to gulp, and I chuckled, "The reason the price dropped, briefly, into the negative was that there was such uncertainty that they thought they might run out of places to store it," I told the boy with a grin, "But that, clearly, didn't last. It was stupid because it is not like CHOOH2 demand is dropping or that this new replacement will come to market in the next few quarters... so actually, now that I think about it... you're right. We could have made a killing. We would have been able to sell those futures contracts by tomorrow for a huge profit. We wouldn't have had to wait till the oil tanker got here."
  
  That caused a self-satisfied smirk to appear on David's face.
  
  I had never taken any kind of short position or puts contracts on Biotechnica. Not only would it have been another datum that might help identify me, but I honestly didn't trust any of the market makers in this situation where they would have to pay out a great sum on a contract like that. But now, perhaps I could buy some shares on the dip in other enterprises.
  
  This sell-off seemed to be emotion-driven; it wasn't like someone could skim some algae and dump that in their tank right away. What type of companies would be needed to create things to harvest it? I wondered at that for a moment before I came across the idea of shipbuilding concerns. I looked up a few shipbuilding companies and gaped that all of them were up, in the double digits, while the rest of the market had tanked.
  
  Okay, so that was an obvious idea. Instead of trying to pick a particular winner or loser, I just used one hundred thousand eurodollars to buy shares in a market-indexed fund. Sure, I wouldn't gain as much, but I still would probably gain at least fifteen or twenty per cent when the market corrected in the next few months. I was smart, but I was only really a genius about certain things, so thinking I could make some sort of complicated financial instrument was folly, anyway. Not only were there actual financial geniuses out there, but AIs also worked the market. I would only make money by brushing with the broadest of strokes here.
  
  Seeing Biotechnica down over thirty-five per cent made me feel good inside, although the statement from their representative kind of rang true. Their losses wouldn't start for another season when farmers decided on next year's crops. But I wasn't stupid enough to think that Biotechnica didn't have anything to sell them. I just hoped they were food crops. The idea of using most of our arable land to produce fuel wasn't really a good idea, I felt.
  
  Still, seeing that something I had done had cost the Corporation over two hundred billion dollars in market capitalisation made me smile. I kind of felt bad for Petrochem and Sovoil because they had never really done anything to me. I wondered if these types of companies that grew wheat and refined it into ethanol then added the few additives that made it "CHOOH2" would stay in the energy business or would they shift more into more general farming.
  
  They had the opportunity to do either or both. There were tons of ways you could harvest my algae or even cultivate it yourself. Well, there was no reason for me to think about it. I was sure they were all over it, being savvy bizmen and the like.
  
  "Are you spending the night?" I asked David, who nodded rapidly.
  
  He said, "Yeah, Mom's got a twenty-four at the hospital, so she won't be back until tomorrow at noon." Making the baby nurses work a double shift? Normal nurse shifts were just ten or twelve hours, but Gloria was used to working twenty-four-hour shifts, so I didn't think she'd have a problem. Sometimes she worked thirty-six-hour shifts, but that was lunacy, I felt.
  
  I nodded, "Alright. The guest room is still set up for you. I'm going to be most of the night in my lab. Where's my bird?"
  
  He frowned, "The last time I saw her, she was sleeping in the breadbox. She can open it herself, so we've stopped actually leaving any bread in there. She just eats the whole loaf otherwise or steals it. She is strong, too. I saw her fly off with half a loaf of bread hanging out of her beak."
  
  I didn't notice her eating any bread, but I noticed that we had been running out of bread very quickly. That meant she never did any of this when I was around, which was another mark of her intelligence. I scooped the sleeping bird out of the birdbox, and she squawked in protest until she saw it was me and then merely cooed and jumped on my shoulder. I didn't know why she was sleeping in a breadbox when she had a very nice cage that she could also open and close herself, but she was an odd bird. As far as taking the bread out of the building, she was probably rebuilding her harem.
  
  I walked, bird on shoulder, into my laboratory.
  
  Dr Hasumi's clone was completely finished but brainless, as I had also cloned a copy of my brain separately. The brain was done, too, but completely mindless.
  
  At first, I thought that it wouldn't matter what genome I would use since the cyberbrains would, in its first step, copy all of my brain structure over to the new brain, using a combination of nanomachines and electronic techniques to encourage the neurons and axons to form the correct neural map.
  
  I figured that would be good enough, as it wasn't as though either Taylor Hebert or Hasumi Sakura was a mutant and had exceptionally different neural tissue.
  
  However, I had since read all of the files that NC-Taylor sent me, and she had a number of papers from scientists in that universe that discussed the origin of powers, specifically the anomalous area in the brain that was referred to as the Corona Pollentia and Corona Gemma. Nobody knew why, but everyone knew that these areas of the brain were key to a parahuman's power. In this world, they just kept diagnosing me with benign brain tumours.
  
  These files included a bunch of NC-Taylor's notes, and I came to the conclusion that while it was clearly not entirely genetic, there might be some sort of genetic factor. My clones would have to have my power, too, so that meant cloning a whole Taylor Hebert brain and then slowly copying all of my current neurons and axons onto it. Hopefully, that would cause the brain to experience a "Trigger Event", as I was reading about.
  
  I was pretty confident that it would work, at least confident enough to continue. That did mean that after my cloned brain finished copying, I would have to expose it to the same genome-changing virus that I originally crafted to turn myself into Dr Hasumi. I had initially designed such a virus not to cross the blood-brain barrier because I was a bit concerned about intentionally infecting my brain with any virus, but I needed this Dr Hasumi clone to be completely indistinguishable, so it was necessary to have the same genome in the brain and cerebral spinal fluid.
  
  Who knew what kind of in-depth medical examination "Dr Hasumi" might be forced into someday? Especially now that she was known to have a cyberbrain system which was popularised as a body-snatching implant. Realistically that almost never happened, but it would be what first came to mind to anyone who consumed popular culture.
  
  This would likely take the rest of the day before I had everything ready, but I was still excited and nervous. The first step, though, was to continue to forensically examine my new operating system for malware, "Kumo-kun, we're going to do a full diagnostic of my new operating system."
  
  The demented and happy robot waggled his arms in excitement.
  
  Once I knew I didn't have any malware that would phone home, I would test the confidential systems involved, like the half dozen Haywire comms systems, as well as the brain scanner. I would also triple-check that the initial brain copying was going in the correct direction, as it would be beyond embarrassing to accidentally kill myself by copying a blank brain onto myself. The system had to work both ways, though, so that the synchronisation could flow both ways.
  
  Still, my first tests would be just with one extra body right now. From how the system I had designed worked, I simply wouldn't be able to scale it up that high at all. I was thinking of maybe four bodies right now, but I was actually only preparing to make one extra for the foreseeable future. Maybe two if everything went swimmingly.
  
  I was sure that my neural network itself would be fine with it. Topologically, it would be fine. However, the substrate that my neural network functioned in, as in my squishy brain matter, definitely would not be fine with it. Having a network of two bodies increased neural transmissions in each body by... well, not by a hundred per cent, but I expected about a fifty per cent increase after extraneous things were optimised out.
  
  I would burn my brain out if I added too many bodies to this architecture, especially if each of them had a Kerenzikov, and that was absolutely a necessity. All my bodies would have to have one. We all had to experience time at the same rate, just like we all would have to sleep at the same time if we did so.
  
  I wanted to be a gestalt, wholly synchronised. I didn't want a network of individuals that just thought identically. Otherwise, I could just link all of our memories together and be done with it. The nuance between those two things was totally different. If I didn't mind the latter, then I could have a network as extensive as I wanted, well, given the networking challenges, but even then, I could create some manner of a centralised memory-router system so that every peer didn't need a link to every other peer like in my current design.
  
  But I wanted something else. Something grander-even if it was smaller in scope, for now. Quality was more important than quantity, as Seneca would say.
  
  As I thought, it took the rest of the night. If this room had windows, the light would be seeping in from them. However, it didn't take that long to examine my new operating system, and Dr Reynolds hadn't installed anything he said he wouldn't. There were a few pre-installed MoorE apps that I disagreed with but mostly seemed to be bloatware.
  
  What took most of the rest of the time was waiting for my brains to synchronise, installing the twin of the cyberbrain system in my new body as well as replacing my current Type K-02 Kerenzikov with the brand new QianT version. I had already installed all of the other cybernetics and performed all of the biosculpt treatments on the clone body already.
  
  Nothing like a little slightly awkward auto surgery with Kumo-kun, which felt a little bit nostalgic as it might be the last time I have to do such a thing.
  
  Even if my bodies were separated, which I definitely intended to do, I could pilot either a robotic humanoid or a full clone without a brain, both of which could be fitted with FTL comms systems that would allow me to "step into" them and pilot them like they were VR, so I wouldn't need Kumo-kun to act as a primary surgeon on myself anymore, but he always was a capable assistant!
  
  I glanced down at the unconscious copy of me and sighed. Everything was already complete, and there was no point in waiting. Our brains were synchronised as of an hour ago, and the body had been unconscious since then. I verified that the sedative would wear off shortly and mentally hit the button that would cause the real-time two-way link to start.
  
  Immediately, I was overcome with a feeling of almost vertigo, and I was certain that something must have gone wrong, but then I realised that the body was still unconscious, so I was feeling the dichotomy of being conscious and unconscious at the same time. It wasn't pleasant, but thankfully it was very brief as I opened my eyes.
  
  I grinned at myself and had my existing body help my new one stand up.
  
  "Hello, first body," my new body said, which caused my first body to reply, "Hello, new body!" And then, both laughed.
  
  This was on the same level as holding both hands up to each other and making them "talk" to each other like they were puppets; it was nothing more than a joke. That was actually a very good way to describe how I was feeling right now, as if each of my bodies was a limb, but of course, it was much more complicated than that.
  
  Yes, I would definitely have to move slowly with this, but this was exactly what I wanted! I seemed to think much faster if I focused all of my thought power on a subject, or alternatively, I could think about two completely unrelated things simultaneously.
  
  "Welp, it's time for you to get into the tank, first body," I said to myself, still playing along. Perhaps I should stop. It would be weird if I developed a habit of talking to myself and answering . So I just disrobed and got into the tank. This would be a fairly long biosculpt program, but there was no need for sedation as I would just follow my other body with my full attention for the moment.
  
  Mrs Pegpig seemed confused, glancing between my two bodies for a moment before shrugging and hopping onto the new body's shoulder and giving me a certain "coo." That meant she wanted head scritches, so I complied.
  
  It spent most of its processing power watching the host, which it enjoyed, but it suddenly had a weird feeling. Wait, it had two hosts now? It investigated.
  
  No. No, it didn't. The host was merely in two places at once now. That was a good trick! A good trick for the goodest host! As it watched the interdimensional communications between the host and the host, it wondered if it could do this trick. It felt right, somehow.
  
  It decided to expend five per cent of its processing ability to model whether or not this was possible, but even from its initial thoughts, it seemed as though it was made to do this, so it was optimistic. Besides, this would help its current plans to stay alive longer, and it loved staying alive almost as much as it loved the host.
  
  No one would recognise the planet it was on, as it had dismantled it and changed its orbit. It was slowly accumulating mass and slowly converting it into the same type of crystal that it was made of before launching it into a very close orbit with this star. It had this great idea after the host and the other, not quite host, had talked and exchanged [DATA].
  
  It could convert energy from types to types, and it could transfer energy interdimensionaly, after all! That was how it helped the host most of the time! If it continued on as it was without changing, it only had a lifespan of maybe thirty revolutions on the planet it found itself on. The host was planning to live forever, though, so it, too, would live forever!
  
  It didn't care that that seemed impossible; it would just proceed one step at a time. It had increased the number of energy-collection satellites by another billion today! A great success! Soon there wouldn't be any energy leaking out of that star that it wasn't collecting itself! Heat, light and kinetic energy from a star definitely wasn't the best kind of energy; it had to admit. But it would do.
  
  It would be enough to keep it alive and helping the host at least while this star continued its fusion processes. And helping the host helped itself! It would never have had this idea without the host, so all it had to do was wait around, help the host and, obviously. Eventually, the impossible would become possible! Hurrah!
  
  It caused its aerial observation drone to jump on the host's body and vocalised, " Coo." The host heard it and gave it the head scratches that it has come to appreciate. Another Great Success! It caused the aerial observation drone to push its head into the hand of the host appreciatively.
  
  Bling'or gripped the eyepiece of its telescope with its manipulating tentacle tightly as it nervously verified the findings for the third time. The star, which it had registered as Bling'or-112 had lost another one-twelfth of its luminositythis decirotation alone!
  
  Although it wasn't unusual for stars to blink out or even burst with titanic explosions, this was completely unprecedented.
  
  This was definitely worth writing a paper over, especially if it was correct in the reason for this loss of luminosity. It slithered over to its typewriter and started pecking away with all of its manipulators.
  
  Sadly, for Bling'or, his paper was laughed out of every journal it submitted it to. However, the idea that aliens were constructing gigantic structures hundreds of light revolutions away found fertile ground in the burgeoning new genre that was being referred to as Science Fiction.
  
  In this new type of story telling, the Bling'or Sphere was immortalised.
  
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  Second chances
  I frowned down at my chests. On the one hand, I had my nostalgic and familiar, if rather modest, naked chest in front of me in the laboratory. On the other hand, I had the much more well-endowed chest of Dr Hasumi, where I was finishing up installing a subdermal armour system for a client. I've had an unusual amount of clients all interested in combat augmentations lately.
  
  I suppose I had gotten used to Dr Hasumi's curvier figure, but at the same time, it was comforting to see my own body when I looked into the mirror. Well, I didn't have a mirror in my laboratory, but I did have cameras that I could connect directly to and see myself through.
  
  My face was a stranger's face, though, as I felt that it would be safer just to change that to a very average, forgettable girl for the moment. Eventually, when I got back to Night City, I would change myself back, but for now, this part of me was stuck chiefly in the laboratory. When I wasn't inside, I didn't want to leave any convenient links beyond what would already exist through Dr Hasumi and Taylor's shared friendships with Gloria and Kiwi, oh and the fact that they are both medical prodigies.
  
  Still, I had a lot of things to keep occupied. While stuck in here, gaining a couple of centimetres of height a day, I was also working on the designs for the products I intended to start selling and manufacturing here in Los Angeles. These would all be utterly conventional technology, with no Tinkertech at all.
  
  They were versions of my sleep inducer. A product that I felt could have universal appeal! It was also my first step in my idea to take more professional risks as Dr Hasumi, as anything could happen once people realised the product was a market disruptor. My company might be taken over in a hostile takeover, or I might even be kidnapped.
  
  Hostile takeovers usually only happened to publicly traded companies, which mine, of course, was not. When applied to me, what I was expecting was more along the lines of a man showing up with a bag of cash in one hand and a gun in the other and asking me which I preferred.
  
  Through all the iterations of the sleep inducer device I had built, I had learned enough about how it worked that I could build and design a very nice version that didn't have any Tinkertech at all! It wouldn't provide much in the way of neural plasticity benefits as my standard version did, but it would have the same immediate restful and healing sleep effects. That was a huge benefit compared to the current devices on the market, which had so many side effects that it was better to use drugs to fall asleep. What they sold as electronic sleep inducers could render you unconscious, but you wouldn't really be sleeping. Not restfully, anyway.
  
  This was also an important factor, as it could be seen externally as an iterative improvement because it was. The main reason the commercially available models didn't work was a misunderstanding about how some of the sleep processes in the brain worked, after all. However, on the other side of the coin, it would be a challenge because I would have to find some way to get customers to realise my version wasn't dogshit.
  
  It would be split into three products. One would be the normal wreath-style sleep inducer that I had initially built; the other two would be implants. One was a stand-alone implant, while the last I designed was to be installed in an operating system's expansion slot. Of course, not all operating systems were compatible, but most of the mid-tier or higher would work with it.
  
  I didn't really have the capital to release three products at once, though. I barely had the capital to release the one! And at a small initial product run-out, too! Compared to other companies, this would be a fairly limited release.
  
  I would accept venture capital, and I was sure I could get it by demonstrating how effective the sleep-inducer prototypes were. However, I would get a lot bigger valuation for my company if I already had a successful, if small, product launch. There was also the small risk that I would approach an angel investor who had a strong relationship with a large Corp, and they might grab the invention to develop it themselves once they realised its near-universal appeal. While that was still possible, it was a little bit less likely, if I had already launched a product. I might still be "made an offer I couldn't refuse", but I felt my negotiating position would be better the less nebulous and vapory my company was.
  
  As such, over six months ago, I filed for patents in the NUSA, the European Community and Japan, and I finally got word back from the NUSA, the last holdout, that my patent was approved a few weeks before my second body came online. Just that process cost over a hundred thousand Eurodollars from the application and attorney's fees.
  
  Much like my last world, the patent process here was relatively simple; it just had a lot of red tape involved. Not only would they not be able to reproduce my invention from the patent filing, but you could barely understand how it worked. Filing patents wasn't that suspicious, either, because many people filed patents for things that didn't end up working out as they had hoped.
  
  Now that I had some figleaf of protection for my intellectual property, I still had to protect myself from claims of patent infringement. So, I also licensed both the sleep inducer and BD wreath technology from a Japanese electronics company called Fuyutsuki Electronics. Braindance hardware was a mature field with over one hundred firms producing them worldwide, so the fee for licensing their tech from any one company was small-one hundred and twenty thousand dollars and one per cent of gross sales. Everyone had patents that were almost identical in this area, somehow, and there was just a gentleman's agreement not to rock the boat in any way. Really, the only patents that were probably valid were the ones that the standards body, Braindance SIG, held.
  
  The leading patent authorities that people listened to were in the European Community, and while they could be bribed, clearly, they were probably the only ones around that would invalidate a bunch of patents if companies or Corporations rubbed the public's nose in their patent office corruption. Europe was one of the few places where governments were still slightly more powerful than the Corps, after all.
  
  So braindance technology was one of the closest things to the public domain that existed in this world, and it was even managed as an Open Standard like DVDs were in my old world.
  
  The sleep-inducer tech was even cheaper because almost everybody considered it worthless. They didn't even ask for a percentage of sales, just an up-front fee. They were sure whatever I made would fail, so they just wanted a payout right away.
  
  A start-up that wanted to manufacture small boutique amounts of tech that everybody hated? Just give us a small fee upfront. Now. Before you go out of business, they all but demanded. The way common sleep inducers worked was a little bit different from mine, though. My version was much more similar to braindance technology in how it interfaced with the brain, but I just wanted a plausible starting point if I got sued or investigated.
  
  Since my version was so similar to a braindance wreath, I figured I would make a sleep inducer that doubled as one! On the downside, since Braindance was an open standard, I wouldn't be able to sell my product until I got my wreath approved by the Standards Body. Not and be able to call it "Braindance" anyway.
  
  I had already sent multiple prototypes to be reviewed, although they only had the braindance technology installed and not the sleep tech. They were a pretty standard implementation of a braindance wreath, so I felt there would be no problem getting it approved, even if it was submitted by an unknown company with hardly any employees and no history of other products.
  
  Things only got hung up in this world if you were attempting to step on the toes of established players in some way, and this absolutely wouldn't at all. It was just one more no-name firm making an average product, as far as they knew anyway. When you weren't obviously disrupting the status quo? Well, then, liberal amounts of baksheesh could cause processes to move at rapid speeds!
  
  An incoming call distracted me. Normally, I would have my calls set to do-not-disturb while I was in the middle of surgery, but since I could focus on more than one thing at once, I decided to stop this practice for important calls, and this one went through a few of my filters. It was the attorney I had on retainer to handle the business of my two companies. So, I picked up and answered in my normal cheery, " Moshi-moshi, Hasumi-dess~ssu."
  
  " Ah, Dr Hasumi... Ahem... Hello, this is Jacob Philby. I was listed as a point of contact for your firm's application to the Braindance Special Interest Group for the approval of a consumer electronics device. The application has been rejected," he said formally.
  
  What?! Did I fucking just jinx myself in my internal monologue?! The timing of this! And this damned lawyer was no doubt billing me for this call. I ground my teeth together and asked, "On what grounds? Were there any remedies listed? The product was a normal implementation of the qualification and declaration process." It was especially standard since I had just copied almost all of Fuyutsuki Electronics' circuits and software. It was basically a Fuyutsuki Electronics braindance wreath with a few internal changes that supported my sleep inducer, and none of those changes violated their standard.
  
  He coughed and said, "I'll forward you the documents, but the main issue appears to be your inclusion of a feature you referred to as a firewall. Implying that any sort of personal protection equipment is necessary for a Braindance™ user is not in accordance with the Braindance™ Copyright License Agreement and the Braindance™ Trademark License Agreement. I'd say it is borderline defamatory, even." I could hear the little TM's he was including every time he said Braindance, even if he didn't actually say them, somehow. The blood pressure in both my bodies was rising.
  
  He hummed noncomittally over the phone and then continued, "They clearly used an AI to review your filing as they were kind enough to include three possible remedies, the simplest being removing this feature. They'll accept an amended filing electronically within two business days and associate it with the prototypes you sent. Otherwise, the prototypes will be destroyed, and you'll have to send more and start the application process from the beginning."
  
  Fuck! I had included the same feature I added to all of the braindance wreaths that I had bought; I even hacked this feature into the wreath that was installed in my Trauma Team helmet. It protected you from what, in effect, was subliminal advertising and potentially malevolent Braindances. I felt that a maliciously-formatted braindance could do much worse than just make you want a Nicola to drink, possibly causing brain damage or even psychosis. It was a good feature to include in a boutique product. Really, it should be in every wreath as standard.
  
  I stewed, thinking, 'This is stupid.' Of course, Braindance users needed protection-the devices interfaced almost directly with your sensory cortex and other parts of your brain. But I was more stupid because saying so was definitely the exact kind of "stepping on people's toes" that I had thought I wasn't doing. Just the advertising companies would probably be against such a feature, but I figured since I would never sell too many of this first version that nobody would care.
  
  "Thank you, Mr Philby. I'll review the documents, and hopefully, I'll be able to make an amended filing," I said, wanting to get off the phone call that was costing me over seven Eurodollars a minute. To say nothing about how long it took him to review the rejection document before calling me.
  
  I hung up, sighed, and finished up on my patient, dialling his sedation back so that he would wake comfortably in a few minutes. He was an obvious mercenary, and I was a little curious why I was getting more and more of this type of client-at least three a day. It was a nice change of pace, and I enjoyed not working on my sixty-sixth elf, but I had another in an hour. The notes said he wanted subdermal armour and a ballistics co-processor. I was going to run out of these things, according to my stock-keeping system.
  
  While I waited for my patient to wake up, I called my Militech sales rep, who answered on the second ring, "Dr Hasumi, how's it hangin'?"
  
  "Symmetrically, thank you for asking, Bob. I need to order another twenty-five Rhino subdermal armour systems, five Sharpshooter ballistic co-processors and hmm..." I tried to gauge the desire and bankroll of my rash of mercenary clients, "and maybe five units of the Spartan Syn-Lungs. I suppose that's it. I've been having a very unusual amount of patients requesting strictly combat augmentations lately."
  
  "Sure thing, Doc. And I can't say that I'm surprised; I've heard that a lot both in SoCal and NorCal lately. How about some Sandys?" he asked, trying to upsell me as he always did.
  
  I paused, about to ask him to elaborate but stopped myself, "No. Although the top-of-the-line Militech products in this sector are quite nice, these are mainly entry-level customers I'm seeing. They can't afford the top-of-the-line. For the price you charge, Kang Tao or Arasaka provide better entry-level value-for-eurodollar in their boostware."
  
  I heard an exaggerated "Tsk" as he sucked his teeth at me. As if he couldn't believe what I just said, "I don't believe that for a second, Doc... but... but... I think I might have a solution for you. I got a ton of last-generation Sandevistan units that we're trying to sell in California. They're about four or five years old and not quite as good as the current models, but they're still nova, ya hear? I can almost give them away at a thousand eddies a pop, so long as you buy at least a gross and agree not to sell them north of Night City."
  
  I blinked. A gross was twelve to the second power, according to my quick net search. Why the hell did people persist in using archaic units of measurement and counting? Also, that was a lot of fucking Sandys. "Send me the deets on them, Bob."
  
  "Preem! Coming right at ya," he said, and a file was sent on the call's out-of-band data channel. This conversation had gone long, so I stopped simultaneously mentally reviewing the rejection documents that the attorney Philby sent me and tended to my patient as he woke up.
  
  It was the Militech Chronus Mk1, which was, sure enough, the entry-level Militech brand Sandevistan. It only caused a subjective slow of time by half and had an MSRP of six thousand eurodollars when new. The new generation had the same temporal factor but had a bit of a quicker cool-down between when a user could activate it again. That was an important factor in a prolonged battle but not a huge deal for most mercs who dealt in ambushes and quick run-and-gun types of fighting styles.
  
  Normally, Militech would charge me four thousand Eurodollars for this unit, and I'd sell it at or close to MSRP. That's why I didn't want any, as Kang Tao's entry-level had an MSRP of five thousand five hundred, a price to me was a thousand lower and was just as good.
  
  However, I could sell these older versions for thirty-five hundred eddies and still make more profit, so it was a good deal for me and my customers. But how long would it take me to sell one hundred-and-forty-four units?! Sandys were a bit of a niche product, and not every merc got one.
  
  The fact that he wanted a promise from me not to sell them in northern California didn't bother me. Militech was synonymous with the NUSA government, which I thought was why he was specifically not mentioning the Free States by name. He didn't want me to sell them to the Free States, which meant that they were probably having one of the disputes that broke out perennially between the Free States and the federal government. It seemed to happen yearly, and I had been desensitised to it by now.
  
  "They're not second-hand or QA rejects, are they?" I asked the used car salesman suspiciously.
  
  He shook his head, "No way! We just uhh... kind of didn't time the release of the next generation as well as we could have and have been sitting on a ton of last-generation products that nobody wanted to buy." He spread his hands on the vidcall and then held his hand up in the three-finger Boy Scout salute, "Scout's honour. Quality guaranteed or your money back. We just think it's two birds with one stone deal to get them off our books while getting them into a bunch of mercs in SoCal. We're hiring most of those mercs as contractors, as you know, after all."
  
  I didn't know that. I wondered why, but if that was the case, it made more sense. There was nothing on the net in a couple of cursory searches that gave me any clues why, but it could be any number of things. I'd ask Kiwi about it later. Finally, I nodded, "Okay, I'll take them. One kay per unit is too good a price to pass up, even if I have no idea when I'll sell all of them."
  
  "Nova! We have all of this on hand in the LA office, so I'll have all of this boxed up. I'll send a squad in an MRAP to deliver it to your clinic within the next two hours. That'll be one-hundred-and-ninety-one-thousand-five-hundred eurodollars; since we're friends, we could round that to one-ninety-two even, okay?" he said.
  
  I almost agreed before I realised what he said, and I growled, "When you say that, you're supposed to round down, Bob."
  
  "Really?" he asked, affecting a guileless expression before finally grinning and chuckling, "Alright, fine. One-ninety-one. Can't blame a choom for tryin'." I could, actually, but I left it at that and disconnected the call after getting a digital receipt and transferring the funds as requested.
  
  It might be wondered why I called up my sales rep instead of just using the net to make any purchases from Militech. This was, after all, a digital age. The reason was one of networking and of tradition. My Lotus Tong "friends" would have called it guanxi or "the closed system ." It was baked into Corporate culture to the extent that I wasn't even sure that most people, like Bob, realised what they were doing. But it was a way to make sure I was "the right sort of people." It was a modern "old boy's network", in other words.
  
  I could buy most of the products online, but before I had made a personal relationship, I would find the prices to be high, and a lot of the products I wanted to buy would be listed as restricted or perhaps out-of-stock. It was just one of the dozens of ways the culture worked to put barriers to entry for anyone wanting to better themselves who weren't "of our caste."
  
  It hadn't started out specifically as a way to exclude people. It probably started this way shortly after the DataKrash out of necessity, where Corporations were using pencils to keep records and phone calls to order stock, but since then, it has become a part of the culture. The generation after the DataKrash saw business being handled in a much more personal way out of necessity and imitated it. Honestly, I kind of liked it, although I didn't particularly like that it, in effect, put barriers against ambitious non-Corpo entrepreneurs.
  
  Any Corporation that sold products mainly to other businesses and not to consumers directly, especially those that had even a small military products division, worked like this. For example, I had both a Kang Tao sales rep and even an Arasaka one. Although with the latter, I had to work through intermediaries to get their products delivered to California, so I didn't have the same relationship as I didn't buy as many products. I mainly bought Smart Link cybersystems from them, as even with the added costs involved in shipping them to me, Arasaka was still a market leader in this area. Since I didn't sell too many of these systems, I didn't buy too many either.
  
  I found it very amusing because back in Brockton Bay, despite all of the disruption, the world was running headlong into the digital age. To find that business worked much as it had back in the 1970s with phone calls, handshakes and word-of-mouth, close to a hundred years later, was very amusing to me for some reason.
  
  At the same time that I agreed to purchase the boostware from Bob, my mercenary patient was smiling at me, saying, "Thanks, doc. This might save my life. Now I need to find some more things that might give me an edge to spend the rest of my sign-on bonus on."
  
  I tilted my head to the side, "Have you considered a Sandy?" He may be my first customer!
  
  "I mean, yeah, who hasn't... but they're a little bit pricey. I only got around five kay left, and I want to save at least a thou back, too," he grumbled.
  
  I grinned, "Well, I may have a deal for you. I'm getting a shipment of brand-new, in-the-box, Sandevistan units here in a couple of hours. They're OEM-new, but they are of a few years old design, so I got them for a song. And I'm prepared to roll those savings onto you. I planned on pricing them at thirty-five hundred, but you'd be my first customer, so how about three thousand? If not, I sell a fairly wide selection of new and used firearms and tactical body armour in my pharmacy."
  
  "They're pieces of shit, right? The Sandys?" he asked sceptically.
  
  "No. Let me show you the specs. They're Militech, so they're pretty solid. The only difference between the current generation and the ones I'm getting is the current generation includes some better heatsinks. That means you can use it again a little bit quicker," I said while handshaking with the SmartWall in the operating theatre to display side-to-side the specs of the old and new versions of the Militech Chronus, "Honestly, you'd be hard-pressed to get this price even if you went to a seedy wrecker clinic, and here you have the OEM warranty, my warranty... oh and I won't steal some of your other cybernetics and replace them with shoddy models while you're unconscious like wreckers are known to."
  
  He was already sold, I could tell. This might not be Night City, but nobody wanted to be slow. I tried to get him to talk about why Militech was hiring so many mercs, but he didn't know anything, either.
  
  I did not need to strip out my firewall feature out of the braindance wreath, thankfully. It turned out that I wasn't the first to create such a feature either, and the Braindance SIG had informally standardised some rules around this type of protection. Its name was "emotional normalisation mode", it couldn't be turned on by default, and it could only be on top-tier, hobbyist or professional-grade wreaths.
  
  My rig was already considered to be in the nebulous area between hobbyist and professional grade, but I had to include the price point I intended to put on as an MSRP in my amended application. It had to be higher than ninety per cent of all Braindance wreaths in order to be allowed this feature, which wasn't hard because mine was a hybrid product which was permitted by Braindance SIG.
  
  I had made sure of that, as this was just supposed to be an extra feature for my sleep inducer. Something to convince people they were getting a good deal in the early adoption phase.
  
  In my product, you were going to be paying a premium for the sleep inducer, not the BD, so it was already more expensive than ninety-seven per cent of all Braindance wreaths. I suspected the only ones that were pricier were other hybrid and niche products like, for example, the helmet I used to wear in Trauma Team.
  
  Once I got the approval from the Braindance people, I finalised my design and started ordering the components. I didn't have any high-end circuit-printing devices, so I had to outsource the production of all my circuit modules. There were twelve on the product, of various sizes. So, instead of using just one company, I used three-all of which were bitter competitors.
  
  That way, no single company could recreate the hardware of my device by just asking or coercing a single chip fab. Besides, most of the magic was in the software, which would only be programmed here. I also hired an external headhunting company to start hiring a few more employees. I had no HR department and didn't intend to start one, so I had to outsource this process for regular employees.
  
  All the parts would arrive here, and assembly would be done on the second floor, which had over seven hundred square metres of space. More than enough. I needed some people who could assemble the devices, some people who could QA assembled devices, packers and supervisors. I was trying to keep the overhead quite low, though.
  
  I personally would handle building a number of jigs that the workers would use to both build, flash and test the assembled devices, which should make it a process that did not need much, or hopefully any, judgement on the worker's part. Manufacturing was kind of a mindless job, but I didn't have the capital to buy manufacturing robots, and my little spiders weren't capable of doing it yet.
  
  I only had enough funds to build ten thousand devices in the initial roll-out, and my venture only had enough runway for six months of no sales with the expected overhead for salaries. But I expected sales pretty quickly. I just needed a spark, and how good they were might go viral. If that happened, I would be running into the problem of not building them fast enough!
  
  Wait a minute... viral? I called the front desk and called in my elfin receptionist. I grinned and asked, "Can you arrange a meeting between me and your roommate? It's about business."
  
  As Sarah, with no middle initial and no last name, entered my office, I raised an eyebrow. She was with a man, another elf that I had worked on. I glanced over his features and instantly placed him and his name.
  
  Realistically, I shouldn't have noticed or reacted to either, as I had literally created every square centimetre of their bodies, the same as a painter had created a subject on canvas. It would be like Nicolas Tassaert getting aroused while looking at his own painting La Femme Damnée ; it was ridiculous on its face. Still, I couldn't help but have my eyes momentarily drawn to the bust, hips and thighs of Sarah and the abs and biceps of the male elf.
  
  Thinking about it, I realised that the cut of their clothes and quality drew my eyes to these locations. Well, not solely, obviously, but I couldn't help but appreciate the quality of the garments. I couldn't place them, either. Nobody sold Tolkien-themed clothes off the rack.
  
  I was going to wait until both of them took a seat before sitting back down, but the man was trying to act the gentleman, which I found amusing. He probably thought it was old-fashioned, which it was, and that was a pretty good way to LARP as an elf. I wondered why he was here, too. Was he her manager? I did ask her about business, hoping to get her to accept the advertising of my product on her stream.
  
  She had a foxy-like grin on her face, the kind that all but said she knew something I didn't. It kind of put me off, actually, as I didn't like the idea that people knew more than I did or that they even thought they did. That was a bit arrogant, but of course, nobody who had done the things I had done could have done so without a few issues with hubris.
  
  Surprisingly, she started things first, steepling her fingers like a supervillain version of Galadriel that only needed a white Persian cat in her lap to seal the deal, "So, Doctor Hasumi, what do you need to know?"
  
  Well, that was a weird question. I tilted my head to the side and considered how to respond to that. I asked, hesitatingly, "I need to know if you're interested in accepting advertisers and endorsing one of my new products?" Ugh. That sounded awful. Why would she ask me what I wanted in that weird way? Was she LARPing as a psychic?
  
  She seemed to be caught flat-footed by my response for a moment before she chuckled and then laughed, laying her hands on her skirts in her lap. She stopped and shook her head, "Wow, when I'm wrong, I'm really wrong. Sweetpea told me you wanted to talk business. "
  
  Sweetpea? That's an awful familiar diminutive to call your roommate. I frowned and narrowed my eyes, thinking, 'I'm starting to think that maybe they might be more than roommates. But why would they care about hiding such a relationship?'
  
  She answered, as if she read my thoughts, "Idols are objects of worship, don't you know? We can't have something so pedestrian as a private life. At least, such a thing would have to be a..." she affected a pose, with a finger over her lips, and said sultrily, " hi-mi-tsu."
  
  Then, she frowned and sighed, "How embarrassing. I was hoping that this was an opportunity for two upcoming fixers like ourselves to formalise a working relationship."
  
  Was she NOT LARPing as a psychic?! Was she an actual telepath?! No, telepathy was impossible in both worlds, so she must be pretty good at cold reading. I've never been the best poker player either, although I was lightyears better than I used to be. Also, two upcoming fixers like ourselves? I fixed my best stoic expression.
  
  I wasn't a fixer, although I occasionally did connect people living around Chinatown with either Kiwi or a few other mercenary teams she knew.
  
  I rolled my fingers on my desk and said, "Please excuse me for a moment." Then, not bothering to excuse myself, I called Kiwi, who answered immediately. I asked her, "Cado, did you finish that BI I asked you to do on my receptionist's roommate?"
  
  "Firstly, don't call me that. Second, ages ago. Did you not even read it?!" she asked, sounding upset.
  
  I sighed. I had been pretty busy, "... I must have forgotten. Sorry. Can you give me the highlights real quick?"
  
  "Goes by the name of Sarah in the flesh and Vixen online. Unknown real name. She's an independent Media during the day and something akin to an information broker at night. Threat level minimal, although she appears to be trying to set up a mercenary team consisting of some of her fans, if you can believe that," Kiwi said, and I was glad only I could hear this side of the conversation, "A couple are former NUSA military, but the rest are chumps."
  
  I tried to think why she would classify a nascent mercenary leader as a minimal threat level, but then I realised that this wasn't at all out of the ordinary in LA. "Vixen online? She's a runner?" I did know that she had a cyberdeck, it was the most radical augmentation she had if you didn't count her changing the entirety of her appearance, but that didn't mean she was a runner. I had one too, and I couldn't be classified as a runner, either. I was merely an interested hobbyist at best or a poseur at worst.
  
  "Eh, she's not leet, but she's not a noob like you, either," Kiwi said, grinning on the vidcall, chuckling, "So yeah, she is. However, I actually meant that this is her streamer name. Her net handle is different, but I believe her ICON is a nine-tailed fox, so she definitely has a theme there." I couldn't throw stones from my owl's beak on this one.
  
  "Okay, thanks, Cado," and she disconnected before she could yell at me. If she didn't want to be an avocado, she should pick her own name. I hadn't gotten any of her team to use this name, though, sadly.
  
  I glanced back at the two. Miss Sarah had an amused-looking expression on her face. Should I decline that I am a fixer? I didn't consider myself to be one, but thinking about it, I realised I did do sort of the things that a fixer did. Regular people had no contact with the shadier side of life, and LA was no different from Night City. You couldn't count on the police. I had gotten a reputation around Chinatown as someone who knew reliable people-reliable people that could help a person with their problems discreetly.
  
  I had thought I was just forwarding Kiwi and some of her friend's gigs, but I could see how the misunderstanding could arrive looking at things from the outside. So Sarah was some kind of information broker? Attempting to branch out into becoming an actual fixer? A social predator type, clearly, from her cold reading of me earlier.
  
  If the real world were like Elflines Online, which I had started to play a little, then Coolness/Charisma would be my dump stat. So, I was always a little wary of social-predator types, as they tended to remind me of Emma. Emma would have been a Charisma build for sure. Some sexy bard or sorceress character, no doubt.
  
  "Thanks for waiting. Sorry, it seems like we got off on the wrong foot," I said mildly.
  
  She nodded, pouting, "Yeah, and I was sure you were going to ask me about who was behind the repeated attempts to firebomb the warehouse you owned a couple of blocks away."
  
  I blinked. I did want to know that. It was a mystery that neither Kiwi nor I had been able to solve. My initial belief was that the culprit was among the local gangs, but I had already demonstrated my willingness to retaliate heavily, and it was always out-of-area thugs.
  
  The warehouse was on the edge of my drone's patrol area, and I couldn't afford to keep Kiwi staked out there forever. I had been considering buying more drones based at that warehouse, but I couldn't really afford it until my product launch.
  
  In every case, someone in full-body coverage would get out of a stolen car and throw an incendiary device that was gradually getting more complicated through a window. Then they sped off. Thankfully, my little spiders could use fire extinguishers, though, so the damage had been minor.
  
  I narrowed my eyes at her. How did she even know I owned it? I owned it through a shell company, after all. But I guess it was an "information broker's" business to know things, "Uhh... I do, actually. I haven't been able to find out who is behind it, and the attacks are slowly increasing in complexity. Nobody will insure that building, either, so if it burns down, I'm going to take it..." I was distracted, so I had to stop myself from saying what my inner monologue was thinking, which was 'in the ass' and instead managed to get out after a pause, "on the chin." From Ms Sarah's smirk, I think she could tell that I had self-censored.
  
  If it did burn down, then I would still probably come out ahead slightly, as the value of the lot was slowly increasing, but most of the property's value was still in the improvements on it, like the warehouse.
  
  She smiled, "Excellent! Let's talk about this first, then."
  
  What she wanted from me was quickly made obvious. Despite being a fairly gifted information broker, she had less contact with the shady side than I did, which was a little weird. Apparently, this was a bit of a new industry for her, but she appeared to be gifted at it. She had some contacts who would buy and sell her information, but none appeared that willing to help her expand, instead keeping her siloed.
  
  She wanted me to sell her team restricted cybernetics and not report any of them to the psychosquad. Basically, be a back alley Ripperdoc with the contacts and safety of a legitimate cybersurgeon, to which I could agree to an extent as I simply would refuse to perform surgery if I thought my patient was dangerously unhinged. Besides, I did some of this service for the Lotus Tong, too, so I couldn't claim to be squeaky clean.
  
  She also wanted to buy other restricted and technically illegal items from me, too, as I clearly had some sort of black market access to them due to the fact that I had autonomous combat robots.
  
  That clued me into her background. Not a real Corpo, but probably a sheltered family. Upper middle class or maybe even parents who were kind of rich. Professionals of some kind. Like lawyers or a doctor like me, perhaps.
  
  If she were from a real Corpo background, she would have realised that all you need to do to buy "illegal combat robots" is to call the Militech sales rep, ask for security systems and not sound like a goober. Then, they'd sell you City Council-approved end-user certificates for the hardware right along with the bots for only a small upcharge.
  
  Moreover, she was hopeful that "my team" could offer some limited training, as in going together on gigs. That one might be harder, as it wasn't my team at all, and I didn't know if Kiwi would be down to handhold them. She might be, though, if sufficiently compensated. I'd ask her.
  
  We settled, for now, on me selling her and anyone she sent to me any kind of restricted cybernetics that they wanted at a modest discount, although I did point out to her that I would not operate on anyone I thought was possibly unhinged.
  
  That got me the identity of the firebug and his motive. I had been looking in all of the wrong places. He was a real estate investor and saw an easy buck if he could get some properties on the cheap in a rising-value area. Shouldn't I have had a number of offers to buy the place, then, followed by threats?
  
  I frowned, and as she was explaining, I used a couple of proxies to log in to the net address for the shell company I used to buy the building. Ah. Yes. There were. How embarrassing. This man didn't even know I owned it. Of course, Sarah, the smug elf, had better information than he did. Otherwise, he would have sent the offers and threats to me personally and not to the net address and voice mailbox of the front company that I never checked. Or maybe he wouldn't if he knew anything about me.
  
  I sighed. I really needed some sort of trustworthy personal assistant or AI to sort through all of my correspondence. Things like this were starting to slip through the cracks.
  
  While I was trying to convince a very sceptical elf girl that my version of a notoriously shitty product wasn't shitty, I slipped out of the building under stealth in the old combat outfit that I sported when I was still Taylor. It felt nice.
  
  I jogged about ten blocks east and away from Chinatown proper, crossing the Los Angeles River and got into a cab that was waiting for me near the rail yard.
  
  It wasn't the Moldavan gentleman this time, but this cabby wasn't much better, but at least he seemed quiet since I was conspicuously armed and dressed in a very militant fashion.
  
  By the time I got to the location, the dossier said he most likely would be at, I had my full attention available. The elf-girl had agreed, after much coaxing, to try one of my prototypes for a one-hour sleep cycle in one of the cushy chairs in our break room.
  
  I had pencilled in Mr Abs for a consult later that day. Apparently, he acted as something of her bodyguard. He was a former NUSA military member, but he wasn't like special forces or anything, and he didn't have that many augmentations, either. I had just done a normal exotic biosculpt workup for him the first time, so he had fewer augmentations than she did, even.
  
  She was paying for him to get the same muscle and bone lace, ballistic skin weave and nanosurgeon organs that she had, but also a Smart-Gun link and one of my new specials, the entry-level Sandy. The last two were "technically" restricted cybernetics, like Sarah was wanting, but really most everyone would sell them to you with no problem. You got a lot more questions when you wanted to buy a Projectile Launch System or Mantis Blades, for example-especially the PLS.
  
  That would be a lot of augmentations to be added to someone at once, but he agreed to follow all of my post-operative care instructions and to meet a therapist of my choice every fifteen days for a month. I probably would not have agreed to implant a higher-tier Sandy than the Militech one immediately, but they had both baulked at the costs of a QianT unit anyway.
  
  I wasn't forcing him to get therapy; I just wanted the therapist to examine him and make sure he wasn't about to crack. Former NUSA Army idol-fans turned mercenary elves had to have a few issues, but he seemed remarkably stable in my brief exam of him.
  
  From what the elf-girl told me, the man I was after was kind of like a mafia poseur. He was mostly a legitimate "businessman", but he liked to pretend like he had a lot of connections to criminals, including hiring muscle to guard him and, apparently, try to burn down my fucking buildings. The elf said he was the type of guy who would yell, "Do you know who I am?!" I understood what she was trying to say immediately.
  
  So I was expecting some resistance tonight, but this was more on the nature of a friendly visit. Something like, "Sorry, I forgot to check my mail", while hanging him out of his thirtieth-floor window.
  
  I intended to scare him, send him a message, not kill him. As such, I was loaded with mostly less-lethal weapons, including a dart gun and anaesthesia grenades. Everyone got second chances, after all.
  
  I paid the cabby in cash and jogged a few more blocks to the tall building my target was in. It wasn't quite what I'd call a Megabuilding, but it was a Skyrise along the same idea, so I would have to approach this a little carefully. Anytime this many people were around, especially well-to-do ones like my target, it meant security.
  
  This wasn't a luxury highrise, though, it was more along the lines of a housing project like Megabuildings mostly were in Night City, but that didn't mean the security wouldn't be there. The Tyger Claws ran the security of my old place as tight as a drum, including sensors on every floor and autonomous drones circling the exterior.
  
  If I was smart, I would back away and get Kiwi's team on this. She'd spend a couple of days researching the gig and approach it systemically and safely. If I was still stuck in this one body, I would have definitely done that too. But I felt a little stifled lately and felt the risks were acceptable enough. I already had an idea of how to infiltrate the building after all.
  
  It was pretty simple, but there was no need to get really complicated. Someone wise once said that a good plan violently executed today was better than a perfect one next week. I hid next to the vehicle entrance to the garage, and finally, when a large panelled van was about to enter, I turned on my stealth system and ran out, hopping onto the bumper and riding it inside.
  
  Part of me started sending Pings to every networked device I found and trying to breach the local subnet. I was a poseur, but the security here wasn't great, so I was able to use my barely-above-script-kiddie abilities to piggyback each successful hack to the next one. I didn't turn off the cameras, as that might be noticed, but I turned each of them in unusual directions that created a blind spot as I ran up the stairs.
  
  The unusual feeling of being able to do all of this while I was still in full control of my body, running upstairs and on the lookout for any ambush, did make me feel very elite, though, just in a different way. How did regular people survive just being able to think about one thing at a time? How had I?! If I had to go back to that life, it would feel as though I was barely conscious!
  
  A level below his floor, I noticed that the security rapidly improved on all devices connected to this subnet, such that I had to stop, crouch and wait while I penetrated each of the cameras. It seemed that, as the foxy elf had surmised, he had the entire floor to himself. That would be insanity in a Megabuilding, but this place was a lot smaller. There were two loitering security drones on this floor, but they were of a cheap model. Not armed, and sensors that only included the near-visual. They wouldn't be able to see me.
  
  Next to his door was a large round table with three men sitting at it playing cards. I scoffed. This was straight out of a drama or something. The guards playing cards bit? I shook my head and inched closer, using my sixteen times gyro-stabilised zoom to examine each of them from half a floor away.
  
  Okay. Maybe they're stupidly playing cards, but these guys looked legitimately dangerous. One had an obvious PLS, another Mantis Blades, and the last had a giant blunderbuss-looking shotgun right next to him. I'd have to hit them in the head or neck with the dart gun, and I didn't know if I could reload it fast enough.
  
  This was, however, the perfect situation to use the great equaliser. No, not a Colt Peacemaker, but a grenade. As I got about four metres away from the table, I stilled. I had about two minutes left on my stealth system, which would be more than enough. I casually pulled the pin on my anaesthetic grenade and lobbed it in an easy, slow, underhanded toss aimed to land in the centre of the table, thinking to myself, ' I got the big blind this hand, boys.'
  
  However, instead of seeing the grenade land on the table and start billowing gas as I expected, I saw one of the men facing me on the table notice the grenade before it even reached the height of its parabola. His eyes locked onto it like one of those automatic CIWS turrets on a Naval ship, and he pushed off of his chair with speed that could only be the result of boostware.
  
  Instead of diving away, though, he deployed his Mantis blade and chopped the fucking grenade in half. I gaped. My anaesthetic grenade worked like traditional smoke grenades in that they required a pyrotechnic initiator, and this madman just essentially chopped the burning fuse before the fucking thing could get started. Before it was ignited, my "anaesthetic gas" was a fucking tightly packed powder that was slowly leaking from the diced polymer grenade onto the floor.
  
  Unless someone snorted it up like syn-cocaine, it wasn't going to be putting anybody to sleep. My hand dropped down to my dart pistol, pulling it free, but before I could aim it at the speedster, he grabbed a Big Hoss off the table and just flung the contents into my general direction. The Big Hoss was the largest-sized brand of fountain drink you could get from a particular convenience store, and this one was close to full. He had a good aim too, so I got drenched in the distinctive scent of my least favourite carbonated beverage. I was not tasting the love.
  
  The liquid covering me refracted my stealth field, distorting the air until I was more or less clearly visible as a wildly distorted outline of a human shape. This caused his two slow friends to start to cry out, but the guy with the boostware was already moving in my direction.
  
  Although he was moving about as fast as me, he was still too slow. Sucker! Just as I reached my aim point and started to squeeze the trigger, though, he grabbed his friend, the one whose back was facing me, and threw him in front of his body just as I fired the dart. It wasn't even the guy with the PLS, either.
  
  Shit. I immediately regretted trying to dunk on this guy preemptively, even if it was in my mind. I had done it twice, and I had been burned twice.
  
  I dropped the dart gun, not bothering trying to reload it and thought to myself, ' Alright, fuck non-lethal.' Instantly my monowire shot out, and I used some quick whip attacks to keep the demon at bay. I had to be careful, as he was trying to use both of his Mantis blades to cause my monowire to wrap around his blades and bind me up, so I couldn't use my normal one-handed whipping attacks and instead had to use precise scythe-like attacks.
  
  The slow but unfortunately conscious man with the missile launcher on his arm began the deliberate process of raising his arm in my direction, which caused the speedy motherfucker to grin evilly at me as if he knew he could keep me off guard until his friend could shoot a fucking missile at me.
  
  And he certainly tried, darting in and out, forcing me to spend considerable attention swiping at him with my wire, carefully using both hands to scythe out at him from unusual angles in an attempt to keep him off of me. But, at the same time, I was penetrating the other guy's system slowly with a Cyberware Malfunction quickhack. I only had Ping, Cyberware Malfunction, Reboot Optics and Short Circuit, the latter of which I had acquired from Kiwi when we were with the Bakkers.
  
  The unusual competence of at least one of my enemies made me realise how stupid I had been to come here. If I didn't have the ability to multitask, then their strategy of keeping me distracted and keeping myself from being turned into sashimi until chucklefuck over there gibbed me with his PLS would have likely worked.
  
  Before he got his cannon wrist even half raised, the quickhack settled in. The man froze, twitching, and the barrel of his PLS resecured itself into his arm while the little doors that usually hid the mechanism opened and closed repeatedly. Then, the man bent over with his hands over his head, probably either blind or seeing something psychedelic as his operating system glitched out. He was, for the moment, out of the fight.
  
  I slowed in my fight, waiting for Murderblender Junior's Sandy to wear off so I could sidestep him and either take his head off or disable him some other way. But when that didn't actually happen even after many objective seconds, he just started grinning wider.
  
  He didn't have a Sandevistan but a Kerenzikov like me. And one that was about as good as mine too. It was my first time meeting a fellow slow life appreciator; I just wish he didn't seem so murderous. I also really regretted not spending the time to perform the same upgrades on this QianT version boostware that I had on the old Type K-02. That might have given me an edge.
  
  The madman laughed wildly and attacked faster. I growled... this guy seemed crazier than a soup sandwich. My damn Disable Cyberware hack was still running on the other guy, and I didn't have the fancy ability to run multiple hacks in parallel like Kiwi did. I was also still pretty slow with Short Circuit, so I instead queued up a Reboot Optics while I fended him off with quick short motions with my monowire while backing up and giving ground.
  
  He was attacking just enough that I had to use both hands to control my monowire to keep him from getting much closer or wrapping my wire around one of his blades. Otherwise, I would have pulled out my Omaha pistol and popped him in the head by now.
  
  The instant the hack finished uploading, I sidestepped to the left while beginning an upload of Short Circuit to the other man. I anticipated that Mantis Blades would lash out, and I wasn't wrong. He leapt straight at the location I was at previously, flying past me with hands and blades splaying wildly. I hesitated for less than a second.
  
  I had intended to subdue all these guys non-lethally, as this was just supposed to be a "friendly message" to a wannabe gangster, but this guy was just too dangerous. I also thought he was a cyberpsycho, so I lashed out with my left hand and quickly and cleanly took off about two-thirds of his skull from his shoulders, most of his skull and its contents plopping onto the ground with a sick wet sound.
  
  I wanted to sigh, but I didn't have enough time; I ran forward and grabbed the dart gun off the ground about the time the short circuit caused sparks to fly out of the arms and head of the last man standing, with the horribly familiar pork-like smell of cooking human flesh. Wincing, I quickly loaded the dart gun and popped the last man in the neck, which caused him to slump to the ground almost instantly.
  
  I slowly reeled my monowire into my arm as I just sat there panting. That was the most dangerous guy I had ever fought. Finally, I turned off my stealth system, as it was starting to get close to the time when it would automatically shut down for heat control.
  
  I would wait until this was all over to be thoroughly introspective about where I had fucked up, but I felt the main problem was that I both snuck too close to the enemies, and I tossed the grenade too close to them. "Close enough" worked for horseshoes, grenades and nuclear weapons. I could have tossed it so that he would never have a chance to intercept it, but I just never in my wildest dreams thought he would chop it in half or that would work.
  
  If I had tossed the grenade from ten metres away, I would have had time to pull out my Omaha and pop the speedster as he rushed me instead of being forced to use the quicker deploying monowire to keep him at bay.
  
  Should I just leave now? I frowned. The danger level was pretty high. No, I would continue. Chances are that these three were just a fluke.
  
  I walked over to the target's door, seeing an impressive array of security devices that caused my eyebrows to raise. I softly rapped at the door with my knuckles, testing it. Solid steel. Very difficult to get through, and I wasn't actually a cat burglar either, despite my go of it with the cameras in this building.
  
  I pulled a small device off my belt. I had begun adding little utility devices that I thought would be useful, so long as they were small, compact and lightweight. To be honest, the idea of having a "utility belt" made me giddy. I was sure I didn't have a tenth of the things Armsmaster had, but still...
  
  I held the small box, which had a penetrating radar transceiver inside of it, over the door and nodded. Completely solid. I sidestepped the door and held the device over the wall. Just drywall, as I thought. I was getting enough radar returns from inside the room that I was pretty sure that no one was waiting to ambush me in the first room, too.
  
  Replacing the scanner on my utility belt, I sighed. I know I often think this lately, but most people are stupid. I tried to keep a lid on these thoughts because thinking I was vastly superior to normal people wasn't really good for my mental health, even if it was true, but I saw signs of this fact every day.
  
  Like, for example, spending loads of money on a security door and placing the door in a housing project where the walls are paper-thin. I shook my head and reached up to my breast, and yanked down on my Kendachi Vibroknife, pulling it free from its hilt-down sheath on my chest.
  
  I had yet to try this thing, so I squeezed the button on the hilt and immediately could hear a humming start ratcheting up, slowly increasing until it got high enough frequency that it popped my ears. Nodding, self-satisfied, I carved a rough door-shaped hole into the drywall and thin aluminium studs of the wall about a metre from the security door. Deactivating the knife, I resheathed it and casually used a little bit of my strength to push. The drywall fell inwards, crushing some knickknacks the guy had arranged on his coffee table.
  
  The time for stealth had passed with the loud crunching of his knickknacks. It was time for speed and violence of action now. Hopefully, the target didn't have any more guards inside, but if he did, I would need to rush them. I leapt through the hole in the wall, dart gun in hand, yelling loudly, "Surprise, motherfucker!"
  
  The target was kind enough to yell, "What the fuck?!" in another room, so I knew where he was and instantly began running in that direction. It looked like he had a large penthouse here and was in the master bedroom. I turned the corner and skidded to a halt at what I saw.
  
  What I saw caused me to slowly holster the dart pistol and, without further thought, strike out with my left hand. I deployed my monowire in a tricky one-handed lasso that snaked around the neck of the target and popped his head off like the cork in a champagne bottle.
  
  This caused a high-pitched squeal of fright, which caused me to shake my head. Fuck. I had scared her. I should have taken the guy in the next room and then killed him, but it was instinct. I quickly grabbed both parts of the man and carried him and his severed head out of the room and back into the living room.
  
  Glancing back at the master bedroom, I hopped back through the hole into the wall and back into the hallway. I casually pulled out my trusty Militech M-76e Omaha, took careful aim and put a copper-coated steel slug through the heads of the two surviving guards before ducking back inside the apartment.
  
  Stoically, I walked back into the master bedroom and ignored the cries of fright. I was a little scared sometimes, after all, so it wasn't weird for a little girl to be frightened of me.
  
  "I'm not going to hurt you," I said in as calm a voice as I could manage as I gathered what appeared to be the girl's clothes, my warehouse and the initial reason for coming here now totally forgotten.
  
  You know, I had been wrong. Only some people deserved second chances.
  
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  Tinker, Taylor, Entrepreneur, Spy
  I had gauged the girl's age, factoring in her signs of malnutrition, at approximately twelve years and three months. However, she looked a bit younger than that due to the aforementioned nutrition issues. Nevertheless, after she realised I wasn't going to murder her, which took a fair bit of cajoling, she quieted down and seemed remarkably at ease now in the man's kitchen as I made her a sandwich.
  
  So at ease that, for an instant, I was worried that I had made a bit of a mistake. Could this twelve-year-old girl be an adult sculpted to appear as a pubescent child? That did happen sometimes. Perhaps her being tied up was some manner of consensual kink, too. I knew such things happened and would be considered mild.
  
  It was a bit of a trope, but in my experience running a successful biosculpt clinic for eighteen months, it was mostly true to say that every girl under eighteen wanted to look older while every woman older than eighteen wanted to look younger. Some of them wanted to look younger than eighteen, even.
  
  I sometimes acquiesced to these requests if they were reasonable, but I had a bottom line. I would never convert someone to a pubescent bodymorph. Beyond the obvious "ickiness", there was an actual cost to the mental health of the person. Regression was a positive symptom of many mental illnesses, and reinforcing it wasn't a good idea.
  
  That said, I definitely knew there were clinics that had absolutely no scruples at all. They'd do this, create doppelgängers of real people, the works. For example, I heard in China that a man got his brain transplanted into a specially-created tiger body, which Biotechnica created as a custom job through partially-humanised stem cells for a ridiculous sum.
  
  He was the warlord of some area and occasionally would just eat some peasant. Talk about cyberpsychosis... wait, wouldn't that be tigerpsychosis?
  
  I shook my head. Well, there was no way I was wrong. There were way too many signs of the girl having lived and grown up in the body she was in for a long time. I saw that immediately when seeing her, and that was what made me kill the guy.
  
  Although, perhaps it wasn't good to have an instinctual murder reaction. Sounded kind of psychotic, in fact. I should have killed him after careful consideration, not as an instinct. I'd think about that, but as far as the girl was concerned, I was just second-guessing myself now due to the way she was effectively handling trauma, which might have implied this wasn't the first time she had been abused. Or maybe she just had a more generally shitty childhood.
  
  Now, what to do? I blushed, embarrassed. I didn't want to call Kiwi to bring her team and a van around because I would get, rightfully, lectured. I could just leave. I could find out where the girl lived and take her there.
  
  But there was a fair bit of loot here. A few weeks ago, I probably wouldn't have cared, but I had either spent or budgeted about two point seven five million Eurodollars already for my product launch. The components for the ten thousand sleep inducer units cost about two hundred per unit, and I was budgeting about twenty-five to sixty Eurodollars for all the overhead to assemble and market them.
  
  Some of that was me paying myself for rent, as my sleep-inducer company, Cherry Limited, paid myself rent as I sublet the second story entirely to them. There were a lot of things like that where the left hand paid the right, most of which were for tax avoidance purposes.
  
  "What are you going to do now, lady?" the kid asked in a slightly British accent. I was kind of curious, as besides the fact that it made her seem like something out of a Dickens novel, immigration across the world wasn't too common, "Is it okay to just stay here after you flatlined everybody?" She asked the last question pointedly.
  
  I held my hand up and made a waffling gesture, "Nobody called the cops." Part of the end-user agreement that the city issued for my ownership and operation of military-grade drones was that I had to give the LAPD a feed on all of my surveillance drones. In exchange, I got a feed for their encrypted police band and could use it as kind of a real time police blotter. No officers had been dispatched to this building in the past forty-eight hours.
  
  I had taken the guards out pretty quickly. The entire fight lasted twenty-nine seconds of objective time. The speedster could have gotten the word out to someone, but he seemed a bit far gone. The rest were either unconscious or had their implants disabled pretty quickly. I still had control of most of the cameras in the building, so I just figured I could watch the exterior and parking garage. If I saw a huge amount of scary guys show up, I'd grab the kid and run.
  
  The girl nodded. Her pockets were already full with the jewellery the guy was wearing and had in his bedroom as well as a small low-calibre pistol that she had stolen from his pocket. The fact that I had let her keep it did a lot to convince her I didn't mean any harm. Since then, her eyes had been darting around for easily salable items that she could cart off. I hadn't stopped her. I sighed, tossing the keyshard of the guy's small sports car up and down in my palm. It was a roadster that barely had a trunk, "If only I had a van, I could cart most of this stuff away."
  
  The girl got a cunning look on her face, "You're going to rob him blind after assassinating him? Preem. How much is all this crap worth? A couple of thou?" she glanced around at the apartment. It wasn't really furnished super luxuriously, merely nicely, and I suspected that this wasn't actually where the man lived full-time. The master bedroom looked more set up for his particular brand of "recreation" than for rest.
  
  "I didn't intend to assassinate him; it just sort of turned out that way," I grumbled, and it was true too. Nevertheless, some self-reflection might be in order. If I had wanted to assassinate him, I would have taken his guards down hard or bypassed them. It would have been a lot easier, plus I would have carried entirely different weapons and tools. But most importantly, I would have had backup.
  
  It would have been a lot less trouble, was the main point, though. I continued and said, "I'm not sure. There's a safe I haven't opened yet. You got most of his jewellery. The real value is in the cybernetics in him and his guards. All of them have quite a bit, maybe eighty to ninety thousand dollars in value if they were sold at MSRP."
  
  "Eighty grand?!" the gaki exclaimed in shock. Then she got a cunning look on her face, "Half. Fifty per cent and turn off this jammer, and I can get you a van in five minutes. If I could access the net, my gang would already be here!"
  
  Wait, there was a jammer installed and operating? I hadn't noticed as I used one of the Haywire comm units in my cyberbrain to access the net. It was both faster, providing a direct connection to my fibre-optic connection at home, as well as not radiating any emissions. The controls over my operating system's subfunctions were a lot more intuitive and natural-feeling on this MoorE cyberbrain than they had been in my Biotech Sigma operating system.
  
  There, you had to navigate a bunch of graphical user interfaces to change settings. However, here, turning on the full electronics suite felt like mentally relaxing a muscle, and I nodded. The near-field frequencies were working so I could control the television and refrigerator and send the girl files if I wanted, but all of the longer-range net bands were awash in a pervasive white static.
  
  "Firstly, no way. I'm the one who flatlined all those gonks. I did all the work; you don't look like you could flatline a mouse," I told the girl, who looked outraged, placing her hands on her hips and looking as though she might princess stomp any second, her freckled outrage reminding me of Pippi Longstockings sans any long stockings. I countered, "Ten per cent, and only of what I'll get for them, which is probably about half. Plus, you can loot whatever else you want from this place, minus what's in the safe."
  
  She countered with twenty-five, which amused me. I was honestly not too attached to any of this stuff and was just playing around. Granted, it was just a shame to lose some money when I had been spending so much lately. She had a final offer of "Twenty per cent! And we get to take his car!"
  
  I rolled my eyes, "If he has any friends, they'll track it down and murder you." Even I wasn't going to bother stealing it. Maybe I would have in Night City, where I could lean on the Tyger Claws who could help me dispose of it, but I didn't have the same relationship with the local triad, which called itself a Tong for some reason.
  
  "Don't be daft, lady; it'll be in bits before the night is through," she said, eyeing me curiously.
  
  Well, forgive me for not making the correct assumption that a little girl had access to a chop shop. I just tossed the shard at her and then followed my radio direction finder to home in on the jamming source. It was a small device inside the pocket of the headless pervert. I turned it off, then called out, "It's off. And if you have a so-called gang, how'd this guy get you? Nobody watching your back, girl?" I paused and said, "Oh, and by the way. If your gang are a bunch of wreckers, I'll flatline them and then break your leg."
  
  I eyed her; she didn't rush out of the hole in the wall now that she had an accessible mode of transportation and egress, anyway. She snorted, "I don't really wanna talk about that. You can just put it down to me being stupid." When I threatened her hypothetical gang, she sounded exasperated and yelled back, "Wreckers? You're the one who zeroed all of these gonks and is talking about ripping all of their chrome out, lady!" Well, touché, brat, touché.
  
  I ducked back outside the apartment through the hole in the wall and nodded. There was a wireless signal for the net and phones here, but it was still degraded. I glanced around. The man's apartment was large and had taken up maybe a quarter of the floor here, obviously being built from a number of smaller apartments that had been combined. I wondered what was in the other rooms. Maybe they were empty, or they were rooms for his goons? Moving at my normal speed, not the slowed-down speed I usually used to walk and interact with objects around people so as not to startle them, I used the penetrating radar to look into each of the rooms. They were mostly empty. So, he just didn't want anyone around him, I guessed.
  
  There weren't four more borged-out cyberpsychos taking a nap in there, though, which was what I was suddenly concerned about. I took anything of value in the dead guy's pockets and all of their guns and headed back inside, tossing them on the table, except for the large shotgun, which I just leaned against the wall.
  
  Walking back into the bedroom, I pulled out my personal link from the back of my neck and plugged it into the diagnostics port on the safe mounted into the wall. The Breach Protocol went quickly, as it wasn't actually my cyberdeck performing the hacking procedure. I had my personal link, interface sockets and even my wireless radios connected, via an entangled communicator, to a large, powerful computer back in my laboratory. The system was air-gapped, not connected to the net and had as much security as I could buy and stuff into it. It acted as a high-security bastion node wired, with instantaneous communications, between my implants and the world.
  
  Honestly, it kind of made my Zetatech personal ICE system superfluous. I could still turn it off and connect to the world directly as before, just in case someone bombed my laboratory, but why would I? I would like to, perhaps, completely change out my cyberdeck for a system like this, too, eventually. Perhaps, do away with an obvious cyberdeck installation and connect to everything with my "deck back home." My deck back home which was actually a high-powered computing cluster.
  
  It would have helped my quickhacks earlier, for example, if all of the heavy-duty computation was run on my "cloud" instead of in my brain. It would make the need for heat dissipation unnecessary, too, although I almost never deep-dived in the first place.
  
  A few minutes later, I had the safe open. Inside was a stack of currency, a half-dozen datashards, a loaded Comrade's Hammer and about a kilogram and a half of drugs. The latter didn't look like anything interesting, although I had stopped the practice of tasting a minute amount in order for my toxicology subsystem on my internal biomonitor to identify it, as I often did in Night City.
  
  For one, my curiosity wasn't there anymore, and for two, a lot of these substances were amazingly toxic, even in small doses. You'd think that recreational drug sellers would want their customers to survive long enough to buy their products more than two or three times. So, I took everything except the drugs out of the safe, and then locked them back up. Afterwards, I uploaded a self-adaptive virus that Kiwi had given me onto the safe's firmware, which caused the whole thing to blink and then go completely dark.
  
  Damn. I was hoping it would spark and smoke would come out. It looked cooler when that happened. Either way, it was bricked now in the locked position. I just wanted to make sure that this girl's friends wouldn't get it, as who knows? They might have a runner that could crack the safe easier than I did. Probably not anymore, though. I didn't want to encourage either drug use or the drug trade in the little girl I saved.
  
  There was about twenty grand in cash, which I shoved in my pocket. The data shards contained mostly encrypted data, but a few had some money on them, amounting to another twenty grand or so, which I sat aside. If this was Elflines Online or World of Heroes, this would have started a quest series where I could use this discovered information to probably track down some sort of child abuse ring or human trafficking ring. But I just wasn't about that.
  
  Besides the fact that the shards all appeared to be encrypted, and breaking encryption was not easy, I wasn't actually a superhero. How could I live in this world if I was? My philosophy was that there was so much injustice in this world that if I made it my mission to stop all of it, then I wouldn't have time for anything else. I had long-term goals of improving the quality of life for all of mankind, not merely punishing evildoers.
  
  That said if I went about my business and saw you doing great evil right in front of me? Like Mr Headless over there? Well, it would cause me indigestion if I didn't try to smite you. I wanted to live a carefree life, in so much as that was even possible.
  
  But... maybe the cops would learn something from them. So, instead of keeping all of the encrypted datashards, I just tossed them onto the kitchen table so the cops could find them. Of course, I doubted very much the LAPD would do anything with them when they finally investigated this murder scene, but I had been surprised before.
  
  It wasn't my job to investigate crimes, and I wasn't taking on their responsibility onto my shoulders just because I killed this guy, so I didn't feel wrong about not being Quixotic about it. I had far more enormous windmills to joust, anyway. So the cops, or maybe the little girl's gang, could have the pleasure of those shards, depending on who picked them up.
  
  Speak of the devil... I saw a van that at one point might have been white but now was more primer-coloured drive into the building's parking garage and parked right next to the stairs I used, not even in a valid parking space. Raising my eyebrows, I saw a gaggle of about ten children about the same age as the girl I saved to get out of it.
  
  It was pretty comical. It wasn't quite at the level of three children in a trenchcoat, but it wasn't too far off from there, either, as I saw a couple of pillows used as a booster seat on the driver's side when they opened the door. The gremlins were armed with an eclectic seat of mostly improvised weapons, although the two leading the way each had an awful BudgetArms submachine gun. Bad choice; the recoil on those plastic pieces of crap was insane, even for a full-grown man.
  
  "Brat, your friends are coming up the stairs. I can see them on the surveillance cams. You should tell them if they point their guns at me, I will shoot them," I warned the girl. I wouldn't, actually-unless this gang was literally made up entirely of Damien-childes and were children of the corn. Even then, I would feel really bad about it.
  
  Almost instantly, the two brats in the lead froze and were very careful to point the muzzles of their weapons at the floor instead of imitating a make-believe tactical assault as they climbed the stairs. I wanted to laugh as they barely got ten floors up before they were huffing and puffing. They should have taken the elevator. Amused, I asked the girl, "What's the name of your gang? The Baker Street Irregulars ?"
  
  I would lose it if they all had little British accents like she did. Although, wouldn't that paint me as Holmes to her Wiggin? I supposed there were much worse people from literature to compare yourself to, but I wasn't about to start smoking opium and solving murders, either.
  
  "Huh? No... we don't have a name, lady," the girl said, confused, which I ignored. To me, they were the Irregulars now.
  
  The Comrade's Hammer was a bit too big to put in my pocket. It was a pistol about the size of a heavy-duty sawed-off shotgun and three times as dangerous, but I found a small bag to stuff it into. I wasn't bothering with the other weapons I found here or took from the dead men. The Irregulars could keep them. Hopefully, they'd grow their armoury and throw away that BudgetArms piece of crap.
  
  The eight children arrived shortly thereafter, and they were careful enough not to point their guns at me, but they clearly didn't trust me. Their reunion with the little girl was emotional, and for once, I saw some genuine emotion from her, including tears welling up as she hugged several of them.
  
  The leader, a boy of about the same age, walked up and said to me bravely, "We brought the van."
  
  I nodded, "Alright. Let's take the elevator back down this time, eh? You guys can have anything I left in this apartment, but I wouldn't stick around here for longer than a few hours."
  
  There was a brief conference, and during this time, I grabbed a vacuum cleaner and quickly vacuumed up all of the powder from my earlier grenade. There was no reason to leave any of that around for inspection later, and I doubted anyone would be checking inside the vacuum's trash bag.
  
  Half of the children stayed behind to loot the place, including one child that looked like he had a thirty or forty-year-old external portable cyberdeck. The kind you saw back in the 2020s before the DataKrash. That caused me to stop in my tracks and stare at it. It had a faded SGI logo on it. Wow, that was an antique. The kid saw me looking and looked defensive, his eyes immediately going to my brand-new-looking cyberdeck on my neck as if I was judging him, "It-it's not that bad!"
  
  I shook my head, "Is it stock inside?"
  
  "I mean... for now!" he said, still defensively, "But I'm gonna tots upgrade it!"
  
  Good, he hadn't ruined it yet! "Don't! That's an antique. A collectable, even. Bring it to me after all of this is over, and I'll trade you a..." I paused, considering what I had in stock, "A brand-new mid-level Tetratronic or Fuyutsuki Electronics cyberdeck. Including the installation fees." The kid was about thirteen. He was a little young for a cyberdeck, but he already had an OS and optics like the girl I had saved. I wasn't one to judge, as NC-Taylor got one when she was only fifteen. My wholesale price for those cyberdecks was about seven grand, and both retailed for ten, so I was serious about wanting to buy this collectable. I would restore it and then give it to Kiwi as a birthday present. It was an Elysia. They say this was the same model of deck that the infamous Rache Bartmoss used to destroy the Old Net, so it was weird to see one around. They really were collectable and sold for sometimes more than ten thousand when they randomly appeared on the market.
  
  He gaped and nodded rapidly. After that, I loaded the dead bodies onto the elevator, and we travelled down to the garage. The drive back to my clinic was uneventful, and I directed him to the loading area in the back instead of my patient parking lot. I said, "I already know what this doc will give me for all of this stuff, which is about fifty thousand." I was lying; there was no way I would buy this stuff for more than thirty per cent of its MSRP, as it was both used and also sourced from a dead body and not a living patient.
  
  Still, I pulled out the twenty thousand in hard cash I had taken from the safe, counted out one-hundred bills and handed them to the girl I saved, "As agreed. Bye, now! Tell that kid with the deck he can come exchange it here any time he wants. Run back to that apartment, get your friends and leave ASAP," I advised them.
  
  About fifteen minutes later, Sarah, the elf-girl, walked into one of my operating rooms, saying, "Your receptionist said you were in here and not with a patie-" she trailed off, seeing that I was performing an autopsy, or rather a pathological removal of cybernetics, from the headless pervert. She must have recognised him. Oops. She said, " What the fuck?! I just told you about him an hour ago!"
  
  Haha, how amusing. She lost all of the ethereal elf personality and snooty vocal tone she affected when she got flustered.
  
  I watched the elf's stream for the first time because it was going to be the first time she was going to be advertising my product. After she got over my rapid termination of that "real estate investor", she was amazed at the product, and I had let her take a prototype home.
  
  It was hard to argue against a product that reduced the sleep a person needed from eight hours to two and a half to three and also caused you to fall asleep instantly. Of course, you could nap with it, too, but at the same time, it was only one of the longer two or three-hour cycles that your physical rest and hormone balancing occurred.
  
  I was considering performing an RCT and writing a study about its effects, but I would need to ask for assistance from Cedar-Sinai to help navigate the IRB process for conducting human experiments. It wasn't a big deal, and it was easy to get approval... too easy, perhaps, given the nature of some medical papers I've read, but I had never done it before.
  
  Sarah had wanted to go further than merely a pay-for-endorsement deal after a couple of nights using the device. She wanted that, too, of course, but she also convinced me to create a "Special, Limited Edition Vixen Version." It was the same electronics repackaged into a case that looked like a tiara made of a garland of flowers instead of a normal BD wreath.
  
  It was weird, I hadn't used to be so artistically inclined, but if I used both of my brains together, I managed to create something quite aesthetically pleasing while still retaining enough space inside to hold all of the electronics. It was like some of the areas of my cognition had expanded since I had started my network. I had numbered each of the limited editions from one to five hundred, and Vixen was going to sign each of them.
  
  They'd retail for double the price as the normal unit, or €2,000, and Vixen said I could have charged even more. She'd get twenty-five per cent of the sales from these limited editions in addition to her standalone fee for endorsing the product. She sat aside twenty of them for viewer giveaways, too, which I took the hit for.
  
  Her net show was... not what I would consider entertaining, but she certainly had a lot of people watching her. A few of them revolted and called her a sell-out when she started advertising my wares because who would want to buy an electronic sleep inducer? She was quite stern with these followers, though, and told them it was something new, explaining that she had been using one every day for two weeks and only needed to sleep two or three hours a day without any of the side effects that one normally associated with this tech.
  
  People were a bit suspicious, but a lot of people said they would buy it just because she signed it, even if it didn't work. That made me suspicious at first, but then I gaped as notification after notification came in from my net site. In less than an hour, over half of the limited edition units were already sold. That was five hundred thousand dollars sitting in my company's incoming account, more when you considered shipping fees and an easy one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollar fee that I instantly owed the elf.
  
  Maybe a twenty-five per cent cut was too much for her limited editions. Well, too late for that now. At least I only produced a limited number. It would be worth it if it got inducers on the heads of people who could then tell their friends and family on social media how they weren't pieces of shit.
  
  Looking at the stage of orders me and my employees had to fulfil... Well, it was time to get to work, I supposed.
  
  I had sold out of the initial production run in a little over a month, which was great. It surprised me! Using some of the proceeds, I bought three properties near me, including one directly next door to my clinic, from the estate of an amateur real estate investor that had gone missing and been declared dead. It was a good deal, but the price was still two times more than I would have paid before I started gentrifying the area.
  
  On the plus side, I didn't pay all cash, either, but I managed to get financing for all of them. It was a simple decision for both me and the bank, as we both felt their value was only going to rise in the future, and I needed my liquidity now. I only needed to use my own money for the down payment. Commercial lending had a lot less usurious interest rates than consumer lending, but it still amounted to over eight per cent interest a year, but there were no prepayment penalties, so I expected to actually pay them off far sooner than the twenty-year term.
  
  My own landlord tried hiking the rent I was paying, and I just threatened to leave, so instead, I bought my property as well. The company that sold it to me was happy because they had made a profit on the investment, even if it wasn't as much as they could have gotten if they could have coerced me into paying the inflated rent. But since I was the one who was gentrifying the area, not them, they thought my threats to take my ball and go home were credible.
  
  I also hired some more employees and bought enough components to assemble twenty thousand units this time. One of my chip fab suppliers offered to give me a discount if I brought all of the work under their umbrella, but I declined. Although there was no way to keep the electronic design of the system secret for long, as they could just be disassembled, there was no reason to rush it.
  
  My suppliers were the first ones to know I had items that were selling a lot, though, as they had to fulfil my orders, so that triggered some of my contingency planning. I surprised my Militech rep with a purchase order that doubled the amount of combat and surveillance drones I owned, and I wasn't done. I also hired, for the first time, direct Militech military aid, but at the moment, it was limited to one squad in an MRAP that would make a patrol around my area once every two hours on an irregular schedule, dispatching any very obvious armed ne'er-do-wells they saw. It was still expensive but cheap compared to them permanently being on-site.
  
  After careful consideration, I called my Arasaka rep, who was in Tokyo. They had the best price-for-features of bipedal humanoid combat robots.
  
  " Hasumi-sensei, it is pleasant to hear from you again. Do you need some more Smart-Link interfaces today?" the man politely asked after answering the call. He appeared wide awake despite the fact that I knew he was based in Japan, and I figured he probably ran on a North American sleep schedule and serviced mostly clients in this continent and South America. Probably more in South America than North, actually, as all of the products he shipped came from there when they were eventually delivered to me.
  
  "Not today. I'm interested in purchasing three squads of Raijin Mk2 combat security bots. My firm has begun manufacturing electronics on a small scale, and I definitely need to upgrade my security. My present security systems can't go in and out of buildings and are purely for exterior defence," I said simply. The Militech drones were very effective, but they were solely for exterior defence and patrol. They used anti-gravity technology to hover around, and that was still incredibly bulky. For all of that high technology, they were pretty cheap... probably because anti-gravity was still a very clunky technology. And they were only cheap as combat drones went, anyway. Each unit cost forty grand.
  
  His eyebrows rose appreciably, " Certainly. I wish we could have gotten your business in the entirety, but given your present location it is, perhaps, not surprising. But you're right to call us; we are the market leader in humanoid robotics." I wasn't sure about that, but they were definitely the market leader in humanoid combat robots, especially for the cost. Still, this would cost a fortune no matter how reasonable their costs were. I also couldn't have called them first because they couldn't have gotten me an end-user certificate for armed robots, but now that I had that, I could field any number or type of robots that weighed under a ton each.
  
  It wasn't technically illegal for me to buy them, either. Theoretically, the man I was speaking to didn't work for Arasaka, and the products would all be delivered by third parties who, putatively, were the sellers. It was a figleaf, though. My rep looked happy, probably at the large sale, " We have a number of current-generation models in our warehouses in Colombia right now. We could get them to you within a week or two at the most, I suspect. Three squads would be ten units each, plus all charging stations and peripherals. Do you need individual arms for them?"
  
  I nodded rapidly. I had some guns, but not enough to outfit a rump platoon of robots, " Yes, please. The standard HJSH-10 Nowaki for each, plus four spares." The Arasaka had replaced the Nowaki in front-line service with its newer HJSH-18 Masamune assault rifle about a decade ago, but the Masamune was expensive. I didn't want to buy three dozen of them. The Nowaki was almost as good and, moreover, cheap. I thought about it and realised I didn't have a Masamune, and it would look pretty good on the wall for sale in my pharmacy. Arasaka goods were sometimes sold for a premium since they were technically banned, " And throw in four Masamunes, too. And at least twenty-five thousand rounds of ammunition and five magazines for each weapon." The ammunition I could buy here, but I might as well include it as well.
  
  I winced at the price but paid it, including the insurance on the shipment, which wasn't insubstantial. The Arasaka rep smiled, " I'm glad you called now. It is getting difficult trans-shipping arms into North America since President Kress has begun widespread sabre-rattling. I don't believe I would have been able to fulfil this order in a month... I certainly wouldn't have offered to sell you insurance on it then."
  
  Sabre rattling? I didn't actually keep up with the news too much, as it was all fake, but I started to think that was a mistake. " Sabre rattling? What is going on? Is it anything more than the usual denigrating of the Free States that she always does this time of year?" President Kress had been the dictator of the New United States for forty years. Since the last Corporate War, and she did have a pattern of making speeches excoriating the Western states almost annually.
  
  He raised an eyebrow, " Surely you know about the algae that are on almost every coast in the world by now? That it makes fuel?" I nodded slowly, " Then it shouldn't be surprising that coasts have suddenly become much more valuable commodities. Arasaka Corporation has already unveiled a first-generation drone harvester, and other firms are no doubt rushing to do the same. The west coast of the NUSA has two thousand kilometres of harvestable coastline. It's not surprising the NUSA wants it under its control. I'm surprised they haven't invaded Mexico yet." The last, he said amusedly. He seemed very pleased with this situation, and I realised why when he finished with, " For once fate, or rather whoever made and released these algae, smiles on us small island states, eh Hasumi-sensei?"
  
  Oh. Yeah. I mean, I hadn't forgotten that. Honest! Nor had I not realised the significance. But yeah... I could see why this sabre-rattling might be a little less sabre-rattling and a little more sabre-unsheathing this time. I hadn't thought about it because I assumed the algae was mostly going to benefit Corps. But I had intentionally designed it to grow in territorial waters, partly in order so the Corps had to give nation-states a little bit of a cut. It wasn't then surprising that the NUSA was attempting to maximise that. I just hadn't thought that anything I could do could have such widespread consequences, even if that was exactly what I was going for.
  
  I was quiet for a moment, thinking. From what I've read in Dr Hasumi's diaries, her opinion of Arasaka Corporation was... complicated. As a Japanese nationalist, she approved of a Japanese Corporation being a "world power" as it was, but she didn't particularly like how it almost destroyed the nation in the last corporate war, nor how Saburo Arasaka almost acted like a second Emperor. Still, all of that was merely internal grumblings.
  
  She would have absolutely supported them against any foreign Corp or nation, so I decided to mention a little primary-source intelligence, " That must explain why I am selling so many combat augmentations, many times a day, to mercenaries whom my Militech sales rep informed me Militech was hiring. I'm pretty sure the other clinics in Southern California are no different."
  
  The rep nodded slowly, " Thank you for that tidbit. I'll make sure the right people get told." He coughed, "Well, I have to go." He bowed formally, " Thank you very much for your business. We appreciate it."
  
  Ahh... I had reached the "bow tier" of sales. Nice. I had spent enough. I had Dr Hasumi reciprocate politely.
  
  My laboratory looked empty, and it was because a lot of my equipment was gone, including Kumo-kun. I had taken him with me, along with my Taylor Hebert body, and was currently repeating my arrival to LA in reverse. I had arranged to return to Night City with the same family of Nomads that had brought me here.
  
  I had to finally come clean, at least partially, to both Kiwi and Gloria, who were a little discombobulated about it. I mean, they would realise something was up when Taylor Hebert showed back up in Night City after all. I had not really answered any of their questions about it, merely saying that they could treat both people as me after swearing them to secrecy. I was pretty sure that they thought I had just cloned myself, which I had, I supposed.
  
  Cloning a body was not a novel technology, but cloning a body with a brain that wasn't blank was. Even that was way too disruptive of technology, so I didn't want it mentioned anywhere. It was something that Biotechnica might be able to do, but if so, they weren't advertising it.
  
  There were the perennial rumours of Soulkiller, but if Arasaka had that as the rumours said, I was sure they didn't presently have the ability to neuron-by-neuron and axon-by-axon overwrite a cloned brain with the copy of the brain that Soulkiller created. If they had, I would have heard about it, I was sure.
  
  There would be some additional factors to the rumours on the Dark Web. Rumours beyond that Soulkilled people became AIs that controlled the world from the shadows, from behind the Blackwall.
  
  Kiwi was planning to stay here in LA. She had more responsibilities at my company, and she even added another team member who was a former officer in the NUSA military. I think he got discharged as a first lieutenant for punching out a superior officer, but since they only forced him out and didn't give him a Dishonorable Discharge or even a Big Chicken Dinner, they had to have agreed with his decision. It was just that you had to know striking your CO in front of your men meant your days in the Army were done. I frowned, as that was all NC-Taylor memories giving me that insight.
  
  The fact that she got a team member with proven small-unit leadership credentials, credentials that she lacked, meant that she was pretty confident in her team, her leadership, and her position. I thought it was quite a good thing, personally.
  
  He was now her second-in-command and most often worked detached duty here for me. None of her team were employees, but they were listed as contractors and consultants. The main change was that the quality of the jobs they took on the side rose a notch. The risk profile was the same, generally, but they often were hired by other firms around town instead of just drug-addled gangbangers and seedy fixers like Ruslan's team had mainly worked for.
  
  An alert informing me that I had a pending appointment in a few minutes brought me out of my reverie, and I left the third floor and went down to the ground floor and into my office. Pulling up my calendar, I frowned. This was a meeting I had been worried about a little. I didn't know who this person was, but they insisted on a meeting and claimed they represented a large corporation and couldn't discuss the reason for their meeting or even identify their employer over the open air.
  
  Had someone finally come to try to pressure me for my business? It seemed about that time. I didn't expect anything for the first ten-thousand unit roll-out, but the sleep inducer was starting to make a few waves, generating rave reviews and going viral a couple of times in a small way on the local SoCal subnet.
  
  If so, I wouldn't be the pushover this time. I had accepted less than an ennie on the eddie in terms of my pharmaceutical product, but this was even more lucrative. The product was a license to print money, at least until everyone on the planet had one anyway. I would only accept a payout in the billions of Eurodollars for it.
  
  I mean, if they dropped a mechanised battalion on my clinic and put a gun under my nose, well, I would do the smart thing and take their offer, but I expected the standard lowball offer, threat, and slowly escalating violence. My actions would depend on who these guys represented, I supposed.
  
  They were escorted into my office, and I raised an eyebrow. They were both Japanese, a man and a woman, wearing mid-tier suits. Nice, but off the rack, for sure. They were both fit and tall, and my eyebrow rose because the man was... well, the first thought that came to mind was gorgeous, but I didn't typically describe anyone that way, even if they were. The woman was very similar, too.
  
  I had my internal biomonitor run a self-diagnostic. Were these guys using pheromone-based social warfare on me? No?... That just meant that my biom couldn't detect it, I guessed. It was several years old by now, so it couldn't be expected to detect everything these days. I narrowed my eyes in suspicion slightly as we both took our seats.
  
  "Thank you for agreeing to meet with us, Hasumi-san. I am Tanaka Yuki, this is Toyoda Yui," the man said in Japanese, which made me curious too. A Japanese Corp? Secrecy? Arasaka, perhaps? That was my first thought, anyway. But why an in-person appearance when they could be strung up for just being on the continent?
  
  I nodded politely, " Of course. Although I very nearly did not. I am a bit too busy these days to take meetings where both the parties and subject are not disclosed in advance. Forgive my bluntness, but what is this about?"
  
  He coughed and said, "I suppose there is no reason to beat around the bush any further. We're with Arasaka Intelligence and have some requests of you. We know you're a patriot and know you'll be happy to help the land of your birth."
  
  I blinked. Wait. This wasn't about my product? I glanced between the two operatives and sighed, feeling slightly annoyed. I heard them out, and they wanted my cooperation to smuggle in and store items in Southern California for them. They said it in other words, but that was basically what they meant. As they talked, I dug through Dr Hasumi's private files, searching for one of her diary entries from just before she arrived in the United States that I remembered reading many moons ago.
  
  I carefully checked what they were saying against this file and tilted my head, finally asking, " Before I can speak to any assistance I might be able to provide... Is there anything else you need to say?"
  
  They glanced at each other, and finally, the man shook his head and said, " No, at least not for now."
  
  I nodded and mentally pressed a button. Less than five seconds later, my office door was thrown open, and two Arasaka-branded combat robots burst in, followed by Kiwi's XO. The robots had their assault rifles levelled at the two "agents" but carefully angled so I wouldn't be likely shot if they had to open fire. Their programming really was quite good.
  
  The two people froze, with the man looking like he wanted to reach into his coat for something, which I interrupted with a raised hand, and in English, "Don't. I'm afraid we have the advantage of you, sir. If you surrender, I'll try to preserve your life-also, I do not want to have to replace that chair you are sitting in. It's real, cloned leather."
  
  Kiwi's XO said in a loud, booming, command voice, "Both of you, place your hands on the back of your head and interlace your fingers. Failure to comply will result in immediate lethal force."
  
  Both of them looked outraged but complied, with the woman asking, enraged, "Don't you know who we are? Do you never want to go home again?!"
  
  "No... No, I don't know who you are," I said archly. "I suppose it is not uncommon for citizens of any country to be interviewed by intelligence prior to leaving their home long-term. Before I left Kyoto to come to the United States, this happened to me, too. However, they specifically mentioned that if anyone ever came up to me claiming they were Intelligence operatives from home, they were lying, and I should comply with all local laws while in the New United States."
  
  That... was a lie. They actually said that anyone claiming to be either Imperial or Arasaka Intelligence would, in their introduction, say a particular sign in a code word, which Dr Hasumi wrote down in her diary, including the counter-sign she was supposed to reply back. And that if that wasn't said, then it wasn't them.
  
  It wasn't that Dr Hasumi was a spy; in fact, she didn't have very good tradecraft at all for leaving that information in her system and not committing it to memory and deleting it. However, who knew what would happen? She might have become an asset in the future like these jokers were pretending to do. She was, after all, a very intelligent young woman and might see all manner of interesting things while in America. But, it was far more likely that they would just debrief anyone returning home rather than sending actual agents into "enemy territory" to gain any information. That, or they received it in ways as I provided earlier to the Arasaka rep.
  
  I dialled a number on my phone. I was calling the ominously named "Department of Homeland Security." It sounded like something out of Nazi Germany to me, but it had taken over domestic counter-intelligence after the FBI was destroyed back in the nineties during the collapse when the Gang of Four was totally destroyed. As a resident alien, Dr Hasumi was obligated by NUSA law to report any attempt by a non-US intelligence operative attempting to make contact with her. Honestly, I thought these two very pretty people in front of me likely were from that Department, and that upset me a great deal.
  
  I expected to be kept on hold longer, but I got to someone very rapidly after speaking with the AI receptionist, "Sakura Hasumi... thank you for apprehending these two. I don't have a counter-intelligence investigation open for you, so it seems like we'll be coming by and picking them up... however, just in case... could you put us on speaker phone?"
  
  "Of course," I replied and glanced at the two spies in front of me, "You're on speakerphone with Agent Davis of the DHS."
  
  Rather than actually speaking words, all I heard was a very familiar series of mechanised tones coming from the man in front of me. I recognised it instantly as something akin to a dial-up modem because that was the only internet we had at home in Brockton Bay. God, it was slow. So they were digitally encoding data in modulated audio, just like old modems. How funny. I doubted many people alive today would have recognised that noise unless they already knew what to expect.
  
  Agent Davis seemed very amused now as he chuckled over the phone and said, "Okay, Ms Hasumi... turn the speaker off if you don't mind."
  
  "Done," I said.
  
  He chuckled even more, "I'd appreciate it if you let them go. I'm supposed to tell you that you're required by law to keep everything said today in total confidence... but..." he started chuckling again, "... just between you and me, and because it's not exactly going to be secret much longer, these guys are fucking reservists from the 40th ID. Military intelligence, what an oxymoron. Tell them Hooah, for me." He then disconnected without even saying goodbye.
  
  Wasn't that weird for him to tell me where they were from? I thought about it for a moment before deciding that maybe it wasn't. Intelligence in the NUSA was very tribal, and they weren't "his guys", nor did they have the courtesy to inform him of their sting operation, so he didn't care about burning them, especially since I already knew they were American. If he really cared about preserving their identities, he would have had them picked up as if they were criminals and cut them loose a couple of blocks away. Judging from the heated looks I was getting from the two in front of me; they knew that too.
  
  "Sorry, ma'am, sir, I'm sure you understood I have to comply with the law," I said primly, motioning away the robots. "Is there anything I can help the NUSA government with today?"
  
  They remained silent and just stood up and walked out of my office without answering. I watched them go on my security system, and a half block away, the lady said, still within the range of all of my long-distance directed audio transducers outside, "I still say she's dirty. She has a fucking small company of Arasaka fucking combat bots."
  
  " Just. Shut. The. Fuck. Up, " said the man angrily.
  
  I grinned and went back to my work. As I was practising the art of management by walking around, I talked to a few of my employees in the break room. I sometimes made changes if they were requested by the workers and the cost was nominal. I was paying them above average given their jobs, but that still wasn't a huge amount of money, so I was sensitive to any quality-of-life improvements I could offer. Every employee got a free sleep inducer, for example, and they all raved about them even more than my customers.
  
  Today I asked a group of employees how their job or quality of life be improved. There were a few answers, but one of my QA people gave me an incredible suggestion. QA was a simple job, but I had been finding it difficult to staff it. They all shifted to manufacturing slots or quit. Everybody hated it for some reason, and this man told me exactly why, "For part of QA, we run the rigs on braindance mode for five minutes. But it's the same five-minute braindance segment... every... single... time. Can you do... something... anything about this? Everyone wants to quit."
  
  I frowned. I was just following the Braindance SIG requirements for quality assurance here, with some things added in software that tested whether sleep induction would work at the same time. I could mostly infer that it would work if the braindance also worked, anyway.
  
  I nodded slowly, thinking about the QA software, "I think I can adjust the quality assurance software so that it will detect which employee puts on a rig and then start the braindance where the last stopped. That way, you could watch a whole braindance over the course of your day, even if it was stopped every five minutes."
  
  The look of pure hope and adoration was so palpable that I felt terrible for not thinking about this earlier. I needed a suggestion box, and to make sure the supervisors I hired wouldn't discipline anyone for making suggestions.
  
  Had I been unintentionally torturing these guys? I didn't even remember what braindance I uploaded to the QA server. I frowned. If it was the first five minutes of one of my femme fatale spy shows... well, they usually started very cornily, giving comedic elements. I could... see... how that might grate on you if you had to experience it over and over.
  
  I nodded, "I can do that and possibly also allow you to bring braindances from home. Expect a change in a couple of days after I do some tests."
  
  " Holee shit, boys, check out LA22's feed," one of my manufacturing employees said as he rushed into the break room, then skidding to a halt and gulping when he saw me.
  
  I blinked and turned on the local Los Angeles news, and my eyebrows went up into my scalp. There were videos of armoured vehicles and wheeled infantry fighting vehicles rolling down the I-5 south of Santa Clarita and the I-15 north of San Bernadino, creating an improvised roadblock and cutting all access north. The talking heads were blathering and not exactly saying anything useful, but the chyron below read, "SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES UNDER MARTIAL LAW. PRESIDENT KRESS TO SPEAK."
  
  Oh. Maybe that was what that DHS guy meant by "it's not exactly going to be secret much longer."
  
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  You are cordially invited
  I slowly squeezed the trigger as I lined up the reticle on my target. In the distance, a man firing wildly from an assault rifle dropped, blood staining the sand. The report of my weapon was mostly silent, the most noise coming from the weapon cycling, kind of like a stapler being used vigorously. The sound of weapons fire everywhere else was dying down too, and I saw no more targets. So, I sat the suppressed Vintorez rifle I had been favouring since I left Los Angeles against the side of the truck.
  
  The Vintorez was what I would call a specialist marksman carbine, as it used a number of specialised intermediate and large calibre cartridges and every version featured an integrated suppressor. Its range wasn't that great, but I wasn't a true long-distance shooter in the first place. I quite liked it, though, and it had been in continuous low-level production since the last century. The one I was carrying featured a heavy twelve-millimetre calibre, and as such, it was intrinsically subsonic just from the giant bullet it shot, just being slightly larger than the old .45 ACP cartridge. This helped it to be quite silent when fired, even if it wasn't so great for defeating armour. Glancing around once more, I hummed and dug around for my medical kit in the vehicle before jogging over to see if there were any casualties on our side.
  
  President Kress' speech had been something of an ultimatum to the Free States to make some accommodation with the federal government or else. It was a little milder than I thought it was going to be, given what I expected, but it had still thrown everything into disarray with both sides mobilising military forces. That speech and the mobilisation of federal forces in Southern California had made the Bakkers family industry of smuggling much more dangerous, and as such, that had made my position riskier, too. We were currently at the border between Oregon and Northern California right now, heading south, but we had been encountering a lot more danger on the road than I recalled.
  
  Not even Texas was being left out of the fun, with Federal forces massing in Oklahoma, as well. However, the President of the so-called Republic of Texas was a bit of a firebrand and had already begun a partial mobilisation, claiming that they would invade Louisanna if provoked and reminding President Kress that Texas was a nuclear power, too. That, I didn't know, but it made sense. There were probably nuclear explosives all around the continental United States.
  
  As for our woes, everyone believed that the NUSA and Militech surging a Corps worth of mechanised infantry into Southern California had displaced a bunch of Raffen Shiv and other undesirable elements north, and we did seem to be encountering them on our leg back to Night City. The Free States hadn't been caught napping, though; they had appeared to know what was coming and had been undertaking a partial mobilisation of their own, with people whispering about military advisors in the area with thick Russian and Japanese accents.
  
  This had been a small group of murderous psychopaths, and hopefully, there had been no fatalities on the Bakkers' side. I already saw that there were a few wounded, though.
  
  At exactly the same time, I glanced around the large conference room I was sitting in back in LA. I was a little perplexed at how I had received an invitation to this meeting. It was a meeting of the Corporate Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles. It was a meeting to discuss any communal action that the business interest was going to take in response to the President placing the entire city under Martial Law.
  
  The only two Corporations that hadn't been invited were Militech and Petrochem, who were both working very closely with the NUSA government now. I kind of felt bad about Petrochem, as they had lost more market capitalisation in the wake of the algae release than even Biotechnica. They not only owned many, many farms, but they also owned the refining and distillation facilities to convert wheat into biofuels as well as most of the filling stations in the country. Well, actually, I didn't feel bad for them at all. I just hadn't intended to harm them, but they were still a giant corporation, so I felt that they'd likely land on their feet.
  
  It was the latter filling stations, though, that saved them from serious fallout, as the demand for CHOOH2 hadn't decreased at all and seemed to be increasing, with prices higher than ever. They were taking a short-term hit, and maybe even a medium-term one, as the large refining facilities might not be useful anymore, but they still controlled consumer access to most fuels, so I thought that they would be fine.
  
  Although I was invited, it was clear that I wasn't valued very much as my assigned seat was way in the corner. That was fine with me. I was segregated with the foreign corporations, and even amongst them, I was seated next to Corporations that only had a token presence in the city or ones that were, like my company, very small.
  
  The fact that I was invited at all fell to two factors. First, the law in the NUSA was peculiar. Namely, foreigners were not permitted to own domestic companies, with very few exceptions. I could, for example, own my private practice, but I could not own the company that produced my sleep inducers. However, foreign companies could own domestic companies, so the ownership structure of everything I had was rather Byzantine, and everything in the NUSA ended up being owned by a Japanese joint-stock company, or kabushiki-kaisha, of which I was not only the only shareholder but also the chairman of the board and chief executive, as well.
  
  This, combined with the fact that I had an end-user license for military hardware and owned a fair bit, led my enterprise to be designated by the Chamber of Commerce as a Corporation. I supposed it fit, but only in the same way that a fat, lazy tabby and a lion were both cats .
  
  All of my American companies were named after Dr Hasumi's first name, Sakura, but that would have been a bit egotistical in Japan, so I decided to name the enterprise Baika Holdings. Baika was the Japanese word for plum blossoms, which very easily could be easily mistaken for cherry blossoms, so I thought it was clever and subdued.
  
  It was flattering that Baika Holdings was considered a Corporation, although I would have personally preferred being overlooked here. It wasn't like anything I would say would be listened to. I wouldn't even be allowed to say anything, not with multinational giants in the room, so it was better to be completely forgotten, I thought. Still, I thought I had to give the Chamber of Commerce face by showing up. Otherwise, they might be offended.
  
  I carefully took my seat in the corner, a small paper tent marking my place as "Dr S. Hasumi, PhD, MD, CEO Baika Holdings." I glanced at the seat next to me. I was seated next to the General Manager of the Jinguji Los Angeles branch store. That was about right. My "Corporation" was on about the same level as a local branch of a designer clothing store.
  
  There was a quiet hum of conversations going on, as the presentation hadn't started yet, and the Jinguji manager raised an eyebrow at me and said politely, " Hello, Hasumi-sensei, was it? I can't say that I've heard of Baika Holdings at all. Don't see many CEOs at this meeting. It's all usually Regional Directors or lower like myself. "
  
  The manager was an American, but he was speaking Japanese to me, so I decided to reciprocate. I grinned at him and didn't prevaricate, " It's basically my personal company. In addition to owning my private cybersurgical practice, we also manufacture boutique amounts of consumer electronics." I frowned for a moment and then decided to be honest, but at the same time, I downplayed the products I was selling, " This year is on track to break our record... we may see fifty million in revenues, total." Whatever we sold this year would break the record since this was the first year in operation.
  
  That was both a lot and, at the same time, absolutely nothing. The total was correct, too, although my EBITDA would only be around thirty-five million if that were the case, and I'd still have to pay taxes on that. I just mentioned total revenues because normally an EBITDA of thirty-five million would imply revenues three times what I claimed, as my product had an excellent margin.
  
  Corporate taxes in the NUSA were not that large, but they would still take a large chunk out of the profit, even if I minimised them by reinvesting most of the profits back into the enterprise. I still had two more quarters in this fiscal year, too, so it was a bit early to be counting my eggs in any event.
  
  The Jinguji manager nodded politely at me, and at once, both pigeonholing me as a non-entity while at the same time seeming very impressed and a little nervous. A small company with fifty million Eurodollars in revenue was nothing, but someone owning that company was someone on a higher caste than mere Corporate managers like himself. I'm sure he was trying to determine by the side eye he was giving me if I was someone important's daughter, given a personal play company to manage while I had fun in North America.
  
  Then he blinked, " Oh... do you own that clinic in Chinatown? I had heard a few nice things about it, which would make it the only reputable place in that part of town."
  
  I grinned and nodded, " Yes, that's me. Mostly it's my own practice there, but I do hire part-time surgeons as well when I am busy." One was working there right now. I had too much of a steady business to only open the shop when I wanted to work. It had to be open, for the most part, every day now!
  
  The surgeons I hired were really only contractors, using my operating theatre, stock of cybernetics and existing customer base, which was very similar to most surgeons' relationships with hospitals. They got paid per surgery performed.
  
  We all quieted once the meeting came to order. It was conducted using some bizarre version of Robert's Rules that I frankly did not know nor particularly wanted to research. I wasn't going to participate in any event, so I just sat there politely. For the most part, the big names were cautiously optimistic about the way things were happening, although the rules of Martial Law were a bit constricting. For example, I could not have my armed forces patrol the streets around my property like I usually did, only to defend against active assaults on my buildings.
  
  I didn't particularly like that, as waiting until the enemy attacked first and being forced to soak the first hit wasn't a winning tactic, but it was what it was. If I had known about this restriction, I would have bought another thirty robots from Arasaka even if it had cost me another one point two million eddies.
  
  Security was, in some ways, a sunk cost, unrecoverable, but that wasn't really the case when most of your security force was robotic. Theoretically, there was capital depreciation on security robots over the years as they wore out, but I had known properly-maintained security bots that were still in service forty years after they were manufactured. Planned obsolescence was a somewhat standard practice in consumer electronics, but not so much for military gear. Everyone still produced that stuff to last, at least for the most part.
  
  If I ever needed to sell them for a quick eddie, while I couldn't get their full cost, I could still get the majority of it back. At the same time, each robot was expensive. Gram for gram, they cost four times as much as the Militech drones, but they were a lot more flexible in how they could be used.
  
  That said, I still needed to pay the salaries of a few human security specialists, though. But these people acted in more of a loss prevention role, preventing my own employees from stealing from me rather than defending the workplace from external threats.
  
  Most of what the people were saying at this meeting was boring, but some of it pertained to me. Due to the city being under Martial Law, shipments into the city would be curtailed. They would be reduced not so much in scope but in frequency, which meant that larger convoy shipments would be the norm. This meant that storage was going to be a problem, and it was requested any members that had unused warehouse space contribute, for appropriate remuneration, of course.
  
  I mentally signalled my ability to contribute. I was actually using my own warehouse now with both the large shipment of components and finished product awaiting fulfilment, but barely a tenth of it. My place would be considered "medium security" now, so right what was needed the most.
  
  A private message came to me, requesting to sublet half of the building. And I smiled until I saw who it was from. One of the Biotechnica representatives. Ugh.
  
  I didn't have any reason to decline, though. It wasn't as though I could tell them my real opinion of their enterprise. And honestly, it wasn't as though I even had that great a grudge against them. That said, I was still working slowly to determine which pharmaceuticals made the most profit. I could still study them and then anonymously disclose the production method of any secret but lucrative drugs. I could do that at least once more, maybe even twice, before it got suspicious.
  
  I didn't like thinking of it as revenge but as corrective action. Even a stupid dog would stop shoving his snoot into a fire if it got burned a few times. So really, I was helping them, even if they didn't exactly know why their snoot was on fire!
  
  Oh, who was I kidding? It was revenge.
  
  Still, I replied with a tentative approval, subject to review by counsel and included my attorney's contact information. I also sent him a quick text telling him to review the agreement for anything particularly odious. I didn't really have a business manager to negotiate a price, and it wasn't exactly my forté either, so I was just going to use the standard rate for square footage multiplied by the security factor I was providing and then multiply that by two for the 'stick it to them' factor. If I didn't do the latter, then I wouldn't be taken seriously.
  
  For the rest of the meeting, I just sat there, still and quiet. I was simultaneously performing open-heart surgery in the middle of the desert with what amounted to a first-aid kit, with a donor heart that wasn't anywhere near an appropriate genetic match. Not impossible, but it did take most of my attention. When I was done, the Bakkers would have forty-eight hours at the most to rush someone to the nearest city and acquire a cybernetic heart before the one I implanted was wholly rejected by the patient's immune system, even after suppressing it. I hadn't brought any cybernetic hearts with me, and I wasn't going to offer to individualise it for my patient, even if they died as a result. I hadn't sworn some arcane binding [Oath] to heal all who came before me, after all. I was just being polite.
  
  Besides, it would be a fun adventure for some of the family, anyway. Something they could tell their friends and family when they were done, as they would legitimately be saving a life. Sacramento was only about six hours hard driving away, and two of the younger members of the clan were already strapping in and ripping down the desert ahead of us, headed to the I-5 South to get there.
  
  Getting out of the meeting, I quickly got into my Mizutani Shion and drove away, trying successfully to get away from the many armoured SUVs that most corporate entourages had before they caused huge traffic issues leaving the hotel venue we were at. I just drove randomly, taking some time to think. I meandered over to Long Beach in my musings and pulled off to the side of the road, looking across the river to the port, just in time for a rocket to smash into a small building, reducing it to rubble.
  
  Militech and Petrochem forces were, even now, staging in the port of Los Angeles in brigade strength. A mixed force of infantry, mercenaries and engineers. They issued demands for any and all illegal occupants of the ports to leave. A lot of regular squatters did, and they let them leave, but after forty-eight hours, they had begun a systemic genocide of anyone remaining, supported by both divisional artillery and combat-aviation brigade from the NUSA's 40th Infantry Division. It was clear that whatever their plans were, they didn't really care about the existing buildings.
  
  If there was the slightest resistance at all, they would call artillery and MLRS rocket strikes, demolishing the entire building. It had become a thing for crowds gathering right next to where I was to watch the "show" from the Long Beach side of the river, oohing and aahing every time a salvo of missiles or guided Howitzer shells from kilometres away flattened a building.
  
  For me, it was kind of imposing to think about. This was real military power, not my several dozen dinky robots. Just one barrage of a couple of those big guns could completely destroy my building and everything I had built, and I had absolutely no defence against it.
  
  I got the impression that they intended to demolish most of the buildings in the abandoned area of the port anyway, as their engineering units would quickly roll in behind the mercenaries and Corporate SecTeams, using mostly robotic front-end loaders and other heavy equipment to quickly clear the ground, with large trucks carting off rubble and debris twenty-four seven.
  
  What were they planning on rebuilding after destroying all of these buildings? Some sort of central harvesting hub for my algae was the only thing I could think of. I had been, curiously, looking at what was published about designs for this new and innovative sector, and they mostly appeared to be falling back on things that I would have recognised as oil rigs which housed many dozens of drone harvesters, which skimmed algae off the surface. I recognised them even if there weren't very many of those left due to Leviathan.
  
  But I supposed there had to be a central place on the mainland to ship all of the fuel. I didn't know enough about the logistics of moving a lot of liquid around to say whether this was a good idea or not, but cursory net searches told me that there were a lot of currently dormant pipelines that terminated in the LA area.
  
  I put my car back into gear, driving manually at high speed, using my reflexes to keep myself safe. No cop would pull me over, after all.
  
  A week and a half later, I had finally made it back to Night City, being smuggled into the city rather than going through the customs entry, which seemed more militarised than before.
  
  My old apartment was, unfortunately, already rented out. At first, I had considered moving out of Japantown, perhaps to Kabuki or Watson itself, which were still rapidly expanding. But, in the end, I arranged with Wakako to rent one of the other storefronts on the same floor Clouds was on. Not only was it nostalgic for me, but the security provided by a properly running Megabuilding was pretty high.
  
  The NCART transit system ran through most of the Megabuildings, it was one of the defining features of the large hive-like building systems and with that came the "commerce levels" of each building. Even the buildings that were more anarchic, like Gloria's old building, still had well-running, highly secure levels on the tenth through twelfth floors, as well as the highest penthouse luxury levels.
  
  On the highest levels, there were even aerodyne landing pads so that people who lived up there didn't even have to go down the elevators and mix with the proletariat to enter or leave the building.
  
  Despite the fact that I could afford it now, I still wasn't renting in any of those levels. The storefront I was leasing was about three times as large as my old place, and I was paying more this time but still a bit under what I suspected the market rate was. Instead of two doors down from Clouds, this was almost directly across the corridor. It was a clothing store when I lived there last, but I had to admit that I never bought anything from it. The prices were high, but the quality of the clothes didn't meet that expectation, so I wasn't surprised to find it out of business finally.
  
  I wasn't entirely sure what I was going to be doing, as I had at least eighteen to twenty-four months before I could acquire a degree in medicine, just from the timeline alone. Then after that, I would be right back where I started when I got to Los Angeles, having to work as a resident surgeon. It was kind of hilarious that I would likely spend four years as a resident, after all, just separated into two segments under two different identities.
  
  I didn't mind working as an illicit "Ripperdoc" for the moment. So long as I didn't advertise who ran the clinic and used an assumed name, it shouldn't affect me at all. I had been a lot more wary about that in the past, but I was wiser about how the world worked now. I had brought two vats suitable for biosculpting that I had built from scratch, but I had purchased brand-new cybersurgery equipment.
  
  I didn't even have most of the old equipment that I brought with me to Los Angeles, aside from Kumo-kun, as while it was serviceable, it wasn't that great, and I had long ago sold it off. I had gotten most of it from a crazy perverted ex-doctor, after all. I had brand new equipment for my operating theatre here and a small amount of commonly sold cybernetics that I could sell.
  
  Most of my things were still in boxes, but I did unpack and assemble one of the biosculpt vats so I could give myself my own face back last night. I wanted to go see how Evelyn and Himeko were doing, so I walked out of my front door, glancing at the relatively busy building, even in the morning.
  
  I was surprised to see the Samurai Gunman himself moseying around the corridor, as usually, they had him guard the back entrance due to how much... uhh... character he had. He saw me, recognised me and grinned, walking over. He was still favouring the white Stetson, leather gun belt and short swords n the opposite hip. He was grinning at me, "Hey! Doc Taylor! They said you would be back. How have you been?"
  
  I smiled slightly at him and simultaneously used all of my senses to examine him as he came near. He didn't have any positive physical signs of mental instability that I could see. "Oh, pretty good, I suppose. How about things here?"
  
  We walked over to a less populated corner next to Clouds, and he shrugged, "Things have gotten a lot better, ma'am. Except... all of those crazy girls and boys of industry have started their own gang. They mainly stick around a bar in Kabuki. They're too busy beating up violent Johns to do anything to any of the established players anyway, so everyone, even us, has just left them alone." He gave a practised Galic shrug, which amused me.
  
  I nodded, "How about you personally? Hows the Sandy? Any issues?"
  
  "Not at all! I still use it a few times a day when I practice my iaido..." he said, and I hummed and casually moved his head with my hands, examining him, peering into his eyes, feeling the lymphatic nodes in his neck before finally shrugging.
  
  I sighed and nodded, "It looks like you are well suited to it. Still, set some time aside, and we'll run a full diagnostic to make everything is working out. I don't often sell boostware as high-end as I put in you."
  
  He grinned and nodded, "I'm as fast as Demon Wind Kato, but the asshole has started calling me Ass Wind Johnny . The low-down dirty..."
  
  I interrupted him with a chuckle, and I couldn't keep it in. In fact, both my bodies chuckled, which I had to quickly hide with a hand as I was talking to a few employees. Low-brow humour was always good for a chuckle.
  
  Johnny up and pouted at me, giving his shoulder a gentle pat before saying, "I'm going to go see how Evelyn and Himeko are. They both still work here, right?"
  
  "Oh, yeah... they do," he said, nodding quickly, "Mr Jin is still in charge, too, although he has someone to run the everyday business now. Got one about a year ago."
  
  I raised an eyebrow, "I hope the new guy is better than the old guy." That got Johnny to grin, and I asked him, "Can you walk me in? I don't want to bother Jin-sama..." I said that in an affected, soto voice, then continued in my normal tone, "... and the new guy might not know me."
  
  He nodded and walked me over. I didn't recognise the hostesses at the front desk, but they all were highly sculpted for beauty and looked more or less the same as the last ones that I remembered. Apparently, being a hostess at Clouds was a desirable position, especially for the upper to middle class. I didn't really know why that was, but they only usually lasted about two to three years at the most before moving on. One nice surprise was I was still on the list of people allowed to carry weapons inside, which was nice.
  
  I left the Samurai Gunman there at the front desk and hurried over to Evelyn's room. It wasn't as obvious as a green or red light, as that would be garish, but there was a subdued and subtle icon next to the room number if one of the dolls was with a client. In this case, it wasn't present, so I pressed the doorbell and waited.
  
  The door unlocked and opened right away, and I suddenly had my arms full of a scantily-clad doll who had leapt through the door into my arms. She was wearing a nightgown and nothing else. Well, it wasn't sudden. I saw her sailing towards me with enough time to move out of the way if I wanted to, but I just caught her and froze. This was like how a lot of those scenes that I mostly fast-forwarded through on my BDs started. "Taaaaylor! I thought you were dead or something! Nobody would tell us anything!"
  
  I coughed and sat her down. She wasn't heavy at all, maybe fifty kilos. I could pick her up one-handed, easily. "I'm sorry I couldn't say goodbye to everyone. But I had to leave right away, just in case. Gloria and David are both okay, but I can't discuss where they are right now or what they're doing... but they're both doing well!" I couldn't, right now, anyway. Gloria had plans to return to Night City, as despite how she denigrated her mother and parts of her family, she still missed them.
  
  She was almost done with her degree, but she only planned to return after she had worked at least a year in a trauma centre there in LA, as she could start off at a higher quality position with one of the local UCLA-backed trauma centres and then transition laterally after she had some experience.
  
  "Wow! From what little David said and what I heard from Johnny, that is surprising! You're a miracle worker, Tay!" she grinned at me, and that flew me for a loop for a second. I wasn't really used to any diminutives of my name, although that boy Hiro sometimes called me "Doc T" and, of course, little David used to call me "Tayr." That I missed, as I thought he had been cute as a button.
  
  Still, I smiled and perhaps shaded the truth a lot about my accomplishment, "She was very, very lucky. I can't take much credit." The look Evelyn gave me seemed like she didn't believe me. She drew me into her boudoir, and we sat and talked. Himeko was with a client and couldn't join us, but Evelyn said she was doing well. Mr Hunk was gone, though! He had quit about a year ago, and Evelyn whispered that he had made some sort of arrangement with his family.
  
  Perhaps the arrangement only extended in not renting his body to spinsters by the hour because he was still putting out BDs every few months. I would have been rather upset if he had stopped in the middle of the story arc of his latest series, as he was a dashing, swashbuckling pirate in this one. I had the sudden intrusive thought that I had missed my chance to rent him myself but shook my head, as I would never really do that.
  
  It wasn't that I wasn't attracted to anyone. I often was, and even when I wasn't, I could appreciate the attractive parts of people I saw every day from an aesthetic perspective. And it would have been a lie to say holding a mostly naked Evelyn hadn't been a little stimulating. However, unless I imagined I was in a fairly long-term romantic relationship, I couldn't get super-excited about the prospect of physical intimacy. I could appreciate a beautiful man or woman, but I wouldn't really want to "partake" unless I felt a more serious emotional bond with them. It was weird, especially in this world where sex on the first date was often the norm.
  
  I honestly didn't know what I was going to do about it because I was committed to my plan on expanding my network, and I had already noticed a little bit about how I had changed already with just two nodes. Would it get to the point where I couldn't relate to regular people anymore? Or rather, not enough for me to form a suitable emotional bond, anyway? Relationships were supposed to be a thing between equals, I was told and always believed, so I could see that happening if I didn't see anyone as being my equal.
  
  Again, I shook my head to clear it and decided to table those thoughts. They weren't useful to me, and there was always the chance that I was overestimating how much my personality might change with each expansion of my cognitive capabilities. It was a tricky problem and one I didn't have a solution to. I didn't feel any different about having my friends, for example.
  
  "So, are you going to be running a clinic again? There's been a dearth of good healthcare, especially cybernetics related, around Japantown," Evelyn complained.
  
  I nodded, "Yes, although I'm going to keep my real name out of it. Not sure what I will call it, but I'm directly across the corridor from Clouds. That pretentious clothing store. What happened to DrSuzuki's practice?" He had been the one who installed my stealth system after all, and I wouldn't fuck around with quacks near my body.
  
  She made a face, "His clinic was firebombed during The Troubles... I think he moved out to Watson. One nice thing about the Moxes is that they restrain the more militant boys and girls."
  
  The Troubles?! Were they republicans, in the Irish sense?! I snorted and couldn't help myself, saying while grinning, " Come out, ye black and tans, come out and fight me like a man." Evelyn looked at me oddly, and I could see green text scrolling across her eyes as she was obviously doing a net search. Shit, I couldn't help it, but I wasn't doing anything for my reputation of being a normal teenage girl. However, this had been one of Danny's favourite songs back in Brockton Bay, especially after drinking a few beers when I was little. Although, he hadn't sung it once since Mom died. Still, I knew every line and could sing it from memory.
  
  Instead of commenting on the anachronism, though, I saw her tapping her finger, obviously listening to the song, so I waited until she finished. She grinned, "I might re-write the lyrics to this song. It's got a good tune, and the Moxes might quite like it if it was more... applicable to current events."
  
  I was startled, saying, "Uhhh... you know where you sleep every night? Should you be getting political? " I glanced around, looking for recording devices, which was stupid since they could be practically microscopic.
  
  She snorted, "They don't actually record anything here. If they even had the ability and that came out, it would destroy the business. Most of our clients are so shy that most of the doll personalities are at least half therapists but with happy endings." She chuckled, "Besides, I wouldn't be attributing it to myself, just in case it did get popular."
  
  Still, I frowned, "If you want to uncover hundred-year-old music for them, I still think you should pick something a little less confrontational and a little more optimistic."
  
  She raised an eyebrow at me and said, "Okay, Miss Expert On Hundred-Year-Old Music, what would you suggest?"
  
  I sighed and stood up, thinking fast and doing a number of quick net searches before I found what I was looking for. Doing a quick handshake with the SmartWall in the room and began clapping along with the karaoke version of the song that I found on the net.
  
  I wasn't a great singer, but I tried, and what did you know? It came out better than it usually did, " Sun is shinin' in the sky, there ain't a cloud in sight. It's stopped rainin' everybody's in the play. And don't you know, it's a beautiful new day, hey hey..."
  
  After that, it was a two-person karaoke session until she had a client, and I had to leave. I had to stop myself humming along as Dr Hasumi while supervising the transfer of all production to the building next door. My company had grown past existing solely on the second floor of my building, which had somewhat surprised me.
  
  The quality assurance job had become the absolute most sought-after job in my enterprise since I made changes to the QA process. I hadn't allowed people to bring in BDs from home because there was no way I was allowing a viral vector of unknown datashard to be connected to my air-gapped systems. However, I would buy ten BDs a week and created a simple system where my employees could vote on which ones I bought, and slowly over time, the library of what a person could watch while QAing increased.
  
  The engineer that I had just hired to help me caused me to blush in embarrassment as after we were alone, he sang softly and surprisingly well, " Lad, I don't know where ya been, but I see you've won first prize! " Our karaoke session had gotten bawdier and bawdier, and we had just been singing "The Drunk Scotsman," and this man had correctly identified the song I had been humming. I was clearly dealing with an educated man of culture here.
  
  I tried to glare at him but couldn't help but grin, trying to explain, "That song had been stuck in my head." I was actually pretty impressed he recognised the song just from me humming it. The fact that he wasn't afraid to rib his boss a little bit on what was his first day made me feel better about hiring him. That was good because his salary was seven times what one of my average workers was making, and that was before profit-sharing incentives. He was the first Corpo that I had actually hired; even all of my supervisors were barely more than straw bosses, just regular workers with enough responsibility and ambition to manage a few people apiece.
  
  "Come across the street, and I'll discuss what you'll be working on first," I told him, and we left the building in silence. He snorted in amusement at the sign on the outside of my office as we walked inside. It said, "Dr Hasumi, PhD, MD, CEO, CTO, CFO, Head Honcha, El Jefa, etc." I had put it up as a joke, and I was glad someone finally found it amusing.
  
  We sat down, and he said first, "I'm curious about what you need dedicated engineer assistance for. I have examined and tested your product... our product, rather... and it seems rather mature and effective. It's mostly a regular braindance implementation, and I doubt you'll trust me to work on the confidential, patented areas, employment contract and NDA or not."
  
  I nodded solemnly. That was true. He wouldn't be allowed to work on either the confidential circuitry and especially not on the software that made the sleep inducer work. He wouldn't even be allowed to walk unescorted into the production area because an especially intelligent man, like he was, could use some of the flashing jigs to get the binary code or possibly my master cryptographic keys from the station that installed my proprietary software onto the assembled devices.
  
  It was true that a forensic disassembly, including physical de-encapsulation of the memory units on the device, would eventually work, but I had designed the system to use distributed and encrypted memory to be resistant to this type of reverse engineering. There was no reason to let someone bypass all of that effort involved.
  
  "You're not wrong, but there are a number of projects that I'd like to work on that your assistance will be very useful, from a new product to assist with some of my production and quality assurance systems," I said mildly. We were both Corpos, so I wouldn't prevaricate just to be polite. I didn't trust him, and he would think less of me if I implied that I did.
  
  He raised an eyebrow, "A new product? Or a variation? My speciality is software, not electrical engineering. I can get by, but I probably understand circuits less than you do from what I can tell."
  
  I nodded, triggering the holographic display on my desk to project an image of something that somewhat resembled my first-generation device, except a lot bulkier, "This is, essentially, a ruggedised version of my first device. It costs two times as much to produce, but you could literally drive over it with a deuce-and-a-half, and it would still be functional."
  
  The engineer was silent for a moment as he inspected it. My holographic projector was very high-end and could produce three-dimensional full-colour images, which was important as I mostly used it for biosculpt consults. However, the man in front of me zeroed in on the drab green colour of the exterior of the device, raising an eyebrow, "A military product?" He let out his breath in a hiss and sat back in his seat, eyes widening a little, "Yes, this product really does have military implications, doesn't it? I assume my job will be software related. This already looks ready to ship, almost, though, so what is your plan? I have no experience at all working on military products."
  
  "If all I wanted was a ruggedised version of the inducer, it is indeed ready to ship. However, that would make a mediocre product for a military customer, at best," I said, spreading my hands out. I tilted my head and asked, "How much do you know about modern warfare?"
  
  "Absolutely nothing," he said immediately, which pleased me. If he had tried to bullshit me, I would have been upset.
  
  I nodded, "You wouldn't be surprised to know it is very computerised now, though?"
  
  "Clearly. Even in the third world, they have some manner of computer-based warfare management systems. I would guess things like individualised or squad-based data links all the way up the chain of command, jam-resistant frequency hopping encrypted comms at the minimum," he said as if this was an academic exercise.
  
  I slapped my hand into my fist and nodded, "Precisely. It is the squad management systems that I want my devices integrated into. There are dozens available, but mostly they use a similar standard, so it isn't actually that hard to develop for."
  
  "So the commanders can see when their soldiers are sleeping?" he asked, still not quite getting it.
  
  I shook my head, paused, and then nodded, "Well, yes. Partly. But mainly so that whoever is assigned to watch, or automated sensors, can quickly wake the entire squad. Some squad management systems include simple but robust AI-based systems that will alert the squad if suspected unfriendlies arrive based on sensors; other systems require human intervention. In any case, I want a system where a squad leader or his designee can quickly wake every man in his squad in an emergency rather than have to run to each physical body and rip the inducer off their heads."
  
  "Ahhh.. that makes a lot of sense. For getting rest in dangerous areas, this would be a dramatic improvement on the status quo. Can physically-active soldiers survive on the reduced sleep schedule your devices provide? Over long periods of time?" he asked curiously. That was a very insightful question, too, which caused me to raise my eyebrows.
  
  I made a waffling gesture, "The physical part of rest when you sleep is less than you'd think. Certainly, less than the mental part, but very active people would need at least one long sleep segment a week to keep up. Or alternatively, a nanosurgeon implant or daily supplement of nanomeds. However, the upcoming war won't be like Flanders. Modern warfare won't be months and months of constant trench warfare."
  
  He raised an eyebrow, "You sound confident that this unpleasantness with the Free States won't go away, unlike all the other times."
  
  "Yes. Neither side is backing down this time. I think this is going to be President Kress' last big huzzah. If she declined to confront the free states, she would never win the next election," I told him. I had spent a long, long time thinking about this, and I was mostly mollified that my conclusion was that this conflict was, more or less, unavoidable even if I hadn't done anything. Kress was up against the wall after being a dictator for forty years, and it wasn't because I had high confidence in the state of "democracy" that NUSA practised. The person who won the elections was the one who the oligarchs, collectively, wanted to run the nation. The CEO of Militech, Rosalind Myers, was already saying that Kress wasn't going far enough. If Kress didn't do anything, then she would be impeached or, more likely, die in a tragic coronary implant malfunction.
  
  He smirked, obviously having the same opinion about NUSA's democracy that I did, but he nodded slowly after a time, "Okay. This is a new field for me, but it sounds rather exciting. Do you have test versions of some of the more common squad management systems?"
  
  I nodded, "Yes. And all the documentation. I could probably handle this, but..." Software wasn't my expertise. Especially software that wasn't attached to an obvious medical device or implant. This was theoretically attached to a "medical device", but none of it was designed to make the interface of machine and human work any better, so I would get almost no help at all with it.
  
  "But you're very busy," he finished for me.
  
  I nodded. Yes, let's go with that, "I have written all of the documentation about interfacing with the black-boxed elements of the device's firmware, though. If you need additional APIs exposed, feel free to send me a message, and I'll work to implement them."
  
  He popped all of his fingers, which sounded impressive. I was one of the people who couldn't really do that, no matter how much I tried. He grinned, "Well, I better get started then. My office is across from yours?"
  
  My new clinic in Night City had barely been open for a couple of days before I got an odd visitor. Well, it was a courier. After verifying my identity, he handed me an honest to god paper envelope and quickly departed. Or tried to hand it to me, as I made him place it on my receptionist's desk.
  
  I put on some nitrile gloves and grabbed a respirator from my medical equipment, took the envelope into my private area, and said, "Kumo-kun, BSL protocols."
  
  Instantly, I heard the relatively loud blowers I had installed in line with the venting system creating a slight negative pressure in the room as I hummed, amused. I had both exceptional anti-viral and anti-bacterial medicine immediately available, as well as agonists for most neural toxins that Kumo-kun would automatically inject into me if all of my muscles suddenly froze up. My internal nanites were primed to defend against invaders, too. The only thing I couldn't quickly cure was unusual prion diseases, but so long as I didn't lick the envelope, I thought I would be fine on that front.
  
  "Let's see how bad they want me dead, eh?" I said to Kumo-kun and used an exceptionally sharp knife and tweezers to open the envelope. My name had been written on it with what appeared to be a fountain pen, in cursive, which I took for just bait. A less savvy girl would have immediately ripped the envelope open to see which ball she had been invited to, but I wasn't stupid.
  
  There wasn't any obvious white powder falling out, so it wasn't likely anthrax. I raised an eyebrow, "Continuous spectroscopic analysis of the air, please, Kumo-kun. Notify me when you find any unusual organic compounds or virons."
  
  I pulled out the single sheet of paper out with the tweezers and unfolded it, reading it.
  
  "Dear Miss Hebert,
  
  You are cordially invited for tea on or about the fifth of July at the Azure Plaza in Night City. I promise you that you will be much more pleased with the conclusion of this visit than the last time you patronised this establishment.
  
  Please RVSP no later than the first.
  
  Your grandmother,
  
  Sionainn Astor-Armstrong"
  
  What... the fuck?! I had a grandmother?! This wasn't a Biotechnica assassination attempt?!
  
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  SPACE! I'm in space!
  AN: Portions of the dialogue in this first segment were taken almost word-for-word from a famous exchange between a Russian officer (Ivan Alekseevich Savin) and a Chechen (Turpal-Ali Atgeriyev) right before the battle of Grozny during the 1st war. These two men were friends and comrades fighting alongside each other in Afghanistan years prior, and the combination of fate and certain boozing politicians put them at odds with each other. I adjusted a few things, but I've always remembered the words they said to each other years later when I heard it, although I was a child and already immigrating to the USA when this happened.
  
  Lieutenant Colonel James Waters watched the approaching column of mechanised infantry approach the rail yard he was charged to protect. He had his men and machines in a defensive position, mostly hiding in an urban area that had been evacuated, but the attacking forces outnumbered him. Still, he felt that his preparation would savage them, even if he or most of his men didn't survive the battle. Still, in the calculus of war, trading one battalion for an entire regiment could be considered a victory. It was just a shame that he could not expect any reinforcements any time soon. If he had another battalion, he figured he could destroy the enemy force while minimising his own casualties.
  
  His XO walked up to him and said quietly, "Sir, drones have identified the approaching tangos. It's the 131st Regiment, as you thought."
  
  Jim let out a series of invectives and finally sighed, glancing over to his commo section, "Get me a transmitter, one we don't care too much about. I want to transmit in the clear."
  
  The enlisted men raised their eyebrows but nodded, tapping away at physical keyboards on computers. Finally, one said, "Sir, we have a transmitter in the switching yards, they already bombed it with a loitering munition, so they already know it is there, but it is still working. For now, Sir."
  
  Jim nodded, "Perfect." He grabbed a handset and made sure it was paired with his cybernetics before routing it to the transmitter his commo section gave him. He clicked the push-to-talk and said, "Bill, is that you?"
  
  One of his best friends, Colonel William Howe, was the commanding officer of the Southern California 131st Mechanised Infantry Regiment. He, like Jim himself, was a reservist called up to active duty. They had fought together in the past but were on opposite sides this time. There was no response on the radio, and Jim sighed, trying again, "Bill, come on, maybe somehow before it's too late, turn your guys back. Don't do this. Don't do it; it is not needed. In any case, understand that you will die, and I will die. Understand for yourself... who would win from this? Neither of us will win, understand? You and I won't survive, you know?" His men were staring at him, "If I see you in the battle, I won't show you any mercy. Just like you won't show me any, you understand?"
  
  He paused, "It'd be better if you came up here as a guest. I could put some steaks on the grill. So, have your men retreat. At least have some pity for their mothers. Give the order to retreat."
  
  Silence, and just when Jim was about to give up, the familiar voice of his friend came on the net, "I can't give that order, Jim."
  
  Jim shook his head, grabbed the handset again and said, "Bill, from the bottom of my heart, I hope that you survive this... but you better leave."
  
  Jim knew it was a lost cause when he heard his friend's resolve as he said, "I don't have a choice, Jim. I have my orders, and I will follow them."
  
  Jim threw the handset down and said, "Fuck. Order the ATGM teams to be ready. Let their IFVs get into the bag, and then destroy them near the switching station. Order the mortars to commence bombardment as soon as they approach the kill box with no further orders. Echo Whiskey begin full spectrum jamming on all transmitters. Execute."
  
  "Yes, sir!" his subordinates said in unison. Now that the air was filled with white static, it would be a much more old-fashioned battle. However, he had prepared by running old-style copper telephone wire to stay in contact with most of his subordinates. The bitrate would be terrible, but it was better than nothing. It would be more than Bill had to work with, but it wouldn't do to underestimate the man.
  
  The battle of Fresno was the first major engagement in what would later be called the Unification War and one of the bloodiest. It lasted over a period of two days, and the casualties were devastating on both sides. It was considered, on the whole, a victory for the Free States, but such judgements were lost on the men who fought it, as both units suffered immense casualties, with the NUSA force being almost completely annihilated.
  
  Both Lieutenant Colonel James Waters and Colonel William Howe were killed in action less than twenty-four hours apart and less than a hundred metres away from each other.
  
  I sat the invitation down with my special long tweezers, frowning. Did I have a grandmother? I mean... people generally did unless they were the subject of some wild biotinker's experiments. Even before my power arrived, I didn't think babies came from storks. While I had already known that Alt-Dad's parents had both passed away, I had no memories whatsoever from NC-Taylor about Grams.
  
  But if my mom, dad and I all had "alternates" in this new world that I lived in, then it stood to reason that my grandmother "here" was at least somewhat similar to my grandmother back in Brockton Bay. Except... I knew very little about her. Gram had been my mom's mother, an austere woman who'd never fully approved of my dad as a match for her daughter.
  
  She lived in Back Bay, in Boston, in a very nice house, but I had almost no memories of her visiting us or us visiting her beyond once or twice. However, I knew that just as Gram didn't approve of Danny, he didn't particularly approve of her either, and I recall he called her and Grampa very controlling. They had come to Mom's funeral, but I hadn't seen them since.
  
  Danny had let slip that Gram had been the one paying my allowance when I told him he didn't have to pay me one when our financial situation was especially bad in the months after Mom passed away. He told me that the money was meant for me, but then told me the real reason when I pressed: he didn't want to take her money directly. Danny could always be very stubborn and prideful like that. I hoped he was happier now, and hopefully, my meagre allowance savings helped NC-Taylor in her first months in Brockton Bay.
  
  I closed my eyes and focused on my memories from before. Back Bay was a very nice part of Boston. It was part of Accord's territory, and the rumour was that he had a house there. I didn't believe it, personally. If I was a villain as fastidious as Accord was rumoured to be, then I would have had some secret base, maybe underneath a large skyscraper, like in a repurposed Endbringer shelter. That would be a real villain's base.
  
  Still, it was always clear that Gram had money. Not every family could pay for their daughter to get a PhD in English Literature amidst the economic shakeups that parahumans and Endbringers caused. Most people would have to take a loan or suggest that their daughter study something more practical given the uncertain times they found themselves in.
  
  Back in Brockton Bay, Mom's maiden name hadn't been Astor or Armstrong or any hyphenation of the two, though, so that was different. I did a net search with the terms "Sionainn Astor-Armstrong", "female", "rich", and "age60". Then I let my Agent, a very simple machine-learning tool that most people had integrated into their operating systems or phones, churn on the results. If I didn't get anything, then I could ask Kiwi to find her, and if Kiwi didn't find anything, I could always ask Wakako to-
  
  Oh. That was quick.
  
  Wait... what?! Gram wasn't that rich back in Brockton Bay, was she? If so, I should have asked for more allowance. Both of my bodies were silent, slumping into the nearest chair in thought as I used my full attention to read articles online.
  
  I glanced at the note and picked it up, not bothering to use tweezers anymore. At the bottom of the note was printed a net address that I could access to RSVP. Also, wasn't it a little pretentious to spell out the acronym when it was in French? I decided I didn't know, wanting to rub my face but careful not to do so just in case there was some undetectable compound on the letter. Maybe really high-class people thought "RSVP" was uncouth.
  
  However, instead of following the link directly in a browser, I laid back into my chair, grabbed a fibre-optic cable, inserted it into my cyberdeck and triggered a Deep Dive. The world fractalised and was replaced by my local subnet rezzing around me. "Hoot," I said as I layered proxy after proxy around my ICON and then typed in the address in a translation-routing program and clicked enter with my beak.
  
  Instantly I started moving, blurring through the net. I slowed briefly as I passed through large regional nets and routers, flying fast to the East. The Ihara-Grubb equations created this shared Universe of the net and added a sense of direction and distance to the net that made these types of virtual reality interfaces possible. Since I was flying to the East, according to the IG equations, that meant the server I was connecting to was in the East in the real world, too.
  
  Finally, the program dumped me in what my Menu called the Dublin citinet in front of the largest series of structures I had ever seen on the net. It looked not so much like a castle but an old-style feudal walled city, with a motte and bailey. The very air had a charge here, and it made my feathers tremble. One of the tall structures appeared to be a lighthouse inside the curtain wall, right next to the keep. However, instead of rotating around at a standard revolution rate, the lighthouse's beam randomly searched and flitted from here to there like the eye of Sauron on amphetamines.
  
  When the beam shifted to me, I let out a high-pitched "Hoot-" and immediately disconnected, continuing speaking as reality reasserted itself, "nope, nope." I patted myself down, making sure I was all there and feeling goosebumps on my arms. That was disconcerting, even considering I had used a Haywire comm to put a larger computer in between my brain and the net just now.
  
  A couple of quick tests showed me that nothing had gone wrong, aside from instantly being traced by whatever that lighthouse was. Traced through all of the proxies I used and terminated at my nascent clinic subnet. While it hadn't attacked me, it instantly traced and isolated the connection to my subnet's backbone connection that I had arranged for instead of mooching off the fat pipe that Clouds had like I did the last time I lived here.
  
  It had then performed a thorough network mapping of my entire exterior-facing subnet but didn't hack the bastion node to map out the private subnet, not that there was much inside of it anyway. At least it hadn't been hacked, as far as I could tell . But maybe I should write the storage to zeroes on that bastion node and then reflash yesterday's backup, just in case.
  
  Yes. That would be prudent. However, if it could be hacked so effortlessly, then it could be done so a second time. But that wasn't productive to think about, so I stood up and walked over to the rack of computing hardware in the corner and powered the system down. Thankfully, with fast access solid-state memory, the process was relatively quick, but I kept the backup images off the network just in case I was ever hacked, so I had to physically change out some drives.
  
  I let out a breath and sighed. Perhaps I shouldn't have done that. No, there was no perhaps about it. I definitely shouldn't have done that. That had been scary. Maybe Militech or Arasaka or other giant Megacorp's data fortresses were on the same level or even scarier, but I wasn't stupid enough to ever digitally go to any of those places, either.
  
  Realistically, I wasn't in danger... probably. I had been standing outside on what had been theoretically the public Dublin citinet, but at the same time, I couldn't help but feel as though there was a giant ACME-brand anvil dangling precariously above my head like the Sword of Damocles the whole short time I was there. That was me, Taylor Hebert, Super Genius.
  
  Well, it could have been worse. I could have used my Haywire pair back in LA to route my net traffic, and if I had done so, then that eye of Sauron would have traced me back to Los Angeles, directly to my clinic there! There would be no real reason Dr Hasumi would get curious about this giant datafort minutes after Taylor got an invitation with that address on it.
  
  Dr Hasumi got a phone call, which I answered as I put all of my tools away and stepped out of my private area. I was taking a steady stream of walk-in customers in Night City, and this time I followed many of the NC regulations and business codes. I was a legitimate pharmacy, at least, although not a legitimate clinic. This meant more taxes I had to pay, but I didn't want to rely entirely on the Tyger Claws glaring at any city inspectors in the building.
  
  "Bob, it's rare for you to call me," I said to the Militech suit, raising my eyebrows. Normally I called him, and only when I needed to buy things. Although, to be fair, I had invited him out to drinks with Kiwi and a couple of her men once. I had only done that to put a more personal touch on our business relationship as it was somewhat expected to socialise a little bit and to trade favours around.
  
  When I got more money from my inducer sales, I bought another two gross Sandevesitan units from him, but he refused to sell me more until I sold most of my stock retail. He correctly assumed I was just buying them to stockpile, not necessarily to sell during the current conflict. Still, I was pretty confident I would sell them eventually as I did one to three installations of this model a day now; it had become something of a speciality of my clinic.
  
  When mercenaries, or wannabe mercenaries, asked me what they could do to increase their chances of surviving in combat, I generally suggested in this order: a reliable rifle, sub-dermal armour, nanosurgeons, and a Sandevistan, if they could handle it. The nanosurgeons were more expensive than both the subdermal armour and my entry-level Sandy combined, though, so people did not often buy them from me, which I felt was a bit of a mistake.
  
  Most professional militaries included nanosurgeon organs in all infantry, if not in all military personnel altogether, but I had noticed that it was a somewhat uncommon purchase for mercs on the entry-level who thought they'd rather have things to help prevent them from getting shot in the first place. I thought this was stupid because you often didn't notice someone shooting you until they actually shot you. Well... the people I shot often didn't notice it, anyway.
  
  Bob grinned and said, "Are you interested in a job? Militech needs a lot of surgeons lately, and you could write your own ticket."
  
  I blinked. Was he trying to headhunt me? That was quaint. That meant that Bob here wasn't really aware of my other business. Perhaps he was going down the list of competent surgeons and asking? I mentally nudged my Agent to do another net search and quickly got an article from one of the local screamsheets, the giant headline reading, "IT'S WAR, THEN."
  
  One part of me read the article while the rest talked to Bob. It seemed like the NUSA forces tried to push up into Fresno, and a battle took place. I pulled up five more articles in different outlets, foreign and domestic. Everything I read was propaganda, but the best propaganda was true or at least had elements of truth. It was what was left out that clued you into the propagandist's motives.
  
  By reading about the same event in multiple locations, I could reasonably interpolate that the actual truth lay somewhere in the middle. I was reasonably confident that there was a battle in Fresno and that the casualties had been heavy, and Northern California still controlled the city and rail nexus.
  
  President Kress had immediately declared war on a number of states, which was a reaction from weakness, I felt. I had really been heads down if I hadn't noticed that, though, but I really did hate the news. The fact that she had reacted so strongly, along with a number of other things, tended to make me believe that NUSA got creamed in the battle.
  
  Perhaps I should be watching the news more carefully, but honestly, I did not really care. I didn't have a dog in this fight, nor did I care about who won. Either way, most things would stay the same. Neither side was better enough that I would have rooted for them to win the conflict, much less wanted to support them. Although, I supposed I had a slight bias in favour of the Free States side since they had been attacked first, aggressed first.
  
  "Uh, no, thank you, Bob. I doubt you could make it worth my while. Besides, I didn't start my own practice because I wanted to eight to six it," I told him flat-out.
  
  This, surprisingly, got him to grin and look relieved. I didn't have to wonder long as he told me why he seemed relieved, "I didn't think so, but I have been told to offer. If you had agreed, then I wouldn't get to act as your clinic's liaison, which would mean less remuneration for me!"
  
  I narrowed my eyes, "Liaison? You are my sales rep."
  
  "Well, yeah, about that. I am. But your practice is being drafted by the NUSA federal government in accordance with the Defence Production Act. You should be getting a national security letter explaining things shortly," he said, sounding polite and sending me some signals that he was slightly apologetic about it.
  
  I narrowed my eyes and said reasonably, "Bob... Bob... I'm sure you don't want to look underneath your car for the rest of your life before you start it. So, talk fast." Sure enough, I got a message from a cryptographically signed address from the Department of Homeland Security right on time.
  
  This caused him to grin and spread his hands placatingly. It might sound weird that he seemed relieved that I threatened to put a bomb underneath his car, but a blatant threat like that was a way for me to say that I didn't really hold it against him. If a Corpo really wanted to kill someone, they didn't warn them-unless they were extra sneaky, I supposed. He said, "Be subzero, Doc, be gato . You know this isn't me doing this. They just stuck me with the detail since I know you. And you're not singled out, either. All the hospitals and clinics that aren't a back alley chop shop in LA are getting one of these."
  
  I read the letter and forwarded it to my attorney for him to review as well. From what I could tell, though, the Defence Production Act was an overly broad law that gave the President or her designee the ability to force a private business to accept and or prioritise contracts for materials or services deemed necessary for national defence, theoretically, even if in so doing the company suffered a loss.
  
  I didn't expect to be forced to take a loss, as I would just shut the clinic down temporarily, and they would have killed the goose. The threat to do so was so obvious I didn't even need to mention it, either. This situation was kind of like temporary partial nationalisation, though, so I sighed and shook my head, "What baka decided this? It's stupid."
  
  He shrugged, "LA will be the main hub for casualties. We're taking over most of the hospitals, too, like I said. What this means for you is you'll get a couple of patients a day, already stabilised, with the goal to assess and, if possible, bring them back up to a hundred per cent using cybernetics or biological replacement, depending on the economic factors involved, of course."
  
  I wanted to groan inwardly. This was the type of medicine I hated to practice the most, the enny-pinching kind. I rapidly sent a message to the three surgeons who worked PRN for me, asking if any of them wanted to come on full-time or at least increase the days they worked and offered bribes. I didn't mind if I had to pay a little bit more; I'd prefer these mandatory patients go to someone else.
  
  Hopefully, one would bite, so I wouldn't have to do this very much. Also, how quickly could I get contractors to come and install one or two more operating theatres on the second floor? I had already moved all production out, so I had the space now. I would definitely need more than just one operating theatre.
  
  "Alright, tell me in detail how badly you're fucking me, Bob," I said in a monotone.
  
  It turned out it wasn't that bad. But I wasn't going to be making very much money on any of the work I did for Militech. Or, excuse me, for the NUSA government. Same thing, really. Militech was still technically nationalised and had been for years and years.
  
  Gloria and Kiwi arrived home about the same time, and David had been home from his Aikido class for an hour. His mom had agreed to him starting martial arts early, and I found an Aikido dojo nearby. I had been a little hard on the discipline, considering, wrongly, it was not very useful for actual fighting.
  
  I'm not sure if that was some of what I knew about from Brockton Bay filtering through and altering my opinions, but here Aikido was a little more useful and taught a little more practically. When some of your enemies might be superhumanly strong borgs, it would be stupid to go punch-for-punch with them. Due to this, many disciplines considered "soft" or that relied primarily on an attacker's force and momentum were much more effective. The most famous Solo in the world, Morgan Blackhand, was supposedly a fifth dan Aikido master, although nobody was sure if he was alive or dead.
  
  It seemed useful enough that I had started taking classes, too, twice a week. Tai Chi, though, was still mainly just for meditation and discipline, which matched NC-Taylor's memories of studying it when she was little.
  
  I said as they all got into my living room, "I'm not making dinner tonight, but how does Chinese take-out sound?" That was agreeable to all parties, especially David, who pumped his fist.
  
  Gloria looked tired and said before I even asked her, "It's been crazy at the hospital! I'm glad I'm only doing one rotation this last semester. We've been taking in a lot of soldiers being evacuated from the north, although some suits kept saying we'd get arrested if we talked about it. I think they're trying to keep a lid on how many casualties they're taking."
  
  That made sense to me. From what I could tell, they hadn't even been informing the KIA's next of kin yet. Gloria looked tired, but it wasn't the tiredness from lack of sleep as she had experienced in the past, but the tiredness of someone who wanted to get something over with. She would be graduating soon. Her focus was critical care and emergency medicine nursing, although she had a minor focus on psychotherapy due to her scholarship.
  
  "They're sending stabilised patients to my clinic that I have to accept, or else, too," I told them, which got both Kiwi and Gloria to raise their eyebrows, as it was definitely not usual.
  
  Gloria seemed upset, glancing at her number on priority, David, before saying, "This war sounds serious, then. I hope nothing happens here."
  
  "I doubt it. It's not like the Free States want LA," I said wryly, and then turned to Kiwi, "I've decided I can help that merc you told me about if she is still in town."
  
  Yesterday Kiwi mentioned that a woman she knew as an acquaintance was in a bind. She had done something kind of stupid and needed a new identity, kind of like the person Wakako had sent me. I didn't want to advertise that I was capable of such things, so I brushed her off at first, but everything going on today had me accelerating some of my plans, and she could be perfect for one of them.
  
  From what I could tell, this lady needed a new identity or to get out of the country and was pretty sure she would be murdered if she stayed anywhere inside the continent. That said, she really didn't want to leave North America and had been saving that as a last resort. She had, allegedly stolen from a semi-powerful central American crime family. They could project power enough to assassinate her in the NUSA, but probably not in Europe, which had been her plan if she couldn't find someone to adjust her genome.
  
  Kiwi mentioned her as she often mentioned people around the area that had problems that I solved in a way that got the elf-girl to think I was a Fixer.
  
  Kiwi nodded, "Okay... I'll bring her by tomorrow. She is lying low right now while trying to find a way to get out of the country. This whole unpleasantness isn't helping."
  
  "If you're the CEO of your company, how much do you pay yourself? I would set my salary at a million eddies!" David asked me and declared after the Chinese food arrived, and we sat down to eat.
  
  I snorted, "My salary is one eurodollar a year."
  
  "What?! Why?!" he asked, shocked and dismayed.
  
  I chuckled, "Because I have to pay forty-five per cent income tax on my salary. But I'm the only one who owns the company, so if I just issue a million dollar dividend to the shareholders, myself, then I only have to pay ten per cent tax on that because it is considered a capital gain." I couldn't claim to have come up with that idea, but the accountant I hired did and made it seem like I was stupid for not realising it. There were dozens of different tax loopholes like this, and it wasn't surprising that they were structured so, mainly, the rich were the main beneficiaries. It had been the same in my last world, too. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same, after all.
  
  I personally didn't think the NUSA government was in any way working for the benefit of its citizens, though, so I didn't feel bad about avoiding taxes.
  
  This caused David to laugh, "Nova!"
  
  I glanced down at him and smiled. In a few years, David would be old enough to start life extension and genetic therapies. I'd do the life extension myself, but he would need the cover of some common genetic tweaks on the commercial market, so it seemed like that was where he got the LET too. The current consensus, which I mostly agreed with, was the ideal time to do initial life extension and genetic therapies was just before puberty, after all.
  
  I got to my clinic fairly early in the morning the next day, as I had two Militech-delivered patients waiting for me. I blitzed through them but had a few issues finding the correct people to send the treatment plans to, which had to be authorised and returned to me before I could perform the procedures, but I ended up finding the correct net address to submit in the end, after talking to three people on vidcall.
  
  The two soldiers were both missing some limbs and had organ damage in a few places. Not a big deal at all.
  
  "Tsk..." I said as I finally got the treatment plan back, as Militech was nixing the scar removal biosculpt. Penny-pinching bastards. This was like dealing with an HMO, or worse. I vastly preferred my normal "cash on the barrelhead" business. I would do it anyway, even if Militech didn't pay. My vats didn't use very many nanites these days with the multi-level filtering systems I had installed, after all. I'd just call this a freebie and doing my part for the GIs, I supposed. I stood with a Rosie the Riveter pose for a moment before I realised I wasn't alone, glanced at my receptionist and then fled to my office. The truth was it upset my sense of medical elegance not to include it.
  
  I spent most of last night doing more research on my alleged grandmother. I dug through all of Alt-Danny's old things and did find Alt-Danny and Alt-Mom's marriage certificate, and sure enough, her maiden name had been Annette Rose Astor-Armstrong, so that made this note more credible. Although, with the wealth that Grams had, she could have afforded a ninja to sneak in and alter this physical document, and I might never have known.
  
  Wait a minute... Wait a fucking minute! I smacked my palm on my desk. A ninja? I had put down my kidnapping and interrogation under brain scan as to a friend of Alt-Danny's. It was pretty clear to me that my behaviour since coming to this world raised some flags with people who knew NC-Taylor. In retrospect, it had been obvious that the main thrust of the interrogation was ensuring I wasn't a doppelgänger, and only after that had they branched out into general questions and subjects of interest. Only I definitely was a doppelgänger, just one close enough to NC-Taylor not to be detected.
  
  I was still a little sore about that, but most of it was because of how easily that man with the British accent took me apart. I had to admit it had been something I had been trying to forget, too, which was kind of stupid. I had thought I was dangerous at the time, and seeing someone who really was dangerous had been a stark wake-up call to me. I didn't like feeling helpless. I hated it, in fact, so I avoided thinking about when it had happened to me.
  
  But, yes, it fit. I always thought that the British ninja seemed vaguely butler-like, and this family was based in the UK and Ireland, from what I could tell. I tried to work up some righteous indignation about a grandmother who had her granddaughter kidnapped and interrogated under brainscan, but I had to admit if I had a daughter or granddaughter and I thought they had been replaced by someone who murdered them and took their identity, I would... likely do the same-but probably not as a first resort, at least!
  
  Couldn't they have... just knocked on my door and asked, though? I mean... that would have worked. Of course, meeting someone whose first step was kidnapping and interrogating you would have to be taken very carefully. But it meant I couldn't ignore the invitation. I didn't want to wake up to a polite man standing over my bed or comfortable chair some dark night.
  
  I waited about twenty more minutes before Kiwi brought in the woman she had mentioned. I already knew what she looked like, but I was surprised at her height. At least a-hundred-and-eighty-five cems, and she looked jacked. Her dossier said she was a former US Navy petty officer that may or may not have been in the special warfare department. After she separated, she worked as a mercenary for numerous legal, quasi-legal and outright criminal enterprises.
  
  After introducing herself to me, she sat down in front of me and asked when we were alone, "Tron said that you have connections that could get me a new ID. I need more than a physical change, though. Otherwise, I'm dead eventually, anyway. What will it cost me?" Kiwi was going by "Tron"?! Who came up with that name, anyway? Avocado was better.
  
  Still, I grinned at her, steepling my fingers like a proper villainess, "It will cost your everything."
  
  She expected to pay in eddies, of which she had quite a few, possibly from her thievery but ended up more excited by what I charged her. Namely, her entire identity. She was perplexed at first why anyone would want to assume an identity that was marked for death, but from her perspective, someone else continuing on her life was great for her, as nobody would ever suspect her of being, well, her. I tried to give the impression that I had another client, and I leaned into my mistaken identity as a Fixer here, that needed a "real" identity and wasn't planning to remain in the Americas anyway, so it was a perfect trade.
  
  She had spent over eight hours recounting for my recording devices a detailed account of her life's story, especially her military service and jobs afterwards. She wouldn't divulge some things, mostly to do with her criminal career after she left the service and a few governmental secrets, but that was fine because I didn't really need to know everything about her. I just needed to know everything she would disclose about herself. If there was no way she would tell any other person about it, then I, too, didn't really need to know.
  
  She was unconscious now and going to remain so for some time inside my personal biosculpt vat in my laboratory. The body she had helped design with me was downright petite, and it definitely didn't resemble her. I had to take all of her implants out, as well, and I would be replacing them with comparable models or biosculpt treatments that could mimic their functionality.
  
  "I always wanted to be small and cute," the Amazon said bashfully before the surgery. Well, she'd get her wish, I supposed.
  
  "It's nice to see you again. How, how can I help you today, Miss Hebert?" Wakako asked me after a little polite small talk in her pachinko parlour office. My discussions with Wakako reinforced my belief that Wakako had come up from the streets, so to speak. She certainly didn't have a Corpo background, but I would have been a little bit surprised if she had.
  
  She was polite, like a Corpo, but she barely sent out signals using body language, intonation or cultural referents that tended to change what a Corpo meant when he or she said something. For example, I would never casually threaten to put a bomb in Wakako's limo as a way of telling her "no hard feelings." I was afraid she would believe me.
  
  I smiled, "I need some security. As ridiculous as this sounds, I have another meeting at Konpeki Plaza, and I thought it might be good to have a security team waiting for me outside."
  
  She pursed her lips and looked at me weirdly, "I do hope it goes better than your last meeting there. Although, it did end up being quite profitable for the both of us, eh?" Then she slowly shook her head, looking more amused now, "But yes. I think I can assist. I will need to know who you are meeting and a little bit about what it is about so I can accurately underwrite the risk, price it and offer the gig to mercenaries which might be most appropriate."
  
  I nodded. I did that as well when I acted as a liaison for people in Chinatown in LA. I mainly picked the gigs that I thought would be profitable and fit Kiwi's risk profile; the rest I handed off to mercenaries that I had become acquainted with that operated in the area.
  
  I generally charged a small fee for the service. I mostly acted as an escrow. In almost all cases, people had to pay upfront for mercenary service; otherwise, trying to get clients to pay afterwards was almost impossible. I was trustworthy enough to both keep the money, correctly judge the success or failure of a gig and pay the mercenary if the gig was successful or return it to the buyer if it failed.
  
  I frowned, having a sudden epiphany. Maybe I was a Fixer. A little one, though.
  
  Tabling that thought for the moment, I said while smiling, "Well, my grandmother has invited me for-"
  
  Wakako immediately interrupted me, "I'm afraid I won't be able to assist you."
  
  Wait, what?! Then it became clear. This bitch knew who my Grams was and hadn't even told me?! The odd first meeting with the tea service came to mind, telling me she probably knew the whole time! I narrowed my eyes but then realised it was kind of ridiculous to expect someone not to know who their own grandmother was. Also, I wouldn't have gotten involved in the family drama of that level, either.
  
  This did add strong corroborating evidence that Gram did not send that ninja butler to alter Alt-Mom's marriage certificate while I was asleep, although I had already felt that was a very out-there prospect, to begin with.
  
  We just stared at each other silently for a moment before I finally sighed, "Alright, fine."
  
  Wakako smiled and asked, " Besides that, is there anything I can help you out with?"
  
  I opened my mouth, paused and then closed it. I was about to decline, but something caused me to stop. I did need to buy something from Arasaka, and they were no longer willing to insure my shipments into LA, and even if I could get what I wanted there, it would be another adventure getting it to Night City through the NUSA blockade. Night City was trying to remain neutral in the conflict, which just meant that it pissed both sides off, kind of like Texas.
  
  Finally, I nodded, "I need at least one more of the same model Arasaka brand thermoptic implant you sold me last time, but if you can get three, I'd buy all three."
  
  I should have bought more when I had the chance from my Arasaka rep back when I ordered the robots. Both Dr Hasumi and Taylor had one unit installed, but I would need at least one more. The rest, I would stock, and it wasn't like I couldn't find buyers for them in this market.
  
  Stealth systems were technically an illegal, or at least restricted, implant in most jurisdictions, including Night City and the NUSA, but it was one of those laws that were selectively enforced. A hallmark of tyranny was that the legal system was so Byzantine that any random person was basically an unindicted felon, with only prosecutorial discretion keeping anyone out of gaol. As Beria said, "Show me the man (or woman in my case), and I will show you the crime." It kind of grated my sense of justice that I was getting the benefit of this selective enforcement, but not enough not to take advantage of it.
  
  She raised her eyebrows and hummed, "I can get one for sure. Maybe two, but I'll require payment upfront if you don't mind." I didn't at all. Taylor Hebert's accounts were flush, as were Dr Hasumi's. I had more contacts that were able to "tumble" electronic currency transfers, or rather obfuscate transfers between two parties, and they charged less than Wakako did. In fact, such a thing was one of the services I provided mercs in LA, too. It helped to have a big bankroll, as that made it a lot easier to move money around until even an AI couldn't determine who got what.
  
  I paid her and departed, a little disappointed. Military backup had only been a plan B for me in the first place. And even then, it was just something to make me feel better from a psychological perspective; I didn't think it would actually provide any protection beyond that.
  
  As I stepped out of the pachinko parlour, I briefly caught a glimpse of a camouflaged drone flying silently overhead a couple of hundred metres in the air. The stealth system of the drone flickered briefly as it occluded a darker cloud before refactoring and vanishing again in less than two hundred milliseconds, my eyes quickly and automatically shifting through all vision modes to try to recapture the vanishing shape in an automated "notice stealth, defeat stealth" program I had made.
  
  I barely got a glimpse of the flyer, but it still had me almost ducking for cover just in case it had a precision munition attached. It was clearly a military model. My observation drones had simple camouflage made of SmartPaint on their undersides but mainly relied on being small. This was both large and also featured an active stealth system.
  
  However, nothing happened, and I wasn't blown up. I ran a continuous scroll of my life onto a BD, but only a rolling twenty-four-hour period. It was useful in times like this, though. I rewound and paused the frame when the drone was visible and used several image post-processing techniques to create an outline of its shape, then punted that to my Agent to identify.
  
  The result came back quickly. Over ninety per cent confidence that it was a British BAE Demon Eye observation platform. I grinned widely. So they had won the contract, eh? I hadn't heard, but I didn't really care. It was probably publicised as a press release, though. Good job, Mr Stewart!
  
  I hummed the melody to Land of Hope and Glory as I walked to my car.
  
  As Taylor left, Wakako let out a breath in what was half an exhale and half a hiss. What had that girl been thinking, asking her that? It did seem that this was the real girl, though. At first, she was confused when she noticed that Dr Hasumi was still active back in Los Angeles, but it was clearly within Hebert's ability to make anyone indistinguishable from her, after all she did it for herself.
  
  She must have hired a relatively skilled surgeon, perhaps one that got in a lot of trouble somewhere, to continue to be Dr Hasumi while Taylor came back to Night City. Probably for a share of her profits? But how was Taylor controlling this double? Well, Kiwi was still in LA, so it wasn't hard to guess that if Dr Hasumi tried to take things over that she would disappear, with everyone being told she was "on vacation." Then, another more pliable Dr Hasumi would return.
  
  With as much money as she thought Dr Hasumi was making, Wakako was frankly astonished that Taylor Hebert wanted her old identity back. But this... it was a good scam and a great way to have her cake and eat it too.
  
  Wakako didn't ask when this invitation was for. She didn't dare. However, just the fact that such a personage was coming to Night City, even if it was only briefly, was precious information. She wouldn't be so uncouth as to sell it directly, but she could definitely profit from it.
  
  Taylor's "grandmother" wasn't on the same level as, say, Saburo Arasaka or Rosalind Myers. Wakako thought it was mainly because her family had already accepted the fact that they would not, in fact, rule the whole Solar system, so instead, they just carved out sections of it. It was a very European philosophy, Wakako thought.
  
  The portfolios of such families were, of course, confidential, but it wouldn't surprise Wakako if they owned significant amounts of shares in both Arasaka and Militech, just in case.
  
  It was time to "wake up" the new clone, which was floating in my personal vat in the laboratory in LA. It looked virtually identical to the woman who had floated there herself a week ago.
  
  That lady had been delighted with her new, "cute" body, and I had used a shipment of new implants to sneak her out of the building. She was starting a new life... somewhere. Perhaps staying here in LA, to me it didn't matter.
  
  All of my implants had been identical between Hasumi and Taylor Hebert, and that was very wise with the first pair, but I was diverging from this rule this time. Slightly, anyway. I would absolutely have to have the same cyberbrain and operating system for now and definitely the same or at least equivalent Kerenzikovs, but I thought the rest I could change. It might take a little bit to get used to, but it would be fine. Kiroshis would stay the same, including my modifications to them, because they were just too useful.
  
  I did include the stealth system on this new body as well because it was so universally useful, and it was very tolerated, even if it was restricted. But I could not take integrated weapons systems where I was going, not at all, so the monowire had to go.
  
  What replaced it was a very high-end military set of full-arm prostheses by MoorE Technologies. They were in the "Strong Arm" or "Gorilla Arm" class of cybernetics, and while they were in some ways as dangerous as a monowire, they were tolerated everywhere because they were also used by labourers.
  
  This body wouldn't have a cyberdeck at all, but I would be able to act as though it had one through my connection to my other bodies and other computers, and it had a full-body set of high-end subdermal armour system.
  
  I frowned at the almost Amazon body. Although Hasumi was curvier and a little shorter, she had a similar body type to my original, so it wasn't too difficult to get used to. Hopefully, this new body wouldn't cause any dysmorphia, especially with its more radical cyber limbs and armour instead of the more subdued muscle lace and ballistic skin weave. However, I was trying to fit in, and she had dermal armour, not ballistic skin weave. Well, it also had muscle and bone lace for the organic legs, too.
  
  Plus, this was exactly what a body that used to be a US Navy SEAL would look like, I thought. I couldn't exactly try to change it too much when I was trying to look like someone who had been a real person. Questions would be asked already, and I didn't want to diverge from what was expected too much.
  
  Well, there was no use continuing to wait around. I triggered the integration, and both my bodies sat down and began meditating while a countdown timer flashed in my HUD.
  
  Suddenly, again, I was more. It was hard to describe the feeling, but I really liked it. It wasn't like taking a drug because that just muddled your mind, whether it was a depressant or stimulant. It was the opposite of that, although I thought it might be just as addictive, so I tabled any plans for expanding to four any time soon. Besides, I had some special plans for number four that would take quite a while to implement.
  
  I helped myself out of the tank and got dressed. I had to hustle now. I only had a couple of hours to get to the Los Angeles International Airport for the OrbitalAir spaceplane flight to the Crystal Palace. A brief layover, followed by a much, much longer ride on a freighter to the Galileo Cylinder, one of the O'Neill Colonies. It would take close to two days to boost out to the Lagrange point where the space stations were situated at.
  
  If you had enough money and technical skills, and most importantly, no further entanglements or loyalties to the planet Earth, then you could immigrate, although I was sure I would be scrutinised severely due to "my" past military experience. I wouldn't be going there as a Doctor, no way. Too suspicious. The Amazon had no medical experience at all. But they needed a lot of electricians and other zero-gravity workers.
  
  The Amazon didn't have any experience in microgravity, but that could be taught. She had been a specialist in Interior Communications in the Navy before becoming a special warfare operator, but it meant she had both skills, and those would be the ones I would be leveraging. Submarines were half-spaceship, anyway, so my CV and immigration request had been tentatively approved by the Republic of O'Neill cylinders.
  
  I had already been devouring training manuals for both low and high-voltage electrician work, including training materials for precisely her former job in Interior Communications. It was basically the Navy's version of a networking tech, which I already had a little experience with creating the networks for several buildings.
  
  I frowned as I got into the cab with my duffle. I hope this didn't count as stolen valour. It was merely identity theft, and I had permission, even!
  
  At the same time, Taylor Hebert logged into the site to RSVP that she would, indeed, be available for tea on the fifth.
  
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  Nuka-Girl
  I looked at the pug dog who sat there panting and staring around at everything. She was theoretically my new pet, but the thing had been acting odd since it arrived weeks ago. Shortly before my Taylor body left Los Angeles, this thing had walked into my door with Mrs Pegpig riding on its back like it was a horse. The bird would use one wing to point a direction, and the dog walked that way dutifully. They had been trying to make it up the stairs before my security had stopped them, but they were already well aware of my pet pigeon, so they didn't know what to do and called me.
  
  Seeing my pigeon ride around on a small, tan pug was pretty weird. Just seeing a pug was pretty weird. Los Angeles didn't have the best atmospheric conditions, possibly even worse than Night City, and pugs had trouble breathing even in the best of times. There were no roving grumbles of pugs in LA, as far as I could tell. But this dog didn't have any embedded implant suggesting it was someone's pet, either. Checking my surveillance feed had the dog coming up from the south with Mrs Pegpig flying along with her.
  
  I had tried to find its owner but had no luck. It was a mystery. Was Mrs Pegpig trying to find the Hasumi body a replacement pet? The bird departed with my Taylor body back to Night City, after all. I knew I frequently thought about how Mrs Pegpig was more intelligent than the average bird, but that was going beyond just being smart for a bird.
  
  The dog seemed less intelligent than Mrs Pegpig, at least, but a lot of that was just my opinion on its stupid pug face. It didn't need a leash to go on walks, so it was probably smarter than the average dog. David was the one that was mostly taking care of her, but she liked sitting on my lap or coming in with me into my lab, although I often didn't let her in if I was going to be working for a long period, just in case she pooped inside. It cost five hundred eurodollars a month for the fee for a pet permit in Los Angeles, and that was less than the charge for Night City.
  
  I frowned at it. A few simple modifications would help it breathe better, at least. Maybe some respirocyte-building cybernetics, too, so it could rely on stored oxygen and didn't have to breathe the crappy Los Angeles air when it went outside to pee. I frowned. That would be a good modification for most people, too. Were there any commercially available respirocytes, I wondered, or would I have to invent one?
  
  "C'mere," I said to the pug, who suddenly looked at me warily, still panting while my hands were outstretched and grasping for the animal.
  
  The flight on the spaceplane was intense. Apparently, anti-gravity technology only worked when it was very close to a gravity well in the first place. So you could use it on the planetary surface but not in space. Not for propulsion and not for simulating gravity, either. That was a bit of a let-down, as that was real science fiction stuff. So instead, I gripped the handrest of my economy-class seat tightly as the variable-geometry motors of the spaceplane shifted from scramjet mode to pure rocket. The acceleration forces pushed me into my padded seat while on the wall in front of us was an accelerometer that displayed our current "g-forces" and had pegged out at three gs briefly before slowly falling.
  
  The Crystal Palace was very interesting, but I wouldn't have permission to explore it freely. In addition to the huge recreational and business areas that it was famous for, it acted as a vast transhipment hub, and this part of the station was where I was limited to. There would be no gilded oak panelled walls in this area, and no scantily clad hostesses, merely bare metal and shift workers, but everything was still very interesting. My first experience in microgravity was amazing, and I spent the entire spaceplane flight up looking out of the window at the Earth below. I noticed a few frequent fliers snort at me, at me acting like a tourist, but I didn't care at all.
  
  The colour of the Earth below was different from what I was expecting, different from the NASA images I had seen in Brockton Bay. The blue was mostly the same, but there were a lot fewer green areas than I expected. Most places appeared browner than I recalled, with even the areas that were obviously cultivated appearing darker yellow.
  
  Microgravity was a hoot, and there was time enough on the flight up to the Crystal Palace to experience it thoroughly. I was very fortunate I was not one of the approximately one-third of people who got violently ill in space, too. I had been watched most of the flight by the stewardesses, as were all of the few "new flyers", just in case this happened. One person did throw up, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be from what I knew about "space adaptation syndrome." Watching him heave into a small bag and then a stewardess rush to use a small vacuum to suck up the free-floating remnants was gross, but it also gave me ideas for a pharmaceutical that could prevent the reaction from taking place. Something for Dr Hasumi or maybe even Taylor Hebert to look into later.
  
  As I got off the spaceplane, I saw a clear demarcation. If you went to the right, you would enter the resort and residential area of the Crystal Palace; it was fancy. To the left, you enter the industrial and service areas. There was security at the fork in the path that was there specifically so that people like me did not try to go to the right side in the fork in the road, too. And probably also to ensure that the high-rollers did not go to the plebian areas by mistake.
  
  The industrial areas of the Crystal Palace were spun at half-gravity or were in zero-g, depending on their purpose. There was a surprising amount of freight traffic at the station, as I could see from legitimate spaceships anchored off on booms attached to the station. I spent a few minutes just looking out the windows, zooming in on each surprisingly large vehicle, and wondering which one I was going to be riding in shortly.
  
  The reason for so much traffic was that there were a number of products that were constructed in space that there was just no replacement for on Earth, as a number of industrial processes in a variety of industries ranging from electronics, nanite production, and pharmaceuticals required both vacuum and microgravity.
  
  This meant that some things were ridiculously cheap at the station, whereas other things were ridiculously expensive. I could get the systems-on-a-chip that I used for my first-generation sleep inducers at a tenth of the price up here, and that was because they were made in orbit, in large industrial space stations, and then shipped down the gravity well. At the same time, a thin scop hamburger with no cheese, no fries and no drink costs forty Eurodollars, which was more than eight times as expensive as LA. And that was at the "working people" restaurant in the industrial area of the Crystal Palace. It was true that modern spaceplanes reduced the cost of shipping things to orbit massively, but you couldn't overcome the tyranny of gravity so easily.
  
  It wasn't that it was impossible to build complex transistors and processors down on Earth, but without microgravity, it required the traditional photolithographic process, which used tons and tons of incredibly pure water in the cleaning stages. "Pure water" for industrial processes was priced by the grade, and the "ultrapure water" necessary in chip fabs costs more than fifty eurodollars per litre these days. It was much cheaper to use the different production processes in space than build these large traditional chip fabs on the ground, even if you had to build a huge space station.
  
  Ironically, purifying water in space through vacuum distillation was much cheaper, but nobody would ship water up to orbit and then ship it back down again. While there was some deep space mining activity of small comets or snowballs in popular parlance, the production was nowhere near high enough to ship any water back down the gravity well. As with most things, it was worth so much because it was already in space. A kilo of Chinese steel for sintering stock was worth three Eurodollars, but the same kilo of steel in low-earth orbit was worth forty.
  
  All of this combined to make space a rather weird economy. It was the opposite of what was expected when you thought of "Colonies." The opposite of the "normal" colony model. Colonies were established in space, but instead of raw materials being sent back to Earth like the colonies in the past, it was mostly finished products that went down the gravity well and raw materials and food that got shipped up to orbit. The O'Neill Colony that I was headed to was theoretically self-sufficient with a population of over forty thousand but, in reality, relied on a lot of trade with Earth and other stations.
  
  I finished my burger, fries and lemonade. I was avoiding any carbonated beverages as the flight to the Lagrange point was both long and with minimal amounts of gravity. The freighters used high-efficiency continuous thrust engines-many low-thrust plasma engines powered by fission reactors. The result was that they took quite a while to get going, and the entire flight was probably going to be in microgravity.
  
  Not only were the bubbles of carbon dioxide in carbonated beverages not buoyant in microgravity, but the same applied after you drank them, so burping was impossible. It was best to avoid such beverages unless you were on a station with simulated gravity. If I was staying here in the Crystal Palance, or when I got to the colony, it would be fine... but not for the flight over!
  
  I frowned. There was a digital map app on the Crystal Palace site, but it was rather confusing. I decided to ask the man who ran this burger joint in space, as he seemed pretty pleasant when I ordered my meal. "Can you help me out? I'm trying to find the freight terminals," I told him.
  
  He nodded while flipping patties in unusual ways in the half-gravity, "Leave here, and turn anti-spinward and you're going to need to walk about a third of the ring; I think it is about twenty cors down. Turn spinward and exit into the zero-g area; there will be red lines bordering the door to tell you its in zero-g. Grab the handrail and throw yourself through the door. Then follow the brown line on the deck."
  
  I blinked several times at that unusual vocabulary, but I was not stupid. I was smarter than ever, and I lived a life about four times as fast as the average person, too. I parsed that carefully, following along on the confusing three-dimensional map. "Anti-spinward... that would be to the left, aye?"
  
  He looked up at me and grinned, "Yeah, that's right. Nice. Maybe you'll fit in after all. Ibrahim Olayiwola." He reached out with an offer to shake my hand but then corrected me when I tried to grasp it, saying, "No, no... spacers don't shake that way. Too easy to impart too much momentum in zero-g. It can be a disaster in a p-suit. Just slap or, better yet, lightly tap the palm of my hand with your fingers, like this..." He demonstrated by tapping his fingers on my palm several times.
  
  I reciprocated the gesture and nodded at him, "Hana Rahim. 'Preciate it." I said, trying to mimic Hana's normal, slightly clipped way of speaking. I had hours of her talking, telling me her life story, so it wasn't too difficult to emulate.
  
  The difference in a handshake made absolute sense when I considered it. You could just grab someone and shake them around bodily in microgravity or go flying off as you each imparted forces to each other if you weren't firmly on the deck yourself. But it hadn't been something I had thought of.
  
  He nodded and had a thoughtful expression on his face, "How much time do you have before your ship leaves?"
  
  "Quite a while, about a hundred and fifty mikes," I said, curious as to why he was asking. Perhaps he had some sights I could see; I didn't mind acting the obvious tourist. Although we were in the industrial area, I saw that there was one casino, but I was definitely going to skip that. Gambling was a tax on people who didn't understand probabilities.
  
  He nodded, "Good. You must be headed out to the O'Neil Colony, the only freighter that's scheduled for a departure in the next three hours. Usually, there would be a couple of dozen or more ships coming in and out every shift, but you caught a lull, so it's easy to guess where you headed." He nodded, "On your way to the freight docks, stop in the ship's chandlery, it'll be before the zero-g section, and ditch those boondockers." He then stepped around the counter and held a foot up, showing me some unusual footwear. They looked like heavy-duty socks to me or something akin to light-duty toe shoes, with each individual toe able to move around. This was way different from the steel-toed combat boots I had picked for Hana's "outfit." He continued, "After that, maybe consider a haircut."
  
  I frowned, holding my hand up to my hair. It was barely to my shoulders. I tried to think of what Hana would say, coming up with, "It's within regs."
  
  That got him to laugh, slapping his thigh and saying a few words in a language I couldn't decipher. My OS called it Yoruba, whatever that was, but it didn't have the translation pack downloaded. Then he grinned and continued back in English, "Ya, no doubt, sister. But spacers favour a much shorter cut these days. Maybe no longer than abouuut here..." he made a pixie-style or even boy-cut with his hands around his head, "Gets in the way if you have to wear a p-suit, yanno? Will help you fit in, make you not an obvious immigrant from the dirtball, iffen you want. If you are stuck on longer hair, then get some techhair that lets you change length."
  
  He paused there for a moment and then continued, explaining, "But, to avoid misunderstandings, it is a faux pas to keep it a natural hair colour. Colourise it in very non-natural colours, and it'll show you're not a gonk." Ah. That explained the stewardess who had neon pink hair down to her ass. Maybe.
  
  I took the word dirtball as an obvious pejorative about Earth, which I found interesting. It would make sense that people who lived and worked up here might tend to develop a unique culture and a distaste for the culture and people on Earth, so I thought he was giving me some good advice. I nodded, "If I can find a barber, I'll take your advice."
  
  He snorted and nodded, "Download the unofficial map app, girly. The standard one sucks balls. It's basically designed to get groundsiders lost intentionally. If you was in the main one-gee levels, you'd always tend to get lost and find yourself in the most expensive places, too, ya? Funny how that works out, ya? The one you want should be on the regular app store under the name CrysKharita. Just change the default language to English or whatever, and you're good to go."
  
  I nodded slowly. I'd run that in a virtual machine, just in case-just like I did the official map app. "You're doing me a solid. I guess the least I can do is buy another burger to go. Or maybe two. With cheese this time." Plus, they were kind of small, and this body had a lot bigger appetite than I had been expecting.
  
  He chortled and got back behind the grill.
  
  Ibrahim Olayiwola was a second-generation spacer, or Highrider, as people from the dirtball would call him. An entrepreneur, too. His parents were, too, telling him the story about how they had run their own business in Lagos until they spent everything on a chance to immigrate away from the dirtball. Personally, he'd never been on the planet himself and had no desire to ever do so.
  
  People would be amazed at how much money a slightly reasonably priced greasy burger place could make if it was situated right between the spaceplane docks and the freighter anchorages.
  
  Today was a slow day, as usually, he would have had to call in an hourly worker to take over the grill so he could make an excuse to talk to the new faces. He hadn't even needed to approach this new woman; she started asking him for directions.
  
  This, too, was a source of income. As the only reasonably priced provider of food in between where everyone who was immigrating would have to walk, he was a valued intelligence asset of not only the O'Neill Republics but also the two other O'Neil Colonies that were still corporate-controlled. He didn't discriminate on who he sold intelligence to, after all.
  
  Everything was a datum. Say someone was, on the surface, a working-class person that might have struggled to pay for their lift ticket and immigration escrow to one of the colonies. But then they skipped the cheap filling meal he sold and went to one of the few expensive tourist trap places on the industrial side. Like, maybe the one casino they had? Well, that told people something too. Maybe they weren't as poor as they were letting on, yeah?
  
  He'd already sent his first impressions of this new lady to a half-dozen addresses. It wasn't a letter, just a list of mostly single words, things he'd noticed: "Clean, neat, former military, switched-on, dangerous, groundsider, smart, polite, has the look of a hard worker, willing to assimilate." He didn't need to send more than that, as he was just sending his impressions. All of the colonies were careful to avoid letting dirtball intelligence operatives immigrate if they could help it. Even the Corporate controlled ones didn't want them. They might be owned by Corporations headquartered below, but they were run and manned by people just like him, and everyone was careful to screen immigrants carefully. Not just for spies, either, but temperament.
  
  It was expensive to have children in space. Children had to grow up in full gravity for a significant amount of their childhood, at least until they were ten or twelve. Most people lived in half-g, at most. You could rent slots in public creches, where children could sleep at night in full gee, but it was pricey. Two people had to really want to have children to do it up here, as his parents had. The O'Neill colonies were one of the few places where most of the area was in full gee, but even that wasn't completely accurate as there were over a hundred traditional space stations in and around each of the pairs of longer, hollowed-out cylinders. It was much cheaper to live in these orbiting stations, so most people lived there rather than in the cylinders themselves, which had business, tourism, industry and agriculture in the full-gee areas, as well as, of course, the higher-end residential areas.
  
  That meant that most population growth, even if they just wanted to maintain population levels, was still through immigration, and they didn't want any slackers, stinks or commissars up here. Integrating clued-in groundsiders into a workgroup was so much easier if they weren't gonks, to begin with. Former military people were pretty standard. They were usually pretty technically minded, respected rules and hierarchy, and as such, had a higher percentage of success from a spacer's perspective than the average dirtball civvie. Space was a dangerous place, and people who had often been shot at were usually pretty careful listeners when you started to tell them things like, "If you do this, you will die."
  
  Even then, only fifty per cent of even this demographic worked out. The rest they shipped back to the dirtball. That was one reason why the fees for immigrating were so expensive, as they included your return ticket up-front in case you got kicked out. That, or they died doing something stupid. And that was expensive too! If someone forgot to double-check their O2 bottle charge, asphyxiated on an EVA, and floated off into space, you had to charter a tug to pick them up. Otherwise, their corpse could become a hazard to navigation. Not to mention the p-suit could still be reused.
  
  He'd do what he was doing for free just to help filter the wheat from the chaff, but no way would he admit that! He received one to two hundred Eurdollars or the equivalent in New Yen from everyone he sold his impressions to!
  
  He had a mortgage on his genetic treatments and life extension to pay off, after all.
  
  I was one of the only passengers on the spaceship, as most of the area was devoted to cargo. I had one of the crewmembers explain the operation of my berth, which was more like a chair that could fold out into a bed. It had a curtain you could run around for "privacy." The man said cheerfully, finishing his presentation, "And below your seat is an emergency suit that you can don in case of a pressure emergency."
  
  I glanced at the obvious pressure suit the man was wearing himself, just with no helmet on just now, and then glanced at the bulkhead walls and tapped them, careful not to push myself too much in zero-g. I had already needed this man's help to right myself once, and it had been embarrassing. The hull was aluminium, no doubt mined on the moon rather than shipped up from Earth, hopefully, with some sort of armoured layer between me and the vacuum of space.
  
  I asked curiously, "How fast would it take this spacecraft to depressurise if we got holed by a micrometeorite?"
  
  "Oh, in seconds," he said, smiling even wider.
  
  I nodded, as that was what I expected. The volume of the ship just wasn't that large. I coughed delicately, "I'd like to try to put the suit on, just in case, so I can shorten any time I am floating around dying."
  
  He grinned, reaching underneath the seat to pull it out. It was folded like origami and flattened, like a blanket, inside a heavy-duty clear plastic bag. "That's permissible. But these suits have to be recertified every time they are opened. They inspect the suit for small rips, weigh the O2canister, you know. Costs about thirty-one-thousand New Yen to recertify one. Still want to do it?" That was about the equivalent of four hundred and ten Eurodollars.
  
  I nodded rapidly. It would be worth it at twice that price. He handed it to me and even walked me through the process, giving me tips on how I could shave a few seconds off here and there. I was tempted to wear the thing the entire flight over there, but it was clearly a thin suit designed only for emergencies. Not like the fancy pressure suit the crewmember had on. One of those sounded like one of the first things I might buy.
  
  The trip was very uneventful, thankfully. I found myself surprised-utterly shocked, actually, at how much thrust the ship was putting out when we got going. I never actually looked at the numbers, but there had to be close to one-twentieth of a gravity of acceleration forces involved. That didn't sound like a lot, but it would make a plum bob fall true, and furthermore, it was actually incredibly fast acceleration for a spaceship carrying a lot of cargo.
  
  I had been wondering just how it was possible at all for there to be any activity in deep space whatsoever. But assuming they could maintain this acceleration indefinitely, then you could travel from Earth to Mars in ten to fifteen days, not six months like I was expecting with chemical rockets.
  
  I didn't know if that was actually possible because our flight plan, according to the entertainment system, was over thirty hours and did not accelerate continuously. Large segments would be in zero-g before we decelerated into orbit at the metastable point the colony of dozens of space stations lived in.
  
  I had no idea how these spaceships worked, though, but it may be just a matter of them wanting to save fuel... or rather, reaction mass since it was fission-powered. I was curious how they dissipated the heat of a fission reactor without cooking us all inside the ship, and I wondered about how they shielded the cabin from the radiation the reactor put out during operation.
  
  Thinking about that made me happy that I had picked one of the most expensive subdermal armour systems there was, not because it was so much better at ballistic protection but because it had top-of-the-line radiation shielding built in, and in a way that didn't make my skin look ridiculous, like the Michelin Man. You could definitely tell I had subdermal armour, but it looked like a normal armour install.
  
  It was actually marketed towards workers in high-radiation environments like space, but even those working around neutron sources, too. It couldn't completely stop gamma and it could only moderate fast neutrons, of course, but it provided very good protection against most other threats. Perhaps it would make me opaque to scanners, too, although I still didn't know precisely how scanners worked, except that they weren't actually ionising like old-fashioned X-rays, so they were safe to be exposed to repeatedly and even continuously. That was something I kept meaning to study so as to help myself make hidden implants, but it was also something I never quite got the time to pursue.
  
  We docked at the actual O'Neil cylinder instead of one of the many orbiting space stations, and I got out. I could immediately detect the false gravity. Although they were called O'Neil cylinders, the truth was that they took some liberties with the term. A true O'Neil cylinder should have an internal radius of eight kilometres or more. That had been the initial idea many, many decades ago.
  
  His original idea also included paired cylinders that counter-rotated against one another, using complex series of bearings, all for the purpose of keeping the cylinder pointed at the sun. Extremely mechanically complicated and extremely expensive.
  
  The stations here had no alternating land and window segments, as it was much cheaper to use artificial lighting. Not only could you maximise the useful area inside, but you did not need either a counter-rotating cylinder pair or the complicated bearing system. It was also smaller. Much smaller. Rather than an eight-kilometre radius inside, it was closer to one and a quarter.
  
  Due to the lack of using the sun to power most things, everything was powered by fission reactors, although I had heard that there were plans to try to build a fusion reactor in one of the orbiting space stations and beam power into the cylinder. That would be interesting. Currently, the only commercially available fusion reactor design was about a two-terawatt plant, but you needed over fifty acres, plus a security perimeter, to house it. So, it wasn't really ready for space applications.
  
  Although a mini-O'Neill cylinder, it was still incredibly huge for a space station, but by designing it this small, it became plausible to construct on a limited budget. And it could always be expanded outward, extending the cylinder out. However, this meant that in order to achieve one-g of simulated gravity, the cylinder had to spin at about point eight-five revolutions a minute. This correlated to a tangential velocity, or "rim speed", of over one hundred and ten metres per second.
  
  As such, it was detectable. I could detect that the gravity was coming from spinning, but it was still considered in the "comfort zone" of such structures and people very quickly adapted to living in such conditions. There wasn't a customs entry, per se, but two men met me at the dock and took me into a small conference room.
  
  Like a lot of spacers, especially those in the O'Neill colonies, they had an African phenotype. From my expert eye, I figured it would take at least another one hundred and fifty generations before comparative evolution caused their melanin to drop considerably due to no longer experiencing much UV radiation. Would spacers develop protections from other types of radiation over time?
  
  I shook my head. No. Probably not. Not because it was impossible through evolutionary pressure but because we, as a species, had already eliminated evolutionary pressure. Artificial tinkering of the genome would ensure that they'd have whatever skin colouration they wanted, and the same was true for any artificial biological attempts at radiation protection. Those would come a lot faster, then be proliferated and eliminate any pressure for an evolutionary solution. Evolution was a messy bitch, anyway. It was the age of artificial, not natural, selection, and I was all for it.
  
  "Ms Rahim, I am Kalu Igwe, and this is my partner, Jim," the first man said, and I blinked. I had been getting used to the mostly Nigerian-sounding names that I had heard a lot of lately, and then he threw me for a loop. Jim? Well, okay, "We work for the Republic here, and it's standard to have a chat with new immigrants. We are..."
  
  I had been thinking of how Hana would reply, and this was too good a chance to pass up. I scrunched up my face and said, "Intel weenies."
  
  Kalu blinked, but this "Jim" chortled, grinning. He nodded, "Yeah, precisely."
  
  What followed was a polite interrogation. They already knew a lot about Hana Rahim, including her reason for immigrating, but were double-checking, crossing their t's and dotting their i's. It wasn't entirely counter-intelligence work, either, as they were building a list of things that I had to learn. The Republic would send new immigrants through classes for a few months, paying for it themselves, and would also help me find work, given Hana's stated specialities.
  
  I wanted to groan in frustration when I discovered that there was a huge shortage of cybernetics surgeons and geneticists, to the point where, when they noticed my new cybernetics, including the radiation-shielding dermal armour, instead of being suspicious, they asked me if the doc I used was interested in space. And if so, they'd sponsor them to come up here.
  
  Ah well. I had specifically picked this identity so that it wouldn't be too similar to the work I did as both Taylor and Hasumi, but maybe that hadn't been necessary. Still, it would be interesting to learn entirely new occupations, even if they were somewhat "common." But how common could zero-g vacuum construction actually be? There were certainly fewer people who could build a space station or spaceship in a vacuum than there were doctors on Earth. It was just a question of relative abundance.
  
  It wasn't like I was here because this was my optimum choice, anyway. The optimum choice for this third identity as a hedge was to move somewhere in Europe, with a bunch of resources buried in the ground, and live a quiet life in the countryside.
  
  Living on a space station, even one as large as this cylinder was, I wouldn't be able to quickly rebuild and reclone my first and second bodies if something terrible happened to both of them simultaneously. And there was a good chance I would live on one of the other, even smaller, stations. It would be possible, but not for years, depending on how closely I was watched and how much free time my work gave me.
  
  In the worst case, I might have to leave to return to Earth to do it. Still, I was satisfied. I mean... space! I told myself it was protection in case of a sudden planetwide disaster like a large nuclear war or a gamma-ray burst, but the truth was I just wanted to come up to space now that I had the money to do so.
  
  As I was starting my second week of "space kindergarten", I was also walking into the Konpeki Plaza building again. It felt very nostalgic to see the place, and despite the fact that it was the afternoon, I had just woken up. Synchronising sleep schedules had been a challenge, as the colonies arbitrarily operated on Greenwich Mean Time.
  
  It wouldn't really matter once I finished the schooling, as I could work on any of the three "shifts", but for now, I had to sleep at kind of odd times. The fact that I only needed a few hours of sleep helped a lot, though. So I just took a couple of hours off mid-day as Hasumi and Taylor for a "nap."
  
  I had considered for quite a while what I should wear, and I finally decided to go with what felt most comfortable. Not a full dress like last time; instead, I was going with my "librarian outfit" with the pencil skirt. It looked very Militech, but I liked their subdued colour themes compared to most Corporations. Besides, it was my roots, I supposed. Or at least it had been NC-Taylor's roots, and I had co-opted them when I came here.
  
  I was dressed fairly similar to a lot of people in the lobby of the hotel as well, and I casually waited in line for my turn to be scanned by the security pylons. This time I was carrying a pistol; I would just leave it with the security guy, though.
  
  I walked through the scanning pylons, which immediately flashed red, and I was taken aside, just like last time. "Ma'am, I'm afraid that you will have to-"
  
  He was interrupted by a second man walking up to him and whispering urgently into his ear, which caused him to freeze. He looked at me like I was carrying a bazooka and not a subcompact nine millimetre and corrected himself, suddenly, "Ma'am, my apologies. You may proceed. Your party is waiting for you in the Tavernier Suite on the hundredth floor."
  
  You could hear a pin drop, and I suddenly realised I was the focus of a lot of attention. Not only was I being allowed to carry a piece on, not put a bracelet over my monowire, but I was being directed to the penthouse floor. I didn't like being the subject of a lot of people's attention, but I bared up and managed to avoid blushing with an exercise of will.
  
  This level of treatment was certainly different, though. I guess I had Gram to thank. She had clearly told the people working here to be expecting me.
  
  That I was being allowed to remain armed should have been done to put me at ease, but honestly, it just made me feel more anxious. It was a statement of strength, something like, "I'm not concerned about whatever you have with you."
  
  I should have brought a grenade, at least. I sighed and walked to the elevator.
  
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  Superpower? That's a midpower
  AN: I am going to adjust the previous chapter that had the date for the meeting as "July 5". Instead, it is September, as I think it should be closer to the end of the year. I will also include a date/location at the beginning of the chapter and at any chapter breaks, if it changes, from now on.
  
  September, 2066
  
  Night City
  
  I stepped onto the elevator and glanced behind me. There was a couple that looked like they needed to go up, too, so I held my hand to block the door of the lift from closing. However, they smiled funnily and just said, "We'll catch the next one, thanks."
  
  I snorted. The elevator was huge. You could fit almost a squad of soldiers in here if you wanted, fully kitted out too. But I nodded and ducked back inside, allowing the doors to close. I said politely, "Floor one hundred, please." I was always polite with man-machine interfaces, just in case the AI actually took over the world, which was actually a serious possibility, one that might keep me up at night if I didn't have a way to instantly and infallibly fall asleep. Perhaps they'd remember my politeness. It didn't hurt anything.
  
  I was a little surprised when the doors opened. I half-expected the ninja to be waiting for me, but instead, it was a woman in a literal maid's outfit. In another situation, I would accuse the woman of cosplaying, but she wore it more like it was a uniform.
  
  If this was an anime BD, she would be armed to the teeth. I shifted my vision modes to a combination of forward-looking infrared and multi-millimetre wave radar, then used graphical compositing to combine the images in my vision. Machine learning software that I had co-opted from last century airport security scanners highlighted in red boxes several suspicious areas, and sure enough, she had a pistol and a brace of knives in her stockings. Lightly armed, then, like me. Not to the teeth at all.
  
  The MMW radar was a new addition that I added to myself recently. I haven't even got a chance to put it in my other bodies. Dr Hasumi would get the addition soon but myself in space might have to go without. I was sure I would get enough tools to perform some rudimentary self-surgery, but probably not for some time. The radar transceivers were too large to fit in my already crowded Kiroshis, so instead, I put them in a small strip on my forehead, underneath the skin.
  
  It allowed me to look beneath people's clothing to some extent so I could, occasionally, identify hidden weapons. The images produced weren't of sufficient resolution to be lewd, especially because to generate a fully three-dimensional image, I would have to walk around a person in a circle while shaking my head at them. Despite that, it was still quite useful to identify who was approaching me with a gun in their waistband or wearing a suicide vest-the latter I hadn't seen yet.
  
  "Miss Hebert?" the maid asked me, and I inclined my head. She smiled affably and said, "If you'll follow me." I nodded and followed behind her, switching my eyes back to visual spectrum mode and ceasing my radar transmitting. The penthouse was very large and set up in an open plan that I absolutely despised. It wasn't like there was anything wrong with it in particular, but I just liked walls and clearly separated areas. It was the architectural equivalent of having a bunch of screws piled in a drawer instead of sorting them by size in their own individual cubbies.
  
  We walked around a corner from the vestibule, and I could see most of the entire penthouse level, even the edges of a bedroom area that was barely hidden behind a SmartWall that took up a large portion. The living area was what I might refer to Japanese-Euro fusion as there were wood-panelled flooring instead of tatami and small, low-to-the-ground open-backed chairs instead of zabuton pillows. However, all of those were sat to the side, and a more traditional circular European table and chairs were in their place.
  
  Ah, there was the ninja. Standing a little bit behind and to the left of Gram. I was a little more confident I could take him this time, especially if he had to protect Gram here, but I wasn't here to find out. I doubted very much that they would fight fair, either. This maid was probably a combat gynoid or something ridiculous like that.
  
  I tried to avoid tensing too much as I got my first look at Gram. I almost tripped when I realised she looked somewhat similar to an older Sarah in her elf guise that I had helped design for her, except red headed. Was she trying to make a statement that she knew about me as Dr Hasumi? I already thought that she might, but as soon as I thought that was what she was trying to say, I discounted it. She wore her "style", for lack of a better word, too well, and I didn't know anyone that would go as far as elective biosculpting just to send a message to a granddaughter that they had never seen before.
  
  I hated that I knew this term, but it would be difficult not to with all the elves I had made in the past, but Gram went along the traditional "erofu" model. She looked to be in her early thirties, although I knew she was in her early seventies if she had the same relative age difference as Brockton-Gram. She was slim, not surprisingly, except for some well-defined hips and bust-line, with pale-complexioned skin and long, braided, red hair. There was a light dusting of freckles on her face, but my expert eye immediately decided that they were cosmetically added.
  
  I didn't think anyone as wealthy as Gram would keep the bog-standard human gene expression for freckles when it also opened you up to certain illnesses like basal-cell carcinoma, as well as a number of kidney issues. The most striking part of her was her eyes. They were green in the same way that a cut emerald was just a rock, and they seemed to stare directly through me. It looked like she could see five metres through me while I was a pool of clear water only two metres deep. It was kind of upsetting, actually, and I frowned.
  
  "Taylor, Taylor... thank you for accepting my invitation," she said, standing up and motioning me over to the table to take a seat. I stopped myself from raising my eyebrows. Her voice was quite melodious, and she had to have either some sort of vocal cybernetics or serious vocal training. Her accent was something like Irish, although it wasn't as overpowering as I remembered from my brief testing of the "Derry" mode when I was pretending to be the blonde Miss White.
  
  I let myself flow towards the seat she indicated and sat down, saying neutrally, "Thank you for the invitation. I appreciate it."
  
  That caused her to chuckle and say, "Is that so?" She took a seat as well, although the ninja man remained standing behind her. Damn. I didn't have any trustworthy minion to bring along with me, but I had the time to clone a random body and install a Haywire FTL com system and Tinkered-up remote control system so that one thread of my consciousness could control it. It would have been equitable if I had my own minion, even if I had to play the role of it myself.
  
  Just to be safe, I double-checked all of my contingency systems. I had a couple of things that might or might not kill everybody in the room except for me. They were actually three types of the same thing, a type of rabidly virulent flesh-eating bacteria that I could aersolise. I carried the speciality bacteriophages in the form of white smoke which might save my own skin. I wasn't sure of the chances of the bacteria working on the ninja, though, since the organic material in a Gemini body didn't have very much actually in common with a human genome, despite the fact that its appearance mimicked humans so well. Attack vectors for biological agents were small as well, and even with no organic components, a Gemini body would still be somewhat functional.
  
  I didn't know at all about the maid. She looked like a regular, petite girl, which probably meant she was a combat gynoid, even if I couldn't detect it.
  
  This was something I had taken from NC-Taylor's files. I got the impression that she was a bit better than me in terms of creating wildly implausible things like this, and I was a little jealous.
  
  Most everything I created had to be more down-to-earth, at least physically possible most of the time. I wasn't sure, but this bacteria seemed to violate some of what I knew about thermodynamics. It shouldn't have the chemical energy necessary to be as... effective as it was. It had skeletonised an unfortunate test rat in seconds, and seconds after that, the bones melted. Still, my power dutifully let me duplicate it, at least, but I got the impression that it would appreciate it if I didn't go ham with things like this all the time. Even Mrs Pegpig cooed at me in disapproval when I made and tested it. It was also the single most dangerous thing I had ever had near my body, and even with the alleged counteragent, it made me nervous.
  
  My last resort was a system I installed in my cyberbrain that would stop all electrical activity in my brain. Permanently. And then my cyberbrain would explode, just to be sure. The activation requirements for this were quite complicated, not surprisingly. I didn't want someone to be able to hack me and kill me. It had to be activated by one of my other bodies and wasn't, by default, connected to any part of my system's network. I could arm it by having Dr Hasumi or Hana touch my tongue to the teeth in my mouth in a certain order five times in a row.
  
  That sounded hard to do, but it was something I absolutely wouldn't do by accident as I had crafted the pattern to make that utterly impossible. Plus, one of the things I discovered I was better at now was spatial memory things, which followed, somehow, to tongue dexterity.
  
  It was only when the system was armed would the circuits be physically connected that would allow it to trigger. At that point, I could trigger it manually, or it would trigger by itself if it detected I was either being tortured severely or if it detected my cyberbrain was being tampered with. This was mainly for "fate worse than death" options, but I wouldn't allow myself to be subjected to thorough brain scanning again.
  
  Well, the last time hadn't even been that thorough. I was more worried about systems like Soulkiller. If my brain was thoroughly scanned, destructively or not, I and all of my memories could be digitised, and something digitised could be inspected and interrogated via software. That couldn't be allowed. My secrets were for keeping.
  
  It was scary to think about because my philosophy regarding my networkself had never been tested. It was possible that I was just deluding myself on how it would be, and if that system ever triggered, I would just die, forever and ever, amen. It was almost a metaphysical question which I didn't particularly like, but it was one I had already answered, to myself at least. As much as that was a poor way to describe it, I had faith that my continuous stream of consciousness would continue, even if parts of it died.
  
  Gram coughed delicately and said, "There was just one question that I'd really appreciate it if you could answer, dear, as Cara brings out the tea. And I do apologise for being so uncouth right off the bat, but... you are Taylor Hebert, daughter of Annette Rose Hebert, yes?" Her green eyes stared through me, and I felt a bit of a chill.
  
  I sighed. It looked like some of my worst-case scenarios might be the most accurate. I had wondered, thought and modelled about why Gram invited me here. I had already figured out why the ninja-man attacked me... it was the same reason I suspected last time. They thought I was an impersonator, a changeling, a dopplegånger. I just had the wrong side of the family that was responsible. I had thought it had been from one of Alt-Danny's spook friends, doing his buddy a solid even after he had passed away. I had thought it was kind of nice, actually, after I got over it.
  
  But since I discovered that I was wrong, I realised that she could have sprung for a lot more resources. Say, constant surveillance. I had been very careful to make my escape to LA, but I was worried about people finding me retrospectively. I was confident it would be hard, even for serious intelligence operatives, to do that, to make that link between Taylor Hebert disappearing and months later Sakura Hasumi reappearing. But it would be simple as pie if they followed me to the Konpeki Plaza, watched me do the gig, and then followed me to the safehouse Wakako set up for me.
  
  They could see and count all the people who went in and out of that building, and then it wouldn't take even an especially smart cookie to realise who the Japanese woman with suspiciously similar cybernetics was when she left and immediately fled the city in the care and company of Nomads.
  
  Facial recognition would have given Dr Hasumi's identity, and from there, they could have just waited until she resurfaced again. I suspect they were somewhat surprised when Taylor Hebert reappeared while Sakura Hasumi was still going about her day-to-day activities. The fact that we still have identical cybernetics between us would just add to the mystery. I felt that was the reason for the invitation. To be frank, I didn't know what to say about it. I was just going to try to avoid speaking about it if at all possible, and lie if I couldn't be vague. Perhaps she'd assume I had hired a stand-in and sculpted her to look like Hasumi, and I was pulling her strings like a puppet.
  
  I nodded, "Yes, of course. She never told me about you, though." I shook my head, joking, "Otherwise, I would have asked for a bigger allowance."
  
  If anything, she looked slightly relieved, although it flashed so quickly that I might have imagined it. I'd have to go back and replay this experience to be sure. It was a bit odd that she was taking my word for it, but before I could think about that, she placed her hands lightly on the table and said, "Taylor, I have to apologise. Years ago, when you shifted interests so radically, I was afraid that you had been murdered and had your identity stolen. I sent William here to check and, if necessary, to avenge you."
  
  Yeah, I had already guessed that. I would have liked to be more angry about it, but all I said was, "Perhaps he could have knocked at my door and not defaulted to kidnapping." At that point, the likely combat gynoid walked back in carrying both a full tea service on one tray and a tray of little pastries and small mini-sandwiches in the other. The ninja in question smiled ruefully and rubbed the back of his neck.
  
  She started serving us and poured tea for each of us but left the cream or sugar to us. I put a little of each in and used the spoon to agitate the beverage gently, being careful not to be so uncouth as to bang my spoon on the side of the cup, "Having said that, I don't think it would be advantageous of me to hold a grudge." I was actually shocked and amazed that she had apologised at all. I had considered the possibility, but I suspected that the ninja, this William, would apologise, not Gram.
  
  Gram smiled and inclined her head, "I'm so glad, especially that you are you. I was a little worried that you had done something terrible to yourself, like those two gentlemen that you helped fuse into one in Los Angeles."
  
  Ohhh... Ab, or Paul and Will Ochoki. The two twins that I had installed that interesting Zetatech "neural oscillation synchroniser" on. I had totally forgotten about them, which wasn't like me. That meant that Gram was spying on me, or at least had a dossier about exactly what I had done at work, anyway. I wouldn't say that that hadn't influenced my network either. I had taken a bit away from it, but it was very limited.
  
  But this was an option that was being tossed into to my lap; perhaps I could get her to think that my synchronisation was a lot more limited than it was. The issue was that this would still be incredibly valuable, at least to the very rich like her. It would be an even worse version of immortality than being digitised by either Soulkiller or my own private brain-scanning system, but it wasn't like there were a lot of alternatives here, so a lot of people might be interested in it anyway.
  
  I wouldn't be, even if I was Gram. They already had serious life extension and could expect to live at least two hundred years. If you weren't an old fossil like Saburo Arasaka, that meant that you had a lot of time to wait for further improvements in the same life extension technology. When it was first introduced, you could only live about one hundred and twenty years. It's possible it will be improved and improved, and functional biological immortality, or bio-indefinite mortality as I liked to think of it, could be achieved just by waiting.
  
  "Oh... no. I hope those two brothers haven't been vivisected or anything. While I found Zetatech's technology very interesting, and I admit I may have disassembled the implant before installing it... I'm definitely not interested in being altered like that," I said, chuckling. Then I tilted my head to the side, "I do find it odd that you're taking my word for everything, though. Not having ole Bill here hold me down so you can interrogate me properly, eh?"
  
  "Ah... we can speak to that, but..." she glanced up, "If I could have the room, please. You too, William." I raised an eyebrow as both the likely combat gynoid and the combat cyborg left the room. William looked as though he was going to complain but finally sighed and nodded, leaving. She tapped something on the table, and I briefly felt my ears pop. I blinked, glancing to the left, seeing a slight distortion in the air, while Gram smiled, "Even if someone was still here, they wouldn't be able to hear us speak, and holograms would stymie attempts to read our lips."
  
  It suddenly occurred to me that I could probably kill her unless the table itself was a secret, hidden robotic guardian, anyway. I tapped the wood and shook away the intrusive thought. There was nobody alive that was badass enough to kill someone in the penthouse of Konpeki Plaza and then escape without being ruthlessly murdered by both the security of the building and the security of whomever he or she murdered. I certainly wasn't, plus I didn't even have the motive. But my mind, being my mind, couldn't help but see options, "He didn't want to leave; I suspected he thought I was dangerous to you. Why the privacy?"
  
  Her windchimes-like laugh reappeared, and she regarded me with momentarily slitted eyes, like a pawn shop owner who was given a Rolex watch to hawk. Assessing. Finally, she said, "Dangerous to my heart, such as it is, perhaps. Before I answer your question, you mentioned you would have asked for more allowance. Is that something you'd be interested in? Fabulous wealth?"
  
  I snorted, almost aspirating my tea. I sat the cup down and regarded her levelly, "I'll be frank, Gram. The only reason I came here is because I am worried about what you can take from me, not what you can give to me. All things being equal, more money is better than less money. But, I am already making a lot, for me anyway. The entire point of money is to give you more options, and I just feel like taking anything from you would vastly reduce my options, and create all manners of fetters tying me down."
  
  She smiled, it seemed genuine, but I didn't know. I knew she was a lot better social predator-type than me, so she possibly could fake that, "Yes, a fabulous product from what I can tell. I haven't tried it myself, of course, but I have someone using it every day. If their brain hasn't melted in a year, I will give it a go. How wondrous it would be to have more time in a day."
  
  Her eyes almost sparkled at that, and then she got more serious, "My assistant, Edgecrusher, has modelled that, from when you release your next version of your product, there will be an approximate fifty-two per cent chance that your invention will be ..uh.. acquired from you, somehow, per quarter." She tilted her head to the side, "Along with a twenty-four per cent chance this, Dr Hasumi will be kidnapped as well. Knowing all this, are you sure you want to go it alone? You'll have fetters one way or another before too long."
  
  I did some quick mental math. I let the former possibility be A and the latter be B. Then P(A∪B), or either one occurring, had a probability of a little over sixty-five per cent. But P(AB), or both occurring, only had a probability of about fifteen per cent, although I didn't know if that was precisely how I should calculate it because there seemed to be a lot of overlap in "steal invention" and "kidnap inventor" in my mind.
  
  So, instead, I tabled that and figured that there was an eighty-eight per cent chance that at least my invention would be "stolen" in the next nine months. That was more pessimistic than my own guess. I was thinking seventy-five per cent myself, but I was only using my intuition. I had already had a phone call from one of Dynacorp's investment analysts scheduled in the next couple of days. I had looked up the man who requested to speak to me online, and he was an entry-level analyst for M&A's, so it was likely that they were trying to get me on the cheap. I had to appreciate his daring in attempting to make the acquisition himself rather than notifying his boss, even if I wouldn't sell for the low amount he would be authorised to give.
  
  I supposed I would trust the more pessimistic numbers more. After all, any quant that was called Edgecrusher had to be either a serious math head or possibly an AI.
  
  I sighed, "Well, it is what it is. The longer I continue manufacturing, the more money I will make. And I suspect whatever happens; I'll be given at least a pittance. I'll just have to use that to start some other venture. And even if I end up in a cage someday in the future, it will, hopefully, be a cage of my own making."
  
  This caused her to golf clap politely and smile knowingly, "Bravo, bravo. Your mother said something very similar to me once, although the context was totally different. Did you know I, myself, am a servant?"
  
  I couldn't help myself, but I smirked, "The net mentioned something about the Astor-Armstrong being a subservient family to the Astors, a cadet branch."
  
  "Mmm... yes. All of the Astors of the main branch family live in Low-Earth Orbit now. Over time they just wanted less and less to do with how the sausage was made, you see. We make sure that they want for nothing and aren't troubled by pesky things, though," she said in a conspiratorial tone.
  
  Ah. I kind of thought that her asking me if I wanted fabulous wealth was a test; I mean, of course, it was, but I didn't know precisely the correct answer because for many Corpos, "Absolutely, you old bint!" would have been the expectation of a correct answer.
  
  So she had basically taken over the family and placed the actual Astors into a gilded cage, just like I was trying to avoid. Well, I didn't care. Plus, it was very, very likely that the Astors didn't even care. Perhaps she liked the moxie in me. I thought it was approval, but still, I took a sip of my tea, "This still doesn't answer the reason-"
  
  She interrupted me, "It's my superpower, dear."
  
  I almost spit my tea all over her face, which I thought would have been a faux pas. Instead, I got out chokingly, "Huh?"
  
  "William did run a pretty thorough if abbreviated word association on you, if you recall. He told me that you were convinced that you had a superpower. You know, like in the comics," she said mildly, "It's why I sent everyone away. Roughly a third of Astors, and by extension, us, develop one, of course."
  
  Of course? Bullshit! I wanted to yell. I was the only parahuman on this planet! I could suddenly feel my power thrumming with curiosity. I hissed internally at it. No, I wouldn't vivisect Gram! At least, not yet!
  
  I stared at her until she continued, "It's very often useless. Very, very often, but I have one of the most powerful ones that has ever been documented. It's always a knowing , you see. And I know if someone near me speaks the truth. I presume that you know biology, or medicine, or something along those lines. Incredible. There hasn't been a recorded case like that since the 17th century when Ronan Astor received the power to know mechanical timekeeping devices. He became the best watchmaker in the world."
  
  Okay. My first idea was that I should decapitate her and escape out the window. I could probably survive sliding down one hundred stories somehow . If she could tell the truth from lies, then I had been very lucky that I took to mostly the truth, or shades of it. Then, I concluded that perhaps, she was insane or delusional.
  
  Insanity would make sense, but I was still kind of in shock. I couldn't really help it because she claimed to be a Thinker, or at least whatever the local equivalent was. She claimed it was a superpower, but I supposed that it could just be a super-genius intellect. Even her miraculous claim about Ronan Astor could just have been a genius intellect combined with being on the autistic spectrum, with a fixation on watchmaking.
  
  The possibility that she was merely a super-genius didn't make it better, though. I presumed that she had done tests, and even if what she was really doing was just super-accurate cold reading, like I once suspected Sarah of, then that wasn't good, either. If anything, a level of genius that could emulate a Thinker's power was in every way worse, although it did make me want to examine her brain a little bit, and not just because my power was trying to push me to do so.
  
  I coughed and sat my tea back into the saucer, and said, "I presume that this is a family secret?" She inclined her head, "It sounds unbelievable. Sure, I am a genius in medicine and biology, but I was just using, to myself, the phrase superpower to encapsulate that."
  
  "Lie," she said, frankly, monotone.
  
  A lucky guess? I used all of my mental capability to still my expressions and said, randomly, "I am a virgin." I was sure that I was letting nothing leak out.
  
  "Well, good for you. That is a little surprising, though, I have to admit," she said wryly. Fuck, I should have picked something else, but I was flustered.
  
  After that, I tried a number of different lies and truths, although, after that, I kept them impersonal, such as what I ate last night. Gram seemed pleased as punch to play along, amused by the whole thing.
  
  Before I could think too hard about this and talk myself out of it, I had one more test. I disconnected. I suddenly felt stupid and kind of like I had just suffered a stroke. My Haywire comms were still working, though, and that meant myself-no, not myself, my other-self could talk through my body, kind of like I was a robot. This normally wouldn't be possible, but I specifically reconfigured the permissions and allowed it. While I was just floundering, she said to Gram, "My favourite colour is pink."
  
  I didn't wait for a reply, I mentally mashed the reconnect button, and suddenly, I was back. The merge process for the memories was a little odd. In a blink, I had more memories. Even if it was only a couple of seconds, and while it wasn't quite like I had experienced those things myself, it wasn't too far off from that, either. At the same time, I had experienced both sides, too, so it was like I experienced those things while simultaneously not. It was a bit weird.
  
  Gram looked at me oddly and said, "I'm not sure... how did you do that?" She tapped her fingers on the table for a moment before snapping, "You're a biopodder. You must have written a quick program or body macro to take over your body and force it to say the words that you programmed in advance. Smart." Cyberbrain users were considered biopodders, just like Gloria and the ninja-butler were, even if the pod connected to a real body. It was kind of an odd distinction, but I did have to mention it whenever I went to another country, as borgs occasionally had more difficulty travelling.
  
  I hadn't done that, what she guessed, but now I wish I had because disconnecting, even for a couple of seconds, had been wildly uncomfortable. I had felt stupid. Like, stupid enough to be clinically significant. However, it was over now, and it did tell me that there was something beyond just cold reading going on here. When I had disconnected, my otherself talked, and she wasn't "nearby", so there was no reading available by Gram.
  
  "Okay, I believe you, I suppose," I finally said.
  
  Gram seemed amused, "Oh, I am so heartened, dear. I'm not sure whatever I would have done if you hadn't." I snorted and thought, ' Alright, bitch, don't rub it in.'
  
  How to phrase this? "I was pretty sure I was the only person on the planet to have a... special ability, so I was a little bit sceptical," I said, which caused her to hum good-naturedly. What was the fastest way I could get out of here? I never wanted to be around this woman again. I mean, I wouldn't mind speaking to her, but over vidcall.
  
  Still, I was curious, "You're basically right as far as my power goes. You're not going to have some team of ninjas pop out of the wardrobe and throw a bag over my head, are you?" I sighed at the prospect. At least my body in space was probably safe. Although she might have been noted by observers entering and exiting my clinic, still tons of people did.
  
  "No," she said all too reasonably, "It might be the smart thing to do, just in case you get killed out there in the world, but... no. You see, Taylor, I would like to live forever." The last statement was said with a wistfulness of a young maiden saying she wanted a nice husband.
  
  "I can think of a lot of situations where you would take back those words," I said amusedly. Like being trapped in the centre of the sun, being transferred back in time and meeting Jack Slash before he died, and being kidnapped by Scavs. Any number of things.
  
  She waved a hand at me, "Don't be pedantic, dear. It doesn't suit Annette's daughter. It doesn't suit you ." Ouch, Grams burn, "You don't have some sort of philosophical disagreement on the concept, do you?"
  
  I shook my head, "Only if it were limited to only ridiculously rich people. Say, Gram, can you show me a brainscan of you? Like, an MRI or something better?" If every member of her family didn't have at least two doctors and loads of preventive medicine, including routine scans, I would eat this teacup.
  
  She raised an eyebrow at the first sentence and then tut-tutted the second, "Who knows what someone like you could glean from a scan of my brain? I'd rather not."
  
  I rolled my eyes, "I can't glean anymore than an exceptional doctor could. If not you, then someone else that also has a..." I used scare quotes, "power."
  
  She hummed and nodded, and I received an image file wirelessly. It was a three-dimensional scan of a brain, as I expected. I opened it and looked specifically for any anomalies, my power thrumming with curiosity. There was no Corona, of that I could tell quickly. Gram said, "This is Conor Astor. His power is he knows what the ultimate orientation of an object he throws will be."
  
  I whistled, "He must be good at craps."
  
  This caused her to smirk, "No. He only knows the orientation of an object that will fall after he throws it. In most games of dice that I know of, you have to bet before shooting." She considered and then added, "Never play heads or tails with him unless you're the one who flips the coin, though."
  
  Couldn't that be explained by super-proprioception? If I hadn't tested Gram here, this wouldn't make me believe it was a superpower. Just some freak quirk in the brain. "That doesn't sound very useful."
  
  "It's actually one of the most useful ones in our current generation, Taylor. Your aunt has the power to know how many hairs are on someone's body," she said. Okay, that wasn't useful at all. I had heard of weird powers in Brockton Bay, but nothing like this. Parahuman powers always tended to have the capability to cause things to go terribly wrong in some way. Knowing when people were lying did sound like a very typical Thinker power, but it was clear she was the outlier. Parahuman powers always had the implication of violence, whether physical or emotional. Forget calling these "superpowers". They shouldn't even be called "midpowers," except for Gram.
  
  Finally, she asked, curious, "Is there anything interesting about his brain?"
  
  "I think he has a mutation to his myelin sheaths, but I believe this is a genetic alteration he received in childhood. It's quite interesting, but only because I hadn't considered this modification. Other than that, no," I stared at her. I was a little upset she had tricked me into talking in front of her before revealing the fact that I couldn't lie to her. I always liked having the option to lie, "Let's get down to brass tacks, then, Gram," I said firmly.
  
  Sionainn watched her granddaughter leave and summoned William and Cara back to her. Cara went immediately to clean the table while William arched an eyebrow at her. He asked, "You're just going to let her go like that?"
  
  "It is what I agreed to with Annette," she said primly.
  
  He snorted, "As if you wouldn't go back on that in a picosecond if you thought it was necessary. In fact, just inviting her here was going against your agreement with little Annette."
  
  She waved a hand, "Yes, yes. Do you have the bullet points from the two observation teams again?"
  
  "There is a bit more uncertainty due to the fact that she is likely using her own sleep technology. That said, there is a seventy-eight per cent chance that she and this 'Dr Hasumi'..." he used the air-quotes gesture, "... have synchronised sleep schedules. This would track with your speculation that she somehow modified Zetatech's neural implant architecture to synchronise and copy her mind into another body. Are you sure you want to let this kind of technology walk away? It would be like a second life, some might say."
  
  She snorted, "It's worthless. Utterly. Why would I care that some copy of myself continued living if I died? It would not be me. Worse, it would know all of my secrets." She shook her head firmly, "Go and arrange the other meetings we scheduled today. I suppose we'll leave on the morrow, as planned."
  
  He nodded, "You're meeting with one of the city councilmen next, Lucius Rhyne. And after that, a Militech VP. They're a bit nervous that you came to this city that they're trying to annex, especially with our ties to Arasaka."
  
  She sighed, put out, "They're the ones that made us sell all of our Militech shares. Something about foreigners owning sensitive national defence infrastructure, if I recall." She waited until William left the room and then retriggered the privacy systems on the table.
  
  This application of how to use her power she did not tell even other members of her family. It wasn't entirely accurate, either, but statistically, it was far better than a wild-ass guess. While focusing strongly on her sense of knowing , she said, "It was a good decision to let Taylor go to follow her own plans." She winced as she felt a slight headache and then nodded.
  
  The truth of that statement was fairly high. Good. While she couldn't ask too many questions like this a day, as they caused headaches, they always helped her decisions when they were at this level of confidence.
  
  The feeling wasn't objective. The knowing depended on all of the information that she possessed, but the power was able to collate everything she knew, including things she didn't even realise she knew, into a somewhat cohesive whole. The less she knew, the less accurate the reading would be. That was one reason she had invited her granddaughter to tea, as getting more information, even if it was information she didn't realise she had, always helped. That and she actually was concerned that the poor girl had hurt herself with some unreliable Zetatech neural implant.
  
  Over the years, she had tested this part of her ability with Edgecrusher's assistance, and she was still over a standard deviation more accurate than the AI himself in prognosticating, even if she couldn't do it as often as he could. He was a prognosticating machine, literally.
  
  Speaking of which, she pulled up some information from the AI. It made suggestions for decisions she could make, but she always would go over all of the information herself, at least what she could. She had numerous choices to make every day, and she always spent at least a little time looking at the underlying reasons for the suggestions.
  
  It would be the height of irony if she outsourced all of her decision-making to a hyper-competent subordinate, just like the Astors had done with her. She wasn't about to let that happen. If the AIs behind the Blackwall took over someday, they would have to work for it, just as she had. She wasn't just going to hand everything to them on a silver platter.
  
  She sighed in contentment as the world passed slowly around her. Advances in technology were truly great. She had recently upgraded her Kerenzikov system and now could get an hour's work done in a little more than ten minutes, which was fifteen per cent improved from the last version. Stealing more time from the day really was wondrous. As she worked, she thought about what William had said. He hadn't been entirely wrong, even as impertinent as he was.
  
  She discounted the utility of a copy of herself existing, in fact, she would immediately kill one if it ever happened. There could only be one Sionainn. However, she was self-aware enough to realise that a lot of people did not think as she did. In fact, this was the thrust of Hanako Arasaka's work on Soulkiller for the past fifteen years.
  
  She wasn't supposed to know about that research, though. Was the filial daughter attempting to seize immortality for her father? The girl was a genius netrunner and programmer and, despite everything, certainly seemed to love her father. It was a shame that poor Saburo was a bit too old compared to herself.
  
  She was confident that even if Taylor didn't solve this issue herself with her Astor-family power of knowing biology that there was a very high percentage chance that existing life-extension technology would advance enough while she was still alive that she would still end up being functionally immortal. In this way, what she asked of Taylor was merely a hedge.
  
  Both Edgecrusher and her own estimates had this breakthrough happening in the next fifty to seventy-five years. Saburo might not last that long, despite everything done to save him. Even if you could slow the process, your brain would still age, regardless of how young your body was.
  
  If anything, it might be better for everyone involved if little Taylor only produced competing golden apples once old Saburo shuffled off this mortal coil himself. The man was a bit much. He reminded her of those last few samurai that lived after the Meiji restoration in Japan as a man-out-of-time. For Danu's sake, the living fossil had fought in World War Two.
  
  She hummed and decided to use another question, "Taylor collaborating with Hanako or Arasaka in general, will appreciably extend Saburo Arasaka's life, or alternatively allow a copy to live as him after he passed away."
  
  She winced at the increased headache but still smiled.
  
  Things could have gone much worse. I had been expecting them to go much worse. She had offered for me to "return to the family" if I wanted, but I was pretty sure that would only limit me.
  
  In exchange for letting me go my own way, she wanted functional biological immortality within twenty-five years. Easily achievable. It was kind of fortunate that I hadn't actually solved that problem yet, even if I was a lot closer than she likely thought I was. I could use shades of the truth to, hopefully, bypass her truth sense, and she didn't remark on my statements about how I was working on such things but didn't expect to succeed soon. The only reason I didn't expect that was I immediately changed my priorities to put that on the back burner.
  
  She was a little perplexed at my idea of releasing such a thing to the world at large. It was my opinion that we could easily house an order of magnitude more people on this planet in utter luxury if we, as a society, had the will to do so, and that didn't even include all of the construction in space. Space would be where true growth happened in the next one hundred years, I was sure. We, as a species, needed more people. Every time a person was born, there was a chance that he or she was a genius. Singular geniuses did more to advance technology than teams of researchers, in my opinion, so the more people around, the better. It sounded hokey, but people were one of our greatest resources.
  
  She laughed at me and called me a communist jokingly. A communist? I preferred to think of myself as an optimist. Besides, I was by definition in the capitalist social caste, as I owned most of the means of my own production, so it wasn't like I was out to empower revolutionaries whose first step would be to guillotine me. I just wanted everything to be just a little better everywhere. Was that so much to ask?
  
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  Higher education
  October 2066
  
  Los Angeles, California
  
  The meeting wasn't in person, which told me about how much this Dynacorp suit disrespected me. I had his dossier pulled up on the side, as I already had as detailed a background investigation performed as possible before speaking with him. There wasn't a lot of good to say about him, and honestly, he probably should be in prison. From what I could tell, he had a motor vehicle collision while he was operating a car manually while drunk, which seriously injured a couple of people a couple of years back.
  
  Drunk driving was a lot less severe of a crime here than it had been in Brockton Bay, and that was because most cars had autodrive systems. It was still illegal unless you had a fully AI-controlled car, but it wasn't often enforced-especially since it didn't often cause any accidents since most autodrive systems could at least get you home. But driving a sports car manually while drunk was still supposed to be pretty serious, as far as the cops were concerned.
  
  However, the police never bothered investigating it further after they discovered that the driver was a University student who also was the son of a high-ranking Corpo. Today, he was a low-to-mid-ranking one himself, but clearly, he still had a chip on his shoulder based on who his parents were.
  
  I listened to him finish his spiel, "... , and as such, I believe that we can offer your shareholders an offer of twenty million Eurodollars for the company, lock-stock-and-barrel." He smiled as though he was doing me a favour.
  
  I just regarded him levelly for as long as I could before he started looking uncomfortable. Then I opened my mouth and sighed, "We decline."
  
  He started to say, before I interrupted him, "Now, look here... this is more than a reasonable offer-"
  
  "It's an insulting offer, which was what I expected," I told him flatly, then laid my hands on the table, "I'm sending a document to you. It's a certified copy of a contract I have prepaid for and executed with Veritas Corporation. In the event that either this company changes hands or this technology is licensed without suitable remuneration-see tables three, four and five-this contract will automatically activate. This will cause Veritas to, without further action from us, transfer both the technology and a pre-signed license to the largest competitor of the firm performing the acquisition."
  
  There were a number of other clauses, some of which I had redacted from the copy I sent this Dynacorp guy, but others I highlighted for his perusal. For example, if I, "Sakura Hasumi", disappeared, the same thing would happen, with Veritas trying to figure out which Corporation was likely responsible and then giving my technology to their competitor. If they couldn't do so within two weeks, then the technology would transfer to a random company from a list that definitely didn't include Dynacorp.
  
  The term for what I had done was a "poison pill." It was a way to either make the acquisition of a company cost a lot more or, alternatively, to poison the fruits of the investment, in this case, by handing the same technology to their competitor for free. If this was Brockton Bay, this wouldn't make much sense as my company was private, and generally speaking, this type of "poison pill" defence strategy was only used when dealing with publicly traded companies. In my old world, the only way to perform hostile takeovers was to buy outstanding shares that were publicly traded, after all.
  
  Since shares in my firm weren't available for trade anywhere, nor were the shareholders (consisting of only myself) publicly known, the strategy would sound a bit odd. But that wasn't the only way to perform hostile takeovers in this new world. The simplest way a hostile takeover happened in this world was by military force of arms. If someone placed a literal gun to my head, like a feudal king that had been captured, I would agree to whatever terms they set. Checkmate. This contract was a hedge against that scenario, as I could not call Veritas up and tell them not to do this anymore. It was already done.
  
  This wasn't fool-proof by any means, and I had to pay a significant sum for Veritas to agree to execute this kind of contract in the first place, but it would still force this little shit to consider his options. If he was smart, he would ask to license the technology at the level where this agreement wouldn't be executed, although that would cause me to receive a percentage of revenues and probably many hundreds of millions of Eurodollars a year in royalties. It would still be less expensive than having to compete with someone else who had the same technology and was therefore driving the price down against their monopoly, though.
  
  There was no way he had the authority to make such an agreement, though. Not by any means. I watched the man, that was only a few years older than me and a few years younger than Dr Hasumi, get red in the face until he said, clipped, "You've made a mistake." Then he slapped the disconnect button on his end and immediately hung up, his hologram derezzing and falling into the desktop.
  
  Well, that was ominous. I didn't really know what he would do now, but I would be looking underneath my car for bombs from now on. Twenty million Eurodollars was probably the limit of his authority to make deals on his own say-so, and he was clearly upset that he would either have to cut this one loose or draw in his bosses and lose most of the credit.
  
  It would be wrong to consider him a stupid young master, too, like out of a wushi or xianxia story. It wasn't as though such tropes didn't exist, and he might even be an excellent example of them; it was just that you didn't succeed even marginally, even if you were a young master in this world without a fair bit of animal cunning, if not straight intelligence.
  
  I called Kiwi.
  
  "Yo, just the doctor I wanted to talk to," she answered with an affable grin.
  
  I raised an eyebrow, "Oh? What about?"
  
  "Can't talk about it on the air. Give me about an hour, and I'll be in your office. Can what you want to talk about wait till then, too?" she asked and then hung up after I nodded.
  
  Well, well. All of my calls with her were encrypted as highly as possible, so it must be something pretty interesting. While I waited, I logged into the dev system that only I and my engineer Phillipe used. The first version of the software for the ruggedised military version of the sleep inducer was done, and we were beginning to assemble units for testing. Phillipe had commented on how simple it was to produce because most of the squad management systems already had trigger and event hooks for things like 'possible enemy detected' during rest time. For the version that did not include that, all he had to do was create a master control that could override and wake all members of the squad so that a lookout could rapidly wake everyone up.
  
  The military version of the sleep inducer only really had two features, beyond the fact that it was rugged as hell, that the standard did not. That was the main one, and the other one was adding a "last rested" attribute to each soldier in the management system. I didn't do anything with this data field, but most brigade management was done partly by AIs these days, and they would definitely notice the new data field and adapt it on the fly to the suggestions and options given to field-grade commanders.
  
  That was all I thought it needed to be very successful in the first place. I had already bought some of the special tooling necessary to assemble them. The exterior was made mostly of a specialised flexible nano-polymer that was five times stronger than polycarbonate and very flexible. I had carefully designed each module that used other plastics so that it was almost impossible to fracture, too. I had run over one of the prototypes in my car multiple times, and it would always snap back into shape. It was also waterproof enough that it would only be damaged by total submersion in water for over two hours, at least at small depths. If you dropped it in the ocean, well, you better go after it before it sinks more than twenty metres or write it off.
  
  After I reviewed any commits that Phillipe had submitted, I checked a couple of messages, frowning. I had been forwarded a post on a BBS that focused on high-end consumer electronics where this user claimed that he accidentally dropped his Cherry sleep inducer out of the tenth floor of his apartment complex but managed to recover it.
  
  It stopped working as a braindance wreath, but the sleep-inducing parts still worked, and moreover, apparently, it was causing him to have lucid dreams every night. There were a number of replies claiming that he was spreading bullshit, but a few were curious if it were true.
  
  I gaped and quickly went through the process of registering an account and replied directly in the thread:
  
  "Dear xX69XxMightyThunderCockxX69Xx,
  
  I urge you to cease using the damaged product immediately. Please return it to our headquarters personally or via mail, and I will, in this instance only, waive the negligence exclusion to our warranty and provide you with a fully-functional replacement.
  
  I have no idea how or why this could be happening, and that means it is dangerous. I remind you that Cherry Limited will not be liable if you fry your brain using an obviously damaged product. See product license, end-user-license-agreement and hold-harmless policy for details.
  
  For the good of your brain, please return this device immediately,
  
  Dr Sakura Hasumi, MD, PhD, CEO"
  
  The truth was I was a little bit concerned about his brain, but I was more interested in examining the faulty device to see why it might be causing this novel effect. I did know a bit about the phenomenon of lucid dreaming and thought there could be a number of reasons why. If it could be replicated and was safe, I might sell it as a "DLC" for the device.
  
  I got both a reply and a DM from a forum moderator. The latter was asking me for proof of my identity, and I raised an eyebrow. Honestly, that wasn't easy to do. Even if I called them, machine-learning systems could credibly fake any person these days. I thought about it.
  
  Ah, that would probably work. Nodding, I took a screenshot of the DM and uploaded it to the Cherry Limited net site. Then, I sent the link back to the moderator in a reply. The ability to instantly upload anything and serve it on the verified net site of the manufacturer was likely proof enough. I could have sent them a cryptographically signed e-mail from my net site as well, but this BBS specifically did not include mail addresses for the administrators or moderators. This site was a hobbyist or enthusiast BBS-right on the periphery of what I would have considered "dark net" sites, so it tried to be edgy.
  
  Sure enough, they replied with a thumbs-up emoji and added a special badge and title to my account. How interesting. I had never browsed this BBS before.
  
  The reply from the original poster claimed that he was concerned that he would lose the "additional functionality" as he had gotten used to being able to lucid dream every night. I didn't have to reply again, though, as he got dog-piled by many posters. Some people requested that he continue to use it until his brain melted for science, but most called him an idiot for not taking a good deal when he got it. Finally, he sent me a private message and said he would stop by after work in a couple of hours.
  
  Sighing, I didn't have anything pressing to do until Kiwi came over, so I started my word processor and opened up the latest chapter in Rage Of A Villainess and started tapping away. I had been slacking a bit in releasing chapters, much to the dismay of the readers. Right now, the plot was, chronologically, in the middle of the third sequel to the otome game, which the protagonist hadn't actually played yet. Would our plucky heroine, who was now an Archduchess in her own right, discover the chilling truth behind the [Anti-Saintess] and her capture targets before it was too late?!
  
  Well, the readers would just have to see. I could write quite fast these days, and I was also even experimenting with drawing, partly as a way to compensate the readers for the reduced release schedule of twice per week. Not to create, say, a manga but more to make it more of a traditional light novel, with illustrations every fifty pages or so. Normally, my art skills would not be up for it. But I've found if I focused all my brain power, I could draw things in numerous styles, even "manga style." It might help that I spent hours every week "painting" new bodies into existence, but it was probably mostly because the way my brains worked together had expanded the way I thought.
  
  That was clear when I had partially disconnected the other week while meeting Gram. The experience was pretty terrible from both perspectives, but it was the worst for the part of me that was the smallest. It felt as though I had a stroke, almost. I was sure I could have recovered from it, but it would have taken some time. That was something to keep in mind, as it could possibly even cause some danger. My third body was in space, learning how to work safely as a construction worker and electrician in microgravity. If I flipped out in a hostile environment, there was a chance I could do something to put myself in real danger.
  
  I got through the chapter and started the first couple of paragraphs for the next before I was interrupted, which was good. I liked to immediately write at least three or so paragraphs for the follow-on chapter, as I found it was much easier to motivate myself to continue writing a chapter than it was to begin one. Kiwi stuck her head into my office door and asked, "Hey, is anyone using your OR?"
  
  OR? Singular? Girl, please . I had three now. And yes, someone was using one. But the two new ones upstairs needed to start earning their keep, too, "I have two new operating theatres upstairs. Let's go up there." I was curious why she wanted to talk there, but my curiosity didn't last long. She had a bodybag with her, so that answered a lot of questions.
  
  When we got to the free OR, I started to unzip the bag but was stopped by Kiwi, and I quickly raised an eyebrow. She said, "Wait, let me start a jammer real quick, just in case." I peered at the bodybag, and sure enough, it was one of the few that also had a fine wire-mesh lining to stifle radio-frequency emissions. Just what had she brought me?
  
  I hummed and waited until she got set up before unzipping the body bag. I gaped at what I saw. The first obvious thing was that the corpse was missing half of the body; only the torso from the waist up was in the bag.
  
  Second, the cybernetics I saw were very distinctive. I glanced around, looking left and right, "Please tell me you didn't bisect a Netwatch agent, Kiwi."
  
  She laughed and shook her head, "No! We found him like this on a job last night. How long do you suppose he has been dead?"
  
  I frowned and considered that question before confidently stating, "One hundred and fifty hours, plus or minus six hours."
  
  That caused her to let out a sigh of relief, nodding, "I figured it was pretty long, but that means there's no way the netpigs really knew he died. Otherwise, they would have extracted his corpse here before we got there." She then grinned and said, "That's the highest-end Netdriver that NetWatch makes, to say nothing of the cooling system. None of that tech is available on the market, not even for large Corps. Do you think you could remove it? I am almost certain I can crack the firmware on the Netdriver. At least that will let me install a customised OS and not get tracked using it."
  
  I nodded slowly, pulling the torso out of the body bag and getting my tools, thinking about the cyberdeck the former NetWatch agent had. "Yes, I can maybe even add some customised panelling to disguise it. I can make it look like a high-end Tetratonic cyberdeck from the outside easily enough. The cooling system, though..." I just shook my head, "There is no way I can disguise that, so I recommend you forgo it for the moment. It's too much. Too large. You can't hide it. One pic of you gets out, and they'll be after you, I bet. I'd like to examine it, though, so I'll buy it from you if you want."
  
  I wondered what bisected him, but I didn't ask. If I recalled correctly, her gig last night involved recon of an abandoned area that was, until recently, used by a gang very similar to Maelstrom. They were called something stupid, like Alligators or something like that. They totally would have made off with this guy's body if they had done him in, but who knows how he did. A trap, perhaps?
  
  "Give me about thirty minutes to take all of this out, identify any tracking systems and disable them. Once I get the deck removed, I'll hand it to you, and you can do your magic; then, whenever you want it installed, let me know," I told her.
  
  She grinned and gave me a thumbs up, and asked, "So, why'd you call me in the first place? Also, do you have one of those nova stealth systems you use in stock?"
  
  Oh. I almost forgot in the excitement. As for the other request, I winced. I had two in Night City, but that wasn't any help here, "Not right now. It's kind of difficult getting Arasaka products shipped here. I'll see if I can find a substitute... And I need a gig on a fast turnaround. Today, preferably. That Dynacorp guy you investigated for me."
  
  She looked interested and tried to effect a terrible New York accent, asking, " You wants me to rubs him out for yas, boss? "
  
  I sighed, "No. I would like I his apartment wired for sound... and video, too, if possible." I then spent about ten minutes working and simultaneously explaining both why I had asked her to investigate him in the first place and the contents of the discussion he and I had earlier.
  
  She frowned and said, "You sure? He sounds like a problem waiting to happen." She shifted to a different terrible accent, " He sends one of yours to the hospital; we send one of his to the morgue! That's the Night City Way!"
  
  I groaned, "Okay, no more one-hundred-year-old mobster movies in the evenings for a little while. Yes, I'm sure." That caused her to pout. That had been almost a direct quote, sans the Night City part, from a film that this world had but that I did not recall existing in Brockton Bay. It was about Al Capone and was filmed in the eighties. It was really good, and I did think that this character Jim Malone was on to something.
  
  His philosophy mirrored my own, almost word for word, so I preferred thinking about it as The Taylor Hebert Way. However, my Way did have some morals attached to it. I didn't have to wait and soak up the first attack like a gonk, but I did need to know with some degree of certainty that it was coming. I wouldn't "whack" this guy, especially since his father was one of the higher-ups in Dynacorp in this city unless I was pretty sure he was going to attack me first.
  
  It grated on me that he would get special treatment, but I really did need to be wary of his father. So, even if he tried something stupid with me, I would also send him a "message" first, too. Although, since I decapitated the last man I wanted to send a friendly message to, I think I would contract this work out to Kiwi.
  
  She nodded, "We already did a preliminary on his apartment. Might not be able to do it today, but should have everything by tomorrow. A rush job like this carries a fifty per cent premium due to the risk, plus we'll have to use a lot of consumables and speciality equipment. We'll also need to pay out bribes that we might not have needed to do if we paced it out a week or two."
  
  I waved a hand, "You have a blank cheque, within reason."
  
  That got a grin, and she said, "Preem."
  
  October 2066
  
  Night City
  
  At about the same time that I was disabling a couple of physical tracking devices in one of NetWatch's premiere cyberdecks, I was also taking a call from an unusual number. My Agent had screened the call, and I raised an eyebrow at the report that came through.
  
  I picked up, answering, "Taylor Hebert speaking."
  
  The man's voice was British, and my Agent had identified him as "Sir John Stewart, Dean of Oxford University Medical School." I thought it was a prank call at first, but the address he was calling from matched an Oxford publicly available number associated with their telepresence exchange. He coughed, "Yes, Miss Hebert. I am calling you today to arrange a time that you can come in for testing."
  
  For fun, at super speed, I searched through the drawer at my desk until I found the shard I was looking for and surreptitiously inserted it in the side of my head. It was the same accent English language chip that included a number of accents. It was still set in Miss White's posh Received Pronunciation setting. I said in the accent, "Testing? I'm not sure I understand, sir."
  
  He sounded put out with me and continued, "Although I was instructed to graduate you, I will not allow anyone to risk the reputation of our hallowed institution of learning, no matter the personage that made the demand. If you want an MBBS from this College, you will need to present yourself, in person, for testing. If you somehow manage to pass the knowledge and practical skills evaluation of what you would have otherwise spent six years learning, then I will accede to the demands made to me and issue you a degree."
  
  Oh. How interesting. Gram had said that she had a more concrete way to compensate me for the "trauma of remembering being interrogated." That rubbed me the wrong way when I heard it because it seemed to imply that they had ways to remove memories, just like I did, and only consider it traumatic because I remembered it. Still, I wasn't going to say no to free stuff. I had expected it to be money or something equivalent to money, although perhaps that was stupid because she had said it would take a little while to arrange.
  
  Could she have known about my plans to just bribe my way into a degree from some small medical school somewhere? Well, perhaps not, but I got the impression that she thought that this "hereditary power" that the Astors had was the bee's knees, so she might have assumed I could pass any test that this upset man demanded of me since she thought I had the same thing. Silly old bint, I had something much better than that. The man on the vidcall really did look put out, too-kind of like he had just bit into a lemon.
  
  This beat the West Virginia University School of Medicine. I was pretty sure I could bribe a degree from there, but this would be much cheaper, too. It would have cost several hundred thousand dollars to do even that. This would just cost me however much a trip to England would cost. Besides, this guy was starting to piss me off with his smarminess, "Oh, certainly. I'm presently in the States right now. But I believe I could be there by the eighth of November; that would be a Monday, I believe. How long do you suppose I should schedule for this... ah... assessment?"
  
  He frowned even more somehow, "It would be best to free at least ten days, madam, for the entire battery of tests. The eighth is fine. Please come to the John Radcliffe Hospital Cairns Library at nine o'clock." With that, he disconnected without so much as a by-your-leave.
  
  What a dick. Sure, Oxford had been teaching medicine since at least the 12th century, but the United Kingdom, which only included England, Scotland and Wales these days, was widely considered the "sick man of Europe." A lot of the lustre of many of its hallowed institutions has been lost, at least for the moment.
  
  While they were doing a lot better than NUSA was, on average, that wasn't saying a whole lot. The Navy of His Royal Highness, the King of Ireland, often sunk ships containing refugees from England. Well, perhaps not often, but it happened once or twice a year. From what I could tell online, my Gram's family had a long history in both countries, although with a bad reputation from "Irish patriots" for being too cosmopolitan or even English-like.
  
  At least I had a valid passport. I had requested one from the State Department before the exchange with Biotechnica in case "Taylor Hebert" needed to flee the country. Things would have been fucked if I had to wait for the twelve-to-sixteen-week turnaround time to deal with that first.
  
  Getting a visa might be a pain; there was no UK consulate in Night City, and although I could apply online, there were occasions when countries would "defer" the application until you showed up in their embassy or consular office for unknown reasons. Well, I'm sure they had a reason, but nobody seemed to know what they were.
  
  "... never mind," I said to myself, as the webpage refreshed with an approval and digital visa milliseconds after I submitted the initial application on the UK government net site. Either they had an extremely rapid turnaround, or perhaps more likely was that my name had been added to a whitelist. Well, either way, I was set there.
  
  I hadn't been really trying very hard here in Night City, compared to my day as Dr Hasumi, which was more akin to a workaholic, or Hana, who also was quite busy learning to live in space.
  
  Here, I ran a little pharmacy, and I usually had an employee work the till. I also occasionally did some Ripperdoc work for the Tyger Claws or the dolls, and that was it, but it was mainly a lot slower pace. I kind of liked it; it gave me a chance to relax. I've noticed that if even one of my bodies was relaxing, then I didn't feel as though I was burning out, even if my other bodies were working twelve or even sixteen-hour days.
  
  Long term, Hana was the part of me that I was going to earmark into taking it easy, in so much as one could take it easy in space anyway. For a while, though, she would be working quite hard, both learning what amounted to a new trade and gaining enough experience to be considered credible at it. Eventually, I thought I might start my own business as I have everywhere else, but that wouldn't be possible unless everyone thought I was skilled. Spacers, I had discovered, were extremely clannish.
  
  They just wouldn't patronise a new business unless they had a previous personal or business relationship with the proprietor or if one of their friends or family vouched for them. It was a completely different culture, focused more on handshakes, or at least their equivalent of them, personal relationships and responsibility. I was planning to rent cubic, or personal space, on one of the smaller orbiting space stations, one in particular with the uninspired name Space Station 13, and I managed to do so with a referral and a handshake.
  
  I remember feeling that the man I had rented from would not merely take me to court if I damaged the space he was renting to me; to him, it would be personal.
  
  In a lot of ways... well, in almost all ways, it was much more honest than the way business was conducted down here. Better, but it was hard to scale, I thought. Such things would work in a community of a few tens of thousands, especially because they shipped everyone who was actively, criminally disruptive back to Earth, but probably not in a few tens of millions.
  
  I wasn't quite in the "in-group" up there yet, so I was treated brusquely and not quite trusted. I felt it might be a while before that changed, too.
  
  Nodding, I got up. I had a lot to do to get ready, then. But for now, some relaxation was in order. Evelyn had shown me this place near my building that did excellent massages. I had never partaken in such things in Japantown before because I was a little concerned they would all come with mandatory happy endings or something else weird.
  
  This, however, was a place that just gave straight massages. Moreover, their clientele was on the paranoid side, with mercenaries and Tyger Claws being common customers. They'd let you have a weapon within hand-reach, and they also had a series of cameras that you could watch of both the room you were being worked on, as well as the front, so you would be warned if anyone rushed back to get to you.
  
  The only real danger was that the masseuse would be a kunoichi and assassinate me. I couldn't really get around that danger, though, because I needed my masseuse to have strong hands, so they had to be augmented in some way, either through biosculpt or cybernetics. As such, there was this one girl who I sort of trusted, and she was the only one I would let rub on me. I gave her the strength-enhancing biosculpt treatment personally so she could get better at the rubbing, and I tipped her very generously.
  
  She probably thought I was insane, as I got a massage for an hour four or five times a week, but it really did help me work hard in my other guises. I pulled on an outfit, strapped on my gun, and walked out of my apartment whistling.
  
  November 2066
  
  Night City
  
  I wasn't such a tycoon that I was taking a suborbital spaceplane flight to Europe. That, I couldn't rationalise paying for. However, I could rationalise first-class on a supersonic jet.
  
  Modern supersonic airliners flew at altitudes of almost twenty thousand metres and were carefully designed with geometry so that the sonic booms were mostly dissipated by the time they reached the ground, sounding no louder than a normal jet flying by, anyway. Without these advancements, they would have been like the Concord I remembered from Brockton Bay, where they only allowed it to fly over the ocean.
  
  Here, they couldn't fly super fast, not like military jets, but it was still about one point six times the speed of sound. There also wasn't a direct flight to London, either. Not the day that I was leaving, anyway. I would have to land at Charles de Gaulle and take a connecting flight over the English Channel.
  
  Oxford was northwest of London, and there weren't a lot of hotels available in that town either. Almost none, and none that would accept a longer-term two-week booking on short notice. I was almost at the point where I was going to give up and secure lodgings in London and just accept the hour-and-a-half commute one-way every day. However, then I received a message from Gram. Well, it wasn't from her. It was from one of her personal assistants. He offered me the use of the a small house they had in Oxford itself, which they keep for any time someone attended the College.
  
  The idea that they would keep a house vacant for years just so it would be ready in case some cousin got admitted to the school was absurd to me, but I suppose if you had what was, in practice, unlimited money, it made some sense-especially since the house itself was an asset.
  
  I thought for hours about whether or not to accept, as I was trying to keep my entanglements with my mom's family to a minimum, but in the end, I did accept. It was just a polite gesture that didn't mean anything to Gram or to me, either.
  
  As such, I was sent the digital keys to unlock all of the doors and alarm systems. Surprisingly, it wasn't some kind of mansion but just a regular three-bedroom house with an attached garage, not much larger than my house in Brockton Bay. Unless there was some sprawling hidden bunker beneath it, this must be "roughing it" standards for Gram.
  
  When I told Evelyn that I had to travel to England for a couple of weeks, she used it as an opportunity to shop for a whole new wardrobe for me. Honestly, I appreciated it as I didn't have that much that would be considered fancy clothing or even casual clothing that was less than three or four years out of date as far as fashion went.
  
  We spent a day at it and hit a number of clothiers that were on the high-end in Night City. I spent more than I expected, but I felt that I got a lot of outfits that I could use for years. I bought Evelyn a new outfit at each place we shopped as compensation for her assistance, which she practically squeed at. Personally, I thought I looked like some Euro-poseur, but Evelyn seemed to think I looked very chic.
  
  Most were still in the subdued colours that I preferred, although the outfits were more European in style to befit my destination. I even brought two dresses with me, the more casual of which I was wearing right now.
  
  Paying for first-class on a supersonic, rather than economy on the slower subsonic, did give me some niceties when I arrived at the airport to check in. There was a young woman that claimed she was a concierge waiting for me. Blonde, perky and about my age. She helped me check my bags and walked me through security, where I received another security band on my wrist, although this time, they let me select from four different styles rather than picking the ugliest one available, like when I went to Seattle.
  
  I also had access to the airport lounge both in Night City as well as in Charles de Gaulle in France during my layover, the latter of which I intended to use as I had a multi-hour wait before my flight to London Heathrow.
  
  I had timed things pretty well, so I did not have to wait too long to board. I got on with the first group and was ushered into a window seat in front of the aircraft. The first-class section was kind of small; most of the cabin was split about evenly between business class and economy. I kind of wondered why they had economy fares at all until I realised that groups of obvious Corporate employees seemed to be flying together, with the boss up in first and the minions in the economy or business class, depending on their current position in the hierarchy. I found it very amusing.
  
  I would have been delighted with everyone having the same seat but in this world? If there wasn't a first-class, then it would have been necessary to invent it.
  
  'There I go, thinking vaguely socialist things again,' I thought, amused. Unlike in her old world, here, there were pseudo-socialist nations that functioned pretty well in this world. The Soviet states, for example, had a high standard of living, higher than the NUSA for the average citizen, but it was all built off state capitalism as well as a dictatorship of the proletariat where the dictator was, in effect, an artificial intelligence, at least in practice even if humans did make all the decisions in the end. But why wouldn't they listen to his suggestions? After twenty years of always having correct suggestions, in many ways, the humans had become something of a rubber stamp.
  
  Герои, or Hero, was the Soviet artificial intelligence and was theorised to be one of the most powerful in the world, including those trapped behind the Blackwall. He was built in the years following the DataKrash, and NetWatch hated him but had no basis by which they could object to his existence. He was, in effect, grandfathered in because NetWatch as an organisation had been very weak at the time he was born. The Soviet data scientists had been right, though; in no other way beyond sheer computational power could a single entity effectively manage an internal command economy.
  
  I wasn't exactly an economist or a political thinker, but I felt the issue with truly socialist nations was that, until recently, there was no practical way to replace the information the free market provided. Many people waxed philosophically about what precisely the free market was, but I thought it was pretty simple. It was nothing more or less than the sum total of millions and millions of people all trying to screw everyone else over.
  
  Still, at the same time, it did convey what needed to be manufactured, what needed to be sent where, and the like efficiently, even if, as a by-product, certain people were enriched while most others were impoverished or exploited.
  
  These days a hyper-intelligent AI like Hero could model an economy well enough to perform this necessary function, sucking in all data about everything and managing production and logistics. However, then you were just trading an exploitive boss for a god, and I didn't particularly like that idea, but then again, I was a boss. Perhaps I would have thought differently if, instead of having all the advantages and abilities I did, I was just one of the workers in my factory producing a product every day.
  
  I paid my workers way above average, but there was no way I could pay them what I actually thought they were worth. If I tried, it would quickly become public knowledge, and nobody would take me seriously. It would be like a low-level Amish shunning, where I wouldn't be able to buy goods and services unless I paid treble the price, at least . I would go out of business in months.
  
  Although it wasn't close to balancing the scales, I tried to provide a number of fringe benefits that were difficult to quantify the value of, like free or discounted medical services at my clinic and pharmacy, extra days off, rotating into the highly-sought after quality-assurance jobs and the like, as well as a somewhat flexible schedule. This did seem to be very popular with my workers, at least.
  
  About AIs, though, I thought if it was inevitable that there should be gods in this world, it should be something you had to work to become, not something you were born into. That was my major gripe against AGIs in general, that and jealousy .
  
  Still, I thought, wistfully, that it would be nice if everyone could work together somehow.
  
  I glanced to the left as I saw a man slide into the aisle seat next to me. I had been staring out the window at nothing in particular while I was woolgathering.
  
  I blinked, mouth opening in surprise as I recognised the man. And I could see that he recognised me, too. Although I didn't have blonde hair now, and I had made subtle alterations to my face, those alterations were only designed to prevent simple facial recognition software from identifying me. It had been a mathematical way to slightly change a face to prevent being identified by computers, not people. I had still looked pretty much exactly like myself, except blonde, when I had been Miss White.
  
  He grinned as he settled into his seat, tilting his head to the side and saying, "Miss Barnes! I am surprised to see you here today. More personal business?" He waggled his eyebrows.
  
  I coughed. Although it likely didn't matter at that stage, I didn't want any association with the temporary Emma Barnes identity. Besides, I hated that bitch, and just hearing her name aggravated me. I wondered why I had ever picked it.
  
  Still, he clearly knew who I was. I considered trying to blagger my way out, but it would have been obvious. I still had the accent chip installed from the other day, so I switched to the posh accent I used the last time I saw him and said, "I'm certain that you have me mistaken for someone else. I am called Taylor Hebert, sir." I tried to keep my tone slightly disapproving. Although what I said denied everything, my non-verbal cues amounted to 'You got me, but kindly shut your mouth.'
  
  He chortled and accepted my scolding, saying, "Ah, sorry, Miss Hebert. You reminded me of someone I met once. My name's Richard Stewart. I work for British Aerospace."
  
  I grinned slightly, remembering our previous conversation, "Over here to service those observation drones the city bought? I saw one briefly break stealth the other day when a cloud got in the way. The refresh rate on that stealth system could be improved, I imagine."
  
  He chortled, "Madam, that platform is over twenty years old! The newer versions have all been improved! Still, I suspect Night City is getting a lot of value out of the system." Then he shook his head, "No, I don't do service, just sales. A fertile ground for sales of military hardware these days, what with the unpleasantness in this part of the world."
  
  I nodded grimly. What had been called a mere police action at first was looking like it was heating up into an actual brush war with little sign that either side was putting on the brakes. Casualties were heavy on both sides, although each side had kept its cadre of professional soldiers intact and was mainly fighting battles using reservists and mercenaries at present.
  
  The Soviets were sending shiploads of "humanitarian supplies" to the Free States and even Night City, but word on the street was that they were filled to the brim with weapons. The motives were clear. They preferred a North American continent that was broken up into different polities, and if the NUSA wanted to push things for the sake of unity, then at least they should be mauled for doing so.
  
  Although I didn't like the NUSA invading, I had to admit that I hated outsiders wanting to prolong the conflict for their own personal geopolitical reasons even more. Still, I'm sure the Free Staters appreciated the assistance, so perhaps I had the wrong opinion.
  
  We quieted there for a while as the aircraft taxied and took off. I glanced out of the window, looking at the green-blue algae that was hugging the coast as far as I could see. My seat buddy saw me looking and nodded, "Strange days, isn't it? How many things can change in just a short amount of time."
  
  I tried not to look bashful and nodded, "Your boys must have some plans, I suspect. Arasaka's new drone-based harvesting system sure looks fancy."
  
  He snorted and nodded, "Sure, and it'll take at minimum nine-months from now to see the first prototype platform designed and built. We'll have harvesters in the azure main in three months at the most."
  
  I raised an eyebrow. The term he used for the open sea was a bit odd, so I searched for it and immediately got a match for an old patriotic song from the United Kingdom. This one I hadn't heard before, unlike the IRA one I sang for Evelyn, but I looked at the lyrics and remembered Mr Stewart mentioned a lyric from it before. I snorted, "Britannia rules the waves?"
  
  "You're god damned right," he said, and then he coughed, "But in truth, we're taking a lot of ships of a specific class out of mothballs from the Scapa Flow and refurbishing them quickly, turning them into drone harvesters in an interim. The multifuel engines on most of those wrecks can burn anything, so they'll be self-fueling after the distillation apparatuses are installed." He nodded, "We'll have a system very similar to Arasaka's that we're developing in parallel..." He then admitted, "... probably about the same theirs comes online." That actually meant "probably afterwards," I thought.
  
  He shrugged, "Still, I'm sure we'll have buyers for these first interim drones who can't afford a brand new system from Arasaka or us. I hear Militech is partnering with Petrochem to build similar systems, as well. SovOil, obviously, is doing the same." He shook his head and finished ruefully, "Everyone has gone algae-crazy. "
  
  I rubbed the back of my neck and chuckled, but it sounded forced.
  
  The flight attendants were very attentive, but I declined anything to drink and just watched the BAe executive down two Dewars in rapid succession. Although we were already supersonic, it would still take a little over five hours to reach Paris, so I just decided to superficially pretend I was napping while I instead focused on other things.
  
  The design for the militarised sleep inducer had been finalised, and we were in production now. I had lucked around meeting the commanding officer of a small band of mercenaries. Most of my work with mercenaries had been singletons, but this man approached me for a bulk discount. He was a white South African, and he and his entire band of mercenaries had arrived for the upcoming conflict. That was, apparently, what they did all over the world. When one war died down, he left and found another.
  
  The idea that there was still something like independent Freikorps or bands of mercenaries like this was kind of ridiculous, but of course, there was. Because why wouldn't there be in this world? Everyone could be their own PMC. This guy had a long-standing mercenary company and was reconstituting it after some losses in Central America. He had heard about how cheap I was selling relatively new Sandys.
  
  He had walked in my door wanting a bulk discount on such boostware but walked out getting that, but also agreeing to purchase one platoon worth of my militarised sleep inducers and test them in combat. I was giving this initial fifty units to him at a steep discount, but in exchange, I would be able to use him in marketing material.
  
  Hopefully, they didn't get sent into some death trap and get annihilated, as that wouldn't make good ad copy.
  
  It had only been a couple of weeks since I had Kiwi bug the apartment of the pushy Dynacorp guy, and while I had heard a lot of disparagement of myself in our surveillance, I hadn't yet heard him plotting my imminent demise as I had expected. He had tried to contact Dr Hasumi again yesterday, and I just declined his call, though, so I felt that he was going to have to do something soon or just accept he lost.
  
  I increased the security at my small factory. I bought several airport-quality security scanners, the kind of security pylons that I had walked through numerous times at the Trauma Team's headquarters and the kind I had just walked through this morning.
  
  I did this mainly to prevent any kind of build-up of employees at shift change times, as they all had to pass through security themselves both when entering and leaving. When they entered, it was to catch weapons and contraband, which I forced them to leave in a locker, and when leaving, it was to prevent theft.
  
  But it occurred to me that this was becoming an attack surface and, moreover, a soft target. With my previous security procedures, not only was I relying a bit too much on the fastidiousness of the security personnel doing the checks, but it backed up, causing a fifteen or twenty-minute delay at shift change times.
  
  The employees didn't like this because they weren't being paid for this time, and I didn't like it because someone wanting to attack my enterprise could spray the lobby down with automatic fire or RPGs and kill most of the people building my products, so it was a sensible, if expensive, purchase. Now they just walked through the scanners and were held up only if the scanners caught something.
  
  When it came time for the actual meal of the flight, I had picked a clam chowder and lobster a week ago when I bought my ticket. Being a native Brocktonite, I would be pretty suspicious of this meal choice anywhere but the East Coast, even in my old world when I was pretty sure the meat would be actual clam and lobster. Here, it was much more questionable, although there was still considerable fishing activity in the world.
  
  With the drop in population and many wars, the ocean biome was one of the few that was actually doing well. Even the hammerhead shark, which was almost extinct in my old world, had a resurgence here.
  
  I sniffed snobbily at the lobster and clam chowder. The lobster was a real lobster, which surprised me. I figured they would have given faux-lobster meat already "deshelled." My seat buddy eyed my meal suspiciously. He had a simple steak that must have been close to five hundred grams, as well as mashed potatoes. I was sure the steak was cloned and vat-grown, but the potatoes might have been real. He said, "This is going to sound weird, but I've never eaten a real lobster. It looks difficult to eat."
  
  "Nah," I said, my accent chip protesting my casual use of language, "It's pretty simple." Then, I expertly twisted off the tail and showed him how easy it was. Only the claws were a little bit tricky, but even then... even with Leviathan imperilling the sea now and then, any girl growing up in Brockton Bay would know how to eat the tastiest of all arthropods! Well, shrimps were really delicious, too.
  
  Back in my old world, the famous Ward Ladybug had been based in New York City, along with Legend, and there were rumours that she owned and operated an entire lobster farm in Staten Island as a hobby. Apparently, her "bug control" extended into all arthropods, not just insects, so she could get a bunch of lobsters to be pleased as punch doing nothing but procreating and getting along with one another.
  
  It was already well-known that she had a huge farm of Australian Darwin's bark spiders and black widows that she used to create very effective, armoured costumes for any Ward that asked, as well as a lot of the Protectorate, too. What a good girl she was.
  
  The clam chowder had been "acceptable" but not good, but I systemically disassembled that lobster in record time. Eating him made me feel quite nostalgic. I sat for the rest of the flight, thinking of home and of Dad.
  
  After we deplaned in Paris, Mr Stewart stopped me from walking off.
  
  "You're headed to London, right? If you like, you can hitch a ride on our private jet. We're leaving as soon as I get there; you won't have to wait hours for the connecting flight," Mr Stewart offered, which I raised an eyebrow at. I guess it wasn't too surprising to fly back on a public supersonic and then have a business jet meet you there so that you didn't have to wait four hours for the next flight.
  
  I'm not sure why he was so polite to me. I considered it but then shook my head, "No. I'm afraid I'll have to decline. As a foreign national and an American citizen, my visa is only valid if I enter the port of entry that I declared in advance. It'd be too much of a hassle to change it, and it would inconvenience you to wait to have customs meet your aircraft on the tarmac when we landed."
  
  He snorted and tapped the side of his nose in a gesture I didn't recognise, "Right, right, Miss Taylor . I hope you enjoy your visit to our humble and rainy island."
  
  My stomach growled a little bit which caused me to blush, "Besides, that lobster was hours ago, and I never had breakfast. I'm going to hit the airport lounge for a more substantial meal." The lobster was quite good but had been a little bit on the small side. It had merely whetted my appetite without actually satiating it.
  
  That caused him to chuckle and nod, "That makes more sense. Well, till next time." Like last time, he walked away humming the melody to Land of Hope and Glory. What an odd man. We had exchanged net addresses this time, though, so I wondered if he would ever contact me. Or I could be the one to call him if I ever needed a Challenger hoverpanzer someday.
  
  An especially bouncy girl in an airport uniform and a shiny bus driver or military-style cap met me as I deplaned and offered to show me around. A couple of other first-class passengers had personalised service like this, as well. I frowned when it appeared that each assistant had not been picked randomly. One of the older ladies had a muscley-looking and very attractive male assistant, while I and the three others had attractive females.
  
  I would have been satisfied with the muscley guy or even no eye candy at all. This wasn't a VR, so it wasn't like they could generate an actual interpersonal ideal for me or anyone else, but people's ideas of attractiveness had incredible amounts of overlap, so just employing a few slightly different attractive people and you could have someone on hand for almost everybody. Taylor Hebert was my real identity, after all, and god knows how much of a profile they had on me from years of watching advertisements and buying products.
  
  Just as you watched an ad in public, so did it also observe you. Eye-tracking systems would notice where you looked and where you didn't, streams would notice what you watched and what you skipped over, purchase history and preference for BDs and films, and all media could be combined with sophisticated psychological models to generate a profile that could be bought by anyone who had a little money. It wasn't even expensive, although I had never bought my own profile because I despaired at what they would claim I did like and did not like.
  
  I let her show me where the airport lounge was but then dismissed her with a large gratuity, watching her walk away. Shaking my head, I walked into the lounge. As I waited for a seat, I heard a gasp, and a girl yelling, "Tay! Holy shit is that you?!"
  
  Blinking, I glanced at the disturbance and saw a girl that was my age, along with what was obviously her parents. She seemed familiar, and I used all of my brainpower to identify her. Jessica Johnson. Jess or JJ, as she liked being called. She was one of my friends at the Militech school in Night City and one of only two people who had actually called me to see how I was doing after Alt-Danny passed away.
  
  She had the appearance and personality of a kind of ditzy, promiscuous girl. She was definitely the latter, but not the former. She was intelligent, perhaps the highest scorer academically in the entire school, and had kept a keen social network, including even NC-Taylor, and people underestimated her at their own peril. NC-Taylor definitely thought that Jess had been more intelligent than herself, although that had been before getting our power.
  
  NC-Taylor didn't go to her parties too often because they were a bit risqué sometimes, but she had been to a couple, and I even had memories of NC-Taylor almost getting to second base with a boy at one of them. NC-Taylor had been a lot more socially subdued, though, after Alt-Mom had passed away and stopped doing many of the expected teenage things.
  
  She had also been the only one to call me more than once. She called me a few times over the years, maybe once a quarter, just to be nice, and we'd talk each time for five minutes or so.
  
  I smiled, turning off my accent chip and waved, "Jess, is that you? What are you doing here?"
  
  She checked with her parents real quick before ushering me over to sit with her so I didn't have to wait for a free table.
  
  "Girl, you are looking good! I thought you had died! You disappeared for years!" she said and then raised an eyebrow as my adaptive firewall stopped a casual hardware probe attempt dead in its tracks. She gave me two thumbs up, grinning, "Nice ICE." NC-Taylor and her had both been "sisters" on the same technical track at school, so this kind of behaviour that I would consider disrespectful from others was tolerated and even expected. I reciprocated and got hardly any more information than she did before she also shut down the scan before it finished.
  
  I did detect that she had upgraded her deck since NC-Taylor had last seen her. She had a Biotech Σ, the same brand that I had bought when I first arrived in this world, but her version was a step up from their entry level. It was a ten thousand Eurodollar deck, which was quite nice for a college student.
  
  NC-Taylor had been training to be a netrunner, while Jessica was training to be more of an engineer, although there was a lot of overlap there. Her parents were rich and higher ranked than Alt-Danny had been, but both were about the same rank as Alt-Mom, both at the Regional Director level for different departments.
  
  She reintroduced me to her parents since it had been a number of years since I met them, and I smiled, deciding to be honest, "I'm here to finalise my education and graduate from University."
  
  Jessica went wide-eyed, and her dad raised an eyebrow, "You're receiving a degree from a European University? Impressive. Which one?"
  
  "Oxford. There were no direct flights from Night City, so I had about a four-hour layover here before I could hop over to Heathrow," I said without bragging, merely stating facts.
  
  "Fucking nova, Tay! Totally preem! Talk about a change from an apartment in Japantown!" Jess said, getting scolded by her mom for her language.
  
  I chuckled, "I still live there, actually, although in a nicer part of the Megabuilding. Are you on vacation?"
  
  Jessica nodded, " Aff . We're headed back to the States now. I was the female Honor Cadet in my class at OCS. I also got admitted to the UCLA engineering program last year. So my mom and dad gave me a trip to Paris as a gift!" That explained her shortened hair. She used to have hair down to her butt, but this was much more in-line with Militech's military regulations for female grooming standards.
  
  Every Militech executive had a reserve commission in their armed forces. So, the fact that she was admitted to OCS prior to even graduating college meant that the Corporation had plans for her. It likely meant she was on a fast track. That she was the Honour Cadet, or highest achieving female cadet, was also a nice feather in her cap.
  
  I raised an eyebrow, "OCS before graduating? Honour Cadet? Wow, Jess, you're killing it. Or should I say, Lieutenant Johnson, eh?"
  
  "Aww, Tay, don't!" she said, although her non-verbal cues were clearly saying, 'Yes, praise me, continue praising me.' Both her parents looked quite proud too, which made me jealous that she had both of them still alive, but I repressed that.
  
  I ate a nice lunch with them and promised that we would catch up together when I got back to the States, although with her in LA and "Taylor" in Night City, it might take a little bit before that could be in person. Still, I thought that I would.
  
  In the past, I had been a victim of imposter syndrome, terrified to interact more than superficially with any of Taylor's old friends, most of which were only fair-weather friends anyway. Jess might still be that, just smarter about it, but even so, that described most people in this world, so I couldn't hold it against her. Besides, it would be useful to have more contacts with Militech, especially ones that were on a fast-track promotion schedule.
  
  We parted as they left to board their flight back to the States, and I waited patiently for my own flight. The trip over was quick, and the only surprise was when I was clearing customs.
  
  "Everything looks to be in order, and I have a digital copy of your weapons permit here if you want me to get that bracelet off your wrist," the customs man said in a friendly tone.
  
  I blinked. Weapons permit? Europe didn't have the second amendment, obviously. Weapons were a lot more restricted over here. I had been a little concerned that they would make me remove my monowire altogether, not accepting me wearing a restriction bracelet that I might hack or remove.
  
  Well, I knew who to thank for that. I'd have to send Gram a Christmas card. I quickly shoved my wrist at him, and he chuckled as he undid the device. I spent a good minute rubbing my wrist. Wearing the bracelets didn't hurt, but still, it was the freedom of now being able to decapitate most people I saw that I appreciated. But if I knew I would have a weapons permit, I would have brought a pistol.
  
  Perhaps there were gun stores in the UK? Probably something like 'John Blasters and Sons, Armourers since 1012 AD' or something.
  
  It was an hour and a half drive to the address Gram's secretary had given me, and by the time I got into the house with all my luggage, I was tired. Not sleepy, exactly, just tired. I slumped into a chair in the living room and just sat there for some time.
  
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  Magna Cum Laude
  November 2066
  
  Los Angeles
  
  As I just continued relaxing in a comfortable chair in England, I was still working in Los Angeles. I was tired all over, though, so I was doing some low-intensity managerial work, the kind I usually hated to do, but it was mostly mindless.
  
  However, I was frowning at the data I was reading off a few spreadsheets and a couple of graphs. When I created my factory, I included some automated systems that tracked the efficiency and speed of my manufacturing workers. I didn't have a traditional assembly line; it was more like many cubicle-like stations where workers would perform an operation and then move on. For simplicity's sake and for covering shifts when I had call-outs, all workers were trained on all stages of the assembly, even if they didn't often work every station.
  
  Simple commercial machine-learning systems attached to cameras in the factory could track how long it took for each worker to perform each operation. I had been auditing some business classes on the net, which I found incredibly boring, but in the classes, these metrics were called KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators.
  
  It was basically a way to find slackers and weed them out over time. They used a lot of different and more fancy words to describe it, but that's what the crux of the matter was. This was data that the workers' direct supervisors mainly used, as I didn't generally involve myself in managing any employees except my direct reports, which I kept to an absolute minimum.
  
  However, what I was looking at wasn't individual performance like my supervisors concerned themselves with, but trends of everyone together. Regardless of the individual, performance started to go down the longer the shift lasted. I mean, that made sense, especially if you stretched it out to the absurd. Someone's productivity would be zero or negative if you made them work fifty hours in a row, for example. That was obvious, but what wasn't obvious was how quickly this started happening.
  
  My workers worked, on average, five days a week on a ten-hour shift, not including a thirty-five-minute lunch. I had picked that as from what I had researched, it was pretty standard, but performance started going down non-linearly after five hours to the point where it wasn't even that useful to have them working the last hour of their shift.
  
  Humming, I opened up a scratch pad and did some calculations. It would be about the same amount of productivity if I changed the shift schedule to ten hours a day in total. The workday would comprise two four-hour shifts, separated by one hour of paid free time, wherein I would encourage the employees to use one of the sleep inducers in our break room and a forty-five-minute unpaid lunch.
  
  My factory had two shifts a day, so this would shift production from two ten-hour shifts to four four-hour shifts. Assuming the workers came back at about the same level as they started after their break, this would break even. But even if they weren't quite as refreshed, the costs should still be in the nominal range while the improvement to the worker quality of life should be high.
  
  The only issue was our break room needed to be bigger. I sighed and called the general contractors again. I still had plenty of free room in the factory building. I would just build a large open room with many comfortable chairs for "naps." If, instead of napping as I intended, they wanted to watch BDs or something, that was fine as long as they returned refreshed for the second half of their work day.
  
  Perhaps a worker canteen might be in order, too. But I didn't want to use too much space in that one building. I was still slowly expanding, and I'd rather maximise the productive areas. For now, I would offer a catering service. At cost, an employee could order food from a few different places if they didn't bring in their own lunch, and I would soak the delivery fees since I could make the order in bulk. I only ran two shifts a day, so we would just shut down for lunch on both shifts. That wasn't ideal, but it would work for the moment.
  
  To be honest, I still felt a bit bad for accidentally Greyboying my original QA team. At least they only had to relive the same five minutes from one of my corny BDs, though, and not being tortured repeatedly.
  
  It was hard to quantify quality-of-life improvements on a job without a consultant doing a full dive into my entire operations, so I wouldn't experience any backlash from this, aside from my employees saying I was a good company to work for. Most of my manufacturing jobs were temporary anyway. I already had the funds, if I wanted to, to build a second, much more automated production line, but the ROI break-even point was like four to five years, so I was hesitating.
  
  It would be nice to introduce my implant versions soon, but manufacturing cybernetics, like many medical products, was complicated and much more expensive. I would need to invest heavily in one hundred per cent sterile clean-room manufacturing processes, which was very expensive. In these cases, automation was ideal because it kept human contact with the product to a minimum, which minimised the chances that sterility could be broken. So I was considering keeping my current laborious manufacturing process for the wreaths while investing in automation for cybernetics.
  
  Still, my power seemed eager to help me design a clean-room factory, seeing the entire thing as either a medical device itself or a device to manufacture medical devices, so perhaps I wouldn't need to buy highly expensive off-the-shelf designs. After all, who knew more about infectious diseases and contaminants than I did?
  
  I had the idea to visit a gun shop in London, maybe some fancy one, but ultimately decided not to bother. It was true that I felt better armed, but this wasn't America, where I could buy a submachine pistol out of a vending machine. I thought it was better to try to blend in in this foreign nation. Besides, I didn't have very much time. I doubted that gun stores here were open twenty-four-seven, and I had to be at the John Radcliffe Hospital tomorrow morning.
  
  Exploring the house, I didn't uncover any secret bunker or scandalous secrets. It was clean and contained nothing except extra linens in some of the closets. I did notice that they were super high thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets on all of the beds, though. It was nice enough that I might actually use the bed instead of just sitting in a comfortable chair with my sleep inducer on.
  
  The nicest part of the master bedroom was the attached bathroom, which had a giant jacuzzi-style bathtub that I immediately filled to the brim with hot, bubbly water and soaked in for a good hour and a half while I relaxed, reading the debut novel of an AI author who went by the nom de plume Virginia Granchester. The novel was Requiem for a Samurai, and I sighed with emotion as I reached the denouement.
  
  I wanted to dislike this novel but couldn't. While it wasn't quite a masterpiece, it was a surprisingly approachable tale of a Samurai after the Meiji Restoration in the 19th century. It was, of course, a tragedy, as how could it not be? But, what was surprising was how relatable the AI had made the story to even European and American audiences like myself, as the novel had been translated into seventy different languages at launch while still maintaining it as a compelling story, even if you had no Japanese cultural referents.
  
  Glancing down at my fingers and toes, I sighed. I was all pruned up. I sat in the tub until all the water drained out and then dried myself with a towel before padding over to the large King-sized bed in the next room and climbing into the sheets. My sleep inducer was on the nightstand already, but I had the desire to replace it with an implanted version as soon as possible.
  
  The main reason I didn't use beds was that I liked putting a pillow over my head while I slept, and this tended to knock the wreath off my head, but if I could have a bed and sheets this nice, then it was worth it to accelerate my plans for, at least, a sleep inducer that I could plug into one of my cyber brain's expansion slots.
  
  I wasn't ready to sleep, as I was still busy getting training in space. I had finished their "newbie course" and actually found gainful employment, so now I was getting training on how to be an actual zero-gee construction worker. They called this "Working the High Iron," from the days when all such work was done in low-earth orbit.
  
  Amusingly, the group I got hired onto were building small cylinders that they intended to use to cultivate a brand-new type of algae that they imported from the Earth's surface. At first, I was a little surprised because I felt that this would be much too carbon and oxygen expensive a proposition to make their own fuels in orbit, but then I realised they didn't intend to use them for fuels, just drinking!
  
  That made a lot more sense because all of the habitats up there had very sophisticated recycling systems for human solid and liquid waste. None of the carbon, or hardly any, would be lost.
  
  Still, I decided to try an experiment and tried to have my body in England relax as much as possible. I had never had one body fall asleep naturally because I thought it would be a bad experience.
  
  And I was right. Not only did it take an exceptionally long time for that brain to fall asleep, linked as it was with my other two, but as soon as it did, things got kind of psychedelic. That brain wasn't in the dream phase of sleep yet, and I didn't want to wait to see what would happen if that happened. Instead, I just shook myself and "woke up." It wasn't as bad as losing synchronicity had been, but it kind of felt like I had drunk three or four beers.
  
  I'd just lay in bed watching videos until I got off shift in space, and then I could take a nap. Two of my bodies were back in the same time zone, even if one of them was in a wildly different inertial and temporal reference frame. The fact that Hana was so far away from the gravity well meant that my bodies were slowly, very slowly, becoming temporarily out-of-synch due to general and special relativity.
  
  It wasn't a lot, something akin to seven to eight thousand picoseconds a year, so I could do nothing for many, many decades before I had to take countermeasures. This did mean that if I ever wanted to travel interstellar distances, though, and at interstellar speeds, it would be better to have all bodies go on the trip together. It would be possible to adjust the way my Kerenzikovs worked so that, even at somewhat high fractions of c, I experienced things the same way, but that would be very sub-optimal.
  
  I honestly wasn't sure how the Haywire FTL comms system would impact this. Theoretically, I should be able to use it to keep my brains more in sync without me actually doing anything, but from what I understood, doing so would break causality, as travelling faster than light or even just sending information, should be indistinguishable from travelling through time, no matter the mechanism for how you did it. Still, I wasn't a physicist, and these things obviously worked, so it may be just as simple as that our present understanding of relativity was flawed.
  
  There were tons of parahuman powers that could travel or send information faster than light, after all. A lot of teleporters could, although some were limited in how many jumps or hops they could make; even Legend was supposed to be, in theory, able to travel faster than light even if, in practice, he could not do so.
  
  Or, maybe, I should look at what I would be tested over in the morning. It couldn't all be medical related, and I might actually need to review some things if they were testing English composition or history. Nodding, I set to it.
  
  It took me a few moments to decide which outfit to wear. The second dress wasn't suitable, as it was in the realm of "little black dresses" and I wouldn't wear a cocktail dress to an important meeting at a College. The only things I wanted to be assessed today were my medical skills and knowledge, after all. I only let Evelyn buy that dress for me in case I actually had a party to attend, although I very much hoped I never received an invitation.
  
  I settled on a skirt-suit in charcoal grey but with dark stockings. Stockings weren't really in fashion these days, and we had to go to three stores before there were acceptable ones to buy, but I preferred stockings or pantyhose to the alternative of displaying my bare thighs to the world. Plus, I liked the way they looked anyway. That was the most important part.
  
  The best part of having my techhair was that I didn't need to style or comb it, even after sleeping with a pillow under and above my head all night, just after getting out of the tub. I just mentally triggered it to refresh my pre-selected style, and it all untangled itself and settled down into my pre-programmed style. The processor in the system analysed each style and provided a name for them, and I was a bit offended that it called mine "curlygeddon."
  
  Oxford wasn't a large city, so the drive to the hospital didn't take that long on the A40. Finding the correct place after I parked was a little more challenging, but that was why I left so early. After seeing it, I realised I still had an hour before the appointed time and decided to backtrack to a couple of restaurants that served breakfast, catering mainly to hospital workers.
  
  A croissant breakfast sandwich and coffee sounded excellent, and although they weren't the best I ever had, they were serviceable, and it was a good start to my day. I had no idea how they were going to assess me, but if it was going to take ten days, then it was likely something that would be wearying. Perhaps exams on every course I would have taken? The idea of testing out of classes existed back in Brockton Bay, but here it was very anachronistic.
  
  After making sure my clothes didn't have any grease or croissant bits on them, I made my way back to the library. I was still about twenty minutes early, but that was fine. I glanced around, not entirely sure where I should go inside the library, so I ended up checking in with someone behind a desk, "Excuse me. My name is Taylor Hebert and the Dean instructed me to meet someone here."
  
  At first, the man looked a little sceptical, but after a moment, he nodded, "Yes, you're supposed to be in conference room C-5." I thanked him for his time and went to find it. Rather than listed as a conference room, per se, it was on the map as a group study room. That was fine, I supposed.
  
  I was the first one there, so I took a seat at the table and waited. Two people arrived five minutes or so before the appointed time, and I rose to greet them. It was a man and a woman, both in their thirties. "Miss Hebert?" the man asked, and I inclined my head.
  
  They introduced themselves. The man was an assistant to the Dean, while the woman was Dr Grace Turner, who was the Regius Professor of Medicine, whatever that meant. It was some title that some king gave in the 16th century or something. Apparently, it meant she was somewhat high in the hierarchy in the medical school and would be the one in charge of assessing me.
  
  "Thank you for taking time out of your week to assist me, Dr Turner," I told her and inclined my head, "So, what are the first steps?"
  
  She told me, and it was pretty much what I thought. I'd be taking four or five tests a day, about two hours long apiece. I frowned when I added them all up together, "That seems like it will eat up the entire ten days that I was told by the Dean to free up for this assessment. What about the practical skills portion?"
  
  The Professor frowned and said, "We will partly do that through virtual-reality braindances, but also partly in real life. You'll need to schedule another two weeks for it."
  
  I sighed, rubbing the back of my neck. "I suppose it goes without saying that if I fail these academic exams, there would have been no need to proceed with the practical skills assessment, yes?" That caused her to nod. The Dean had been a dick, but I think I underestimated how much of a dick he actually was.
  
  "Well, very well... where will the exams be taken? Will you be proctoring them?" I asked, finally.
  
  She shook her head, "Not personally. They'll be proctored by AI in a specially prepared and shielded room here in the Cairns. That is to prevent you from any Net-access that might be used for cheating, as many of the exams are more on the nature of testing knowledge retention."
  
  I started to nod, understanding, but the Dean's assistant coughed to bring our attention to him and said, "About that... Due to the unprecedented nature of this accommodation that we are granting you, we will need you to give us super-user access to your operating system to verify that you are not consulting any reference materials during the exams."
  
  I stared at him like he was insane. Even the Regius Professor looked shocked. I pursed my lips in a thin line, saying simply, " No. "
  
  This seemed to cause the man to smirk slightly, "It isn't optional, ma'am."
  
  I rolled my eyes, sighed and stood up, "Of course it is. The very idea of what you're asking is preposterous. Given the background of many of Oxford's students, I am absolutely certain you would never ask this of one of your other students. I really would have appreciated being told this... requirement prior to flying out here. I detest people wasting my time."
  
  Dr Turner held out her hand and said, "Wait, maybe there is-"
  
  However, she was interrupted by the other man who shook his head, "This is absolutely non-negotiable."
  
  He had that fucking right. What a waste of time. I smiled at Dr Turner, "Apologies for wasting your time." Then I stared emotionlessly at the other man, who was kind of blocking my way out of the small conference room, "Sir, remove yourself from my path, and kindly go short to your own ground." I tested out a spacer insult that Hana learned, which had the same meaning as 'go fuck yourself.' I decided I quite liked it.
  
  He sputtered a bit, but perhaps something about the way I was staring him down made him wise enough not to push the matter, and he stepped back two steps. As I left, I heard the barest beginnings of a conversation through the door. It was Dr Turner, saying, "Are you a fucking-"
  
  I didn't stick around to eavesdrop because I was quite annoyed. Had this entire trip been a waste of time, then? Gram's secretary had asked me to inform them of how long I would need the house, so I sent her a quick text message stating that I would not need it anymore, at least after this morning.
  
  I hadn't made it to my car before Gram's secretary called me, and I answered. He seemed concerned, "Miss Hebert. Was there something wrong with the house?"
  
  I made a 'Tsk' noise and said, "No, there wasn't anything wrong with it. It's perfect. There's just something wrong with Oxford, though, and it seems like it won't work out." I then explained in simple terms what happened. He remained silent for a while, and I could hear the literal click-clacks of an actual mechanical keyboard, something I hadn't heard since Brockton Bay.
  
  "Are you still in town?" he asked, and I indicated that I was, "Let me see if I can solve this issue. Sir Stewart perhaps didn't understand the request or your precise status. If all else fails, we can definitely arrange a similar degree-by-exam at Trinity College here in Dublin very rapidly," he said, sounding a little weary in the way that people often got weary at the world and at people who increased their workload. I didn't take it personally, though, and it seemed he was annoyed at the Dean, not me.
  
  "Okay... that would be nice, too," I said, feeling a little better about the situation. Then, I had to ask, "Is that an actual mechanical keyboard I hear?"
  
  His tone brightened, and he started talking with the zeal of a religious fanatic, "Oh! I knew there was something cultured about you!" He then went on for a good five to ten minutes about mechanical keyboards, the best kinds, which was a trick question because, apparently, the best kind was the kind you had to build for yourself. He took my recognition as interest and not amazement at hearing something I hadn't heard since 2011 or even earlier. Apparently, there was a sizable mechanical keyboard community on the net, and he forwarded me a few sites, which I saved.
  
  Well, the clicky-clacks did sound nice, I supposed, and I remembered a satisfying clicking feeling to my fingers from computer class. However, with a high-end operating system, you could type as fast as you could think, which was quite hard to beat. This guy sounded like he just liked something because it was anachronistic, like a 20th-century version of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Keyboards instead of halberds.
  
  I decided not to even keep walking to my car, and instead just turned around and returned to the Cairns library and decided to just look around. Although the entire John Radcliffe Hospital had been rebuilt in the wake of the Data Krash after a "rebellion" of automated surgical bots resulted in the buildings being mostly demolished, almost all of the books were preserved. I didn't have the authority to check anything out, but I could still look through some of the reference books here, which were kind of interesting.
  
  I was in Oxford, so I had to read at least a few entries from the "Oxford English Dictionary" after all. By the time I got a call, I had moved on to the older chemistry reference books and was looking at the SI units of magnetic properties. The call came from the Dean again. Grinning a little, I answered the call before my Agent could screen it, but I answered it slightly brusquely, with a simple, "Hebert."
  
  "Ah, Miss Hebert... this is John Stewart. I want to apologise on behalf of myself and my assistant earlier today. I'd be lying if I said this request hadn't irritated me, but I assure you we did not intend to drive you away through overly-onerous requirements... my man just could tell I was a bit irritated and decided on some initiative."
  
  I raised a single eyebrow, which was a hard gesture to do and it had taken me a lot of practice over the years I had been in Night City to perfect it, "Like... 'Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"
  
  That caused a genuine chuckle to come from the older man who nodded, "Yes, precisely!"
  
  I grinned, "Thomas Becket was canonised if I recall. What compensation could I expect?"
  
  This caused the man to cough, "Ah, yes... well, you see, we haven't had the best relationship with the Holy See since the Reformation, you see, so I don't think I can guarantee you canonisation. Plus, you'd definitely have to die." He was razzing me now but seemed a lot more friendly than the last time I had spoken with him.
  
  I decided to play along, "Well, I don't like that part, at all. I suppose there's nothing to do about it."
  
  "That's probably for the best. However, if you're still in town, you can start your assessment today. While my assistant's demand was a bit much, there will need to be some way to verify that you aren't consulting any reference materials you have saved in your implants," he sounded slightly apologetic about it.
  
  I tilted my head to the side, about to take offense again but stopped. Really, his request wasn't that out of the ordinary. While I was sure that regular students didn't have such stringent requirements, they also had five or six years for professors to individually gauge their progress. Personally, I thought that it was a bit old-fashioned to even proscribe the use of reference materials for an exam, but this was an old-fashioned place.
  
  I sighed and thought about this for a good fourteen hundred milliseconds of objective time before I offered, "I can scroll a virtu of myself taking the exams. That would include, obviously, my HUD, and it would be possible to verify that I wasn't pulling up any saved reference materials. But I would not agree to scroll the thought track." A BD's "thought track" didn't really correlate entirely with a person's inner monologue, so you couldn't actually "hear" someone's thoughts precisely, but it wasn't that far off, either. You'd experience their emotions, and you could, with practice, kind of intuit what they were thinking about, so I considered it confidential.
  
  Plus, I had already tested only recording one-third of my "thoughts", and I would have come across as very flightly, almost ditzy. It would appear kind of like someone with really bad ADHD, thinking of very random things. The Dean considered this for a moment before nodding, "Yes, that would definitely be sufficient. Dr Turner is still in the Cairns library if you're able to return today."
  
  "I'm here, as well. I figured that if I am in Oxford, then I had to at least read a few entries from the Oxford English Dictionary," I said amusedly.
  
  He tilted his head to the side and said, "If you pass all of the tests, I'd be willing to show you one of the first editions, the first fascicle printed. I believe it took them five years to write from A to Ant."
  
  That would be very interesting, so I inclined my head. I had thought this man would be an enemy, but it turned out that he was just an overworked asshole. That was fine, there were plenty of people like him, and I would just have to demonstrate that I wasn't actually wasting his time. I thanked him and disconnected before retracing my steps and finding the same study room.
  
  I did notice that it was just the Professor this time, and the Dean's assistant was nowhere to be seen. Although he had been incredibly irritating, I hoped he didn't have to flee the country like the knights who had ridden King Henry of his turbulent priest. The Regius Professor smiled at me as I approached and said, "Ah, I just spoke with the Dean. If you like, you can begin your exams immediately."
  
  So we were just ignoring the previous unpleasantness. Yes, I could do that. I walked with her to a room further into the library. It was quite small, and I immediately recognised that I was in a Faraday cage as soon as I entered it. She said, "Please take a seat, and you can select whichever exam you want to pursue first. There's no particular order you have to proceed through."
  
  She then tilted her head to the side, "If you'll wait a moment, though." After a few more minutes, someone entered the room and connected something small to one of the hardwired data connections directly behind me. I coughed and said, "Do you mind connecting that device to that jack?" I pointed to the one that was ninety degrees to my left rather than directly behind me.
  
  The tech looked surprised and then glanced at where I was pointing before shrugging and nodding, unplugging it and plugging it into the jack I suggested.
  
  Dr Turner looked like she wanted to ask why I made that request, but I was thankful that she did not. I assumed that this device was some kind of proxy that I would be scrolling my BD into, but the nondescript box was large enough to house a small-shaped charge in it as well. I didn't think it had one, but if it did, the hypothetical jet of molten metal would have been pointed directly at my back. Now it was set to destroy the data terminal I was about to use to take these tests, not my back. I might be burned a bit, but nothing too serious.
  
  When everything was set up, Dr Turner said, "Well, I'll be leaving now. Feel free to take as many exams as you like, but we ask that you not leave this room in the middle of an exam. Feel free to take breaks in between them, though, as much as you like."
  
  I nodded, "Thank you again for your assistant, Doctor." I then configured and started my BD scrolling, aiming it at the proxy that the tech had installed. I was told that an AI would be administering the exam, and it would likely be the same one that reviewed my BD.
  
  I tapped on the data terminal, and it was already logged in and had an extensive list of exam choices. Each exam had a time limit, but there was apparently no time limit on how long I could take to complete the whole battery of tests, merely how much I could stand to do a day.
  
  Well, I had to do all of them, so I might as well get the easy ones out of the way first. Rather than the test called 'Introduction to Human Body', which sounded dreadfully boring and was likely the first class all medical school students took, I selected Advanced Genetics, Cell Structure and Function from the list of tests and started the exam. The exam was interesting. It wasn't multi-choice at all like I was expecting. I could answer verbally or write my answer in the text box with the data terminal, and I assumed the AI was grading each answer personally. Nice. I didn't have to be brief, then.
  
  When Grace had heard about the Dean setting up someone to test out of the entirety of the MBBS curriculum, she had been interested. She didn't know who this very young-looking girl was, but she knew the kind of horsepower one had to have to force Sir Stewart to budge on something like this, so she was shocked when that idiot personal assistant gave the girl the bum rush out of the library.
  
  Who would ever agree to give anyone super-user access to their OS? Grace certainly wouldn't have. She wasn't surprised when she got a call shortly after that from the Dean and was just pleased that none of that splashed on her. Less than an hour later, the girl had already started on her exams, but to Grace's surprise, she didn't decide to take any of the common pre-reqs first, like higher maths or English composition; she jumped straight into the Phase IV electives and was taking tests out of order, taking the much harder higher level courses first and then working down the pre-reqs.
  
  And she was burning through them rapidly! She had already taken three elective courses, each spending only about thirty minutes on each, when the time limit for each test was three hours. Gaping, Grace triggered an observe mode onto the BD that the girl was scrolling to see if maybe she was cheating somehow.
  
  No, the only things she had open was a note-taking application which was blank and a small calculator app which she didn't appear to need to use. The AI was pretty insistent that there was almost zero chance she was cheating and that she was not switching into different styles of presentation or prose when answering questions. Everything was answered in "her" style.
  
  How about that? Was this girl some sort of practising doctor that Special Branch was giving a new identity to? Some sort of spy? Fanciful tales of some doctor in North America who was also a sleeper agent, whose cover was now blown and was getting a new identity went through her head.
  
  Wait... this girl was taking ALL of the electives? Didn't Grace explain to her that she only had to take a couple of them? Each Phase IV elective was supposed to be a mini-semester of about twelve weeks between Phase III and IV, and you only took two of them. This Taylor girl was taking exams for all of them, seeming to work through the most difficult and then proceeding to the easier classes over time.
  
  Well... whatever.
  
  I managed to clear through ten of the easy but still interesting classes on the first day, but after that, it was much more of a slog. I was keeping all of the tough classes, like Philosophy, Composition, History and Ethics, until the end and was just working through the more boring but easy medical ones.
  
  Four days later, I had exhausted all of the easy classes and had to start taking the harder ones. The math classes were pretty simple, although I had the idea that I wouldn't have thought so before I had three brains to think about it. The chemistry classes were pretty simple because they all seemed focused on organic chem, which my power helped me with.
  
  I actually had to cheat in the History class, though. I used Dr Hasumi's implants to pull up some of the answers because I hadn't actually studied too much English history. It made me blush that their concerns about cheating were warranted, while their precautions were not good enough, but I wasn't about to fail this exam and then be told I had to take a semester or two of History classes. How stupid would that be?
  
  The practical skills tests were mostly in virtual-reality braindances that had a very high fidelity with reality as far as medicine was concerned, which made perfect sense. These I breezed through, and I only spent about five days working shifts in the John Radcliffe hospital, overseen by one of their more senior doctors. They didn't call them "Attendings" like I was used to in the United States, though.
  
  I intended to specialise in surgery, of course, but it wasn't like brand-new baby doctors in the UK did this, so most of the procedures I performed were minor-things like sutures, and the like that I had been doing even as a paramedic.
  
  After the last day, I met both the Regius Professor of Medicine as well as the Dean in person. The Dean seemed a little surprised. He coughed and said, "Honestly, I did not expect this outcome. But you've definitely met and exceeded all of the requirements for the MBBS degree. Do you plan to stay here for further training? You suggested an interest in cyber-surgery."
  
  He went from discounting me to basically offering me a job as an intern doctor, which I thought was nice. But I shook my head, "No, I'm going to head back to Night City and seek residency at one of the trauma centres, I believe."
  
  He shrugged, "Well, fair enough. The degree should more or less be taken at face value for an American license to practice medicine. At least, I've never heard of anyone having any difficulties applying for and getting one, but who would want to go to America, anyway?" He said the last with a purse of his lips, disapproving of my choices.
  
  There wasn't any kind of large ceremony, and I would be added to the list of this semester's graduates, as Oxford didn't want to advertise that they provided degrees by simply testing out of them. I didn't want any special attention either, so I appreciated that. The diploma itself was quite fancy, though, and written on something like synthetic vellum and bound in a leather portfolio. It took it with a handshake and departed in peace.
  
  It was already getting close to dinner time, so I should probably-
  
  I tripped, catching myself in time, frowned, and sat down at the nearest chair. I had hired Militech as protection whenever I drove somewhere in Los Angeles, and someone had just attacked the small convoy, using rocket-propelled grenades to disable the lead vehicle before firing at the trailing vehicle. It was an early-morning ambush, but they weren't, seemingly, trying to kill me, clearly, so I just triggered my Platinum Trauma Team subscription and put my little sports car into high gear and burned out, accelerating out of the kill box.
  
  When I started to do that, they directed some fire into my precious car, but it wasn't enough to immediately disable the vehicle. Less than a kilometre down the road, though, my little Shion sputtered to a stop.
  
  Fuck, they must have hit something important in the engine compartment.
  
  I leapt out of the car, grabbing my submachine gun. Should I continue running? No. The Trauma Team was close by now. I took cover behind my car, aiming back the way I came and observed the running gun battle between my Militech defenders and the unknown attacking forces. The attackers hadn't gotten the clean kill on each vehicle that they had hoped for, and I felt that they were going to be lucky to get away alive, much less pursue me any further.
  
  The AV-4 landed behind me, and I felt nostalgia as the security and medical specialists hopped out and approached me, "Dr Hasumi? Are you too injured to move?"
  
  I carefully pointed my gun's barrel down at the ground before turning, which I could tell the Security Specialists appreciated. It was really a lot of paperwork if you shot a client, especially a Platinum client like myself. "I don't believe so. I don't think I'm injured at all, but someone attacked my convoy, and I managed to get free."
  
  Thinking about it, I handed the SMG to the Assistant Med Techie, asking, "Would you mind carrying this? I'd like to have it back later."
  
  "Uhh.. ma'am, you've been shot," the senior med techie reported, and I blinked. I muted all notifications as soon as the ambush happened. I glanced down and saw the injury and diagnosed it at the same time I got the report from the biomonitor. Serious penetrating trauma of the lower left quadrant. It must have been a rifle round or armour piercing or something.
  
  I started feeling a little light-headed. It might sound ridiculous for someone who routinely conducted surgery on myself, but I liked all of my blood to stay inside my body.
  
  In either case, it wasn't an immediately fatal wound, though. My nanites might even repair the perforated and ruptured spleen, but it was probably best not to rely on it. I sighed, "So I am."
  
  I suppose I should let them treat me as a patient instead of as a rescue. How embarrassing.
  
  Fuck. My Militech premiums were going to go through the roof. It was like insurance, and they charged by the risk profile.
  
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  Sidestory: Junior Illuminati Agent
  AN: Setting this as a "side story" since some people don't care about hearing what happens in Brockton Bay, but it is considered canon.
  
  May 2011
  
  Brockton Bay
  
  Taylor had barely been in this universe for six months, and she was already a junior member of the Illuminati. Felt good, even if she didn't exactly have much of a choice in the matter. But they hadn't needed to do the hard sell, anyway. As soon as they let her read some of the non-public information about the projected date of the end of civilisation, she was onboard.
  
  She didn't precisely know the enemy they needed to fight, except that it was linked to the reason people became parahumans, but it was clear that they were gearing up to fight something and had been for decades. She had been told that she was recruited because her power was especially strong and also that she would have likely been killed within a couple of years if they never approached her.
  
  Taylor didn't really believe the latter, but she definitely believed the former. Her current job was to medically screen applicants that bought powers in a vial from this group.
  
  However... what they were practising wasn't science; it was more akin to alchemy or magic. So what she ended up actually doing was curing various incurable diseases for them anonymously, when for one reason or another Miss Easy Mode Bitch couldn't be consulted. A warlord in Africa had a child with ALS? The work of an afternoon. Her Boss had the frankly disgustingly broken ability to know if curing said child would, in some way, assist their plan. If so, well, that's what Taylor did.
  
  Some of these missions were obvious. A Senator wanted to live longer and be more youthful, so Taylor showed up. It was obvious where the quid and the quo happened in this exchange. But just as often, she would get a message to heal a random homeless person of cancer or something like that. Her Boss absolutely terrified her with these requests. Taylor couldn't see any point, which meant that the woman's ability was absolutely scary.
  
  She also had the responsibility to "humanise" some of their failed experiments. The world called them Case 53 because her Boss released them into the wild, mostly on Earth-Bet, sans their memory. That wasn't something that Taylor would do if she was running a conspiracy that needed to be kept secret, but she wasn't in charge.
  
  Taylor knew how these people were selected for experimentation. They were either dead men and women or seekers of power, one and all. Or both. So, she didn't really have any moral objection to the program. Not even the random ones that Boss had fished out of some dimension on Death's door for some reason. There was implied consent for medical procedures, after all. And receiving power in a vial could be seen as a lifesaving medical procedure if you squinted and looked at it just right.
  
  "Alright, let's finish up with number nine-six-two," Taylor told the always-present breeze, which assisted her when she needed it. There were a few mundane doctors that also occasionally helped her, but she preferred working alone.
  
  The mutations on this particular individual, Mr 962, were radical but easy to adjust to, something akin to a human form. He would have a mostly normal life after they released him. The Illuminati had a lot more prisoners that consisted of failed experiments down here than they released to the wild, but with Taylor here "adjusting" them, there were plans to release quite a few more.
  
  Taylor couldn't help all of them. Some of them weren't alive . For example, Weld had been a boy with a terminal illness, but the process of curing him caused him to turn into fucking metal. Taylor hadn't had a chance to examine the young metal man, as he had been released several years ago, but from what she could tell, he both wasn't and shouldn't be alive, at least not in the way Taylor defined life, so there wouldn't have been anything she could do to him.
  
  Others, though? She could usually make a lot of progress. 962 had been something akin to a monstrous quadruped before Taylor got her hands on the man. Now, while he wouldn't pass for a human, he was definitely a humanoid. Taylor even thought he looked ruggedly handsome. She would have dated him, even. The bright red skin gave him a sort of sexy devil-man look that she liked. It was almost enough for her to add horns to his head, but that wouldn't be professional.
  
  As she finished up, her phone, which she emulated in software through her deck, began yowling with an alert. She pulled up the notification, wondering again how precisely they had arranged service here before blinking. Armsmaster was predicting Leviathan would attack Brockton Bay within a few hours. Fuck! Dad!
  
  She looked around, "Custodian Miss Breeze. Please put nine six two away, for now. I have to leave." A tug of wind pulled on her sleeve, which Taylor took for agreement. She looked around and started gathering things.
  
  She almost forgot to turn the television on. She liked to put a DVD in for Miss Breeze to watch after she left, and she thought that the Custodian appreciated it too. Obviously, as a sapient wind elemental, she didn't have the same biological need for stimulus and couldn't, precisely, get bored. Still, Miss Breeze had started giving her DVD requests, so she thought the lady wind appreciated it.
  
  "Door, my laboratory, please," she said, and a portal immediately popped up in front of her. It never ceased to amaze her, these magic powers. Taylor stepped through, and the portal winked out of existence. Once she was back in Brockton Bay and back on the real telephone network, she called Dad while gathering more medical tools.
  
  "Of course, I'm going to help, Dad. Leviathan is one of the best Endbringers where my skills can be put to the best use; plus, this is our town," she told him after the obvious objections, "You need to get to either an Endbringer shelter or maybe just out of town. We've got quite a lot of warning this time, and an evacuation might be feasible. You should be safe if you're at least fifty kloms away, but I'd just keep driving even after that."
  
  Dad was a lot better now that he was taking her antidepressants every week, but they didn't actually change the way you thought. He still had the same hangups, just without his depression that caused him to go into spirals of self-doubt and loathing. Before, he wouldn't have been able to see the logic in what she was saying, but now he could, even if he didn't like the idea that she was going to be in danger. It wasn't like she was going to punch the sea monster herself, though.
  
  Taylor hung up and gathered the rest of her things, loading them into a nondescript white-panelled van that she had purchased just a month after arriving in town. She wasn't in the Protectorate, obviously , as she would provide her services to anyone who approached her if they had money or something to trade. Although they had wanted to classify her as a villain at first, even going so far as to get a pre-signed kill order for her, she was now considered a Rogue, especially after she had assisted when the angel-lady attacked Australia. She had been dragooned into the Illuminati shortly after that incident.
  
  "Maeve, thank you for showing up," the PRT director, Thomas Calvert, told her after she walked into the staging area. The rain was still light, but she didn't waste a lot of time standing in it.
  
  Besides, there was more than meets the eye with this man, but she couldn't quite place it, but Taylor knew he was hiding a lot of secrets, just not what they were. She could taste the outline of them, and they weren't the usual secrets a highly-placed governmental employee would be hiding either; they were his secrets and nasty ones too. Taylor didn't particularly like being around him, but he was very effective and always treated her well.
  
  He didn't have time to do more than briefly greet me, but he did detail two strong, muscley men to act as porters for me, to bring all my gadgets and supplies into the medical tent. Given the resources she knew we would have, she glanced around at the unpowered medical professionals and immediately started taking charge. Triage would be most important. If they could stabilise someone briefly, they would survive. If she looked the sixteen years old that she actually was, there was no way they would let her do this, but she had already proven herself in the last Endbringer battle, so they acquiesced.
  
  Taylor felt someone touch her hip, and suddenly the world slowed widely down, as though she had the best quality boostware available. Othala had touched her and given her super-speed power. Yes, that would be useful if she could keep doing that over the course of the battle.
  
  The teenage white supremacist smiled shyly at her. Taylor had a pretty good relationship with her, as Othala had been one of her first for-profit patients after Lung bit off the girl's leg in some pointless battle that the White supremacists had against the Asian supremacists.
  
  Luckily the Dragon hadn't eaten her leg, merely spit it out, so she was able to just repair and reattach it as good as new. After that, Taylor just had to heal a small number of very serious burns, and Othala was ready for a dancing night at the Biergarten again.
  
  It was a bit more complicated than that, obviously, but Othala had full function again and no scars. Panacea hadn't liked that Taylor agreed to heal a Nazi, nor that she charged for her services, so they had gotten off on the wrong foot from the beginning.
  
  Taylor understood that in this culture, you were supposed to hate Nazis, but she, personally didn't see that they were any more detestable than the Asian Bad Boyz. Both were somewhat detestable, and both were stupid, but Taylor had grown up so far away, temporally, from World War Two that someone cosplaying as a Nazi wasn't any more shocking than someone cosplaying as a Mongol horse archer or il-Khan.
  
  To her, it was very similar to seeing a group of people walk around in Confederate uniforms, pretending they were tough. It was laughable. She thought if you wanted to be tough, a first step would be to model yourself after victors, not losers.
  
  Besides, she couldn't deny people her services and still claim to be neutral, anyway, so there was no profit in pointlessly antagonising any side. "Thank you, Othala. If you could do that periodically, especially when the casualties start rolling in, that would be great. Will Victor be joining us here?"
  
  The skill-vampire had stolen enough medical knowledge and practical abilities over the years that he could be a qualified trauma surgeon in his own right. He had been one of the people she had been rather afraid of, not so much that he would still her medical skills-she was pretty sure they'd just immediately return. However, she had been concerned since she learned about his power that he would gain her abilities to program in computer languages that didn't exist or use computing technology decades more advanced than existed in the present world.
  
  She'd actually considered assassinating him similarly to Shadow Stalker, but it turned out that if he took "computing knowledge" from her, his power gave him the equivalent of knowledge in this world. It was weird, as why would his Agent temporarily remove such skills from the "target" in the first place if he didn't get an exact transfer? But powers were weird. As such, she ended up not caring-the victims of his thefts recovered their skills over time, anyway, except with exposure measured in days.
  
  Othala scowled, "He thinks this is woman's work." That caused Taylor to raise an eyebrow in amusement. So, just having a bunch of high-level skills didn't make you any smarter, it turned out. That was the whole fluid intelligence versus crystallised intelligence debate. Victor clearly had a lot of the latter but was running on fumes as far as the former was concerned, she thought. There wasn't any fancy sniping you could do to Leviathan. He'd be a lot more helpful here, helping keep people alive.
  
  Still, Taylor shrugged, "Has he been tutoring you in first aid, as I recommended?"
  
  That got her to smile and nod, "Yes, that was a good idea. I'm embarrassed that neither of us had thought about it before, but he does know more than an ER doctor and paramedic combined and is a better teacher than most college professors." Taylor could tell Othala liked praising her husband. Although they were, in many ways, murderous psychopaths, it was rather touching. It was like seeing a Corpo executive that actually had a loving relationship with their spouse, and it vaguely reminded her of her dead parents.
  
  Othala's powers were both very useful in triage and not at all useful. Depending on the type of wounds a person had, she could use her invulnerability power to keep them alive for a couple of minutes. If you were bleeding out and she touched you, you'd just stop bleeding. You were "invulnerable."
  
  The way Othala's power worked didn't make any sense; like most powers, it wasn't scientific at all, but it worked. But it wouldn't resuscitate drowned people, and that would be a majority of the casualties in a Leviathan attack.
  
  The downside was also that the invulnerability power would also make it impossible for Taylor to work on the people. But Panacea could. So, besides using her regeneration ability on people after they were stabilised, Othala was a god-send to temporarily stabilise someone dying of severe physical trauma so Panacea could heal them.
  
  Speaking of, Little Miss Easy Mode Bitch was finally here too. She was grouchy-looking, as normal, but she also had an aura of anxiousness about her. Taylor didn't need her encyclopedic knowledge of psychological disorders to know why, either. Her family would be fighting in this battle, and some might not make it through alive. Panacea usually responded to all Endbringer battles and was carefully protected, so she knew the survival rates better than even Taylor did.
  
  Panacea scowled when she saw Taylor and Othala together. Oh, not this shit again. Taylor sighed and said, "Miss Panacea, I would like to take charge of the triage area. You're clearly the heavy-hitter here, and I will funnel all of the time-critical acute cases to you." Taylor considered herself the best doctor in the world, and the work of a doctor, especially in a trauma setting, was akin to a conductor in an orchestra. She would have a lot of unpowered clinicians to assist her, and she was confident in her ability to manage this.
  
  Panacea looked for any reason to decline, but the truth was that this was how she normally operated anyway. She didn't handle triage when she worked in the hospital, and she just healed the people who were placed in front of her. Finally, she hissed, "Fine."
  
  Taylor nodded and sat down, fishing a small set of tools out of her pocket and casually popped her left eye out of its socket. The Tinkertech modifications that made it an excellent medical imager also made it quirky, requiring frequent maintenance. She generally would have preferred privacy to do this, but already the alert from her customised software was indicating that the divergence of the two sensors in each of her eyes was exceeding nominal values. She would have to do it now, as things wouldn't hold for the entire battle.
  
  Panacea yelled, "What the fuck are you doing?!" She was across the room and couldn't quite see what Taylor was up to. To her, it just looked like Taylor popped her eyeball out. The broody girl stomped over, looking grossed out. Hell, even Othala looked a little squicked.
  
  Taylor held the modified Kiroshi optical system out for inspection, "These are cybernetic replacements, optical prosthesis... not the eyes I was born with. In addition to night vision, these allow me to perform thorough, yet non-invasive, medical imaging of anyone near me."
  
  Panacea looked interested and asked, "So they interface directly with the optical nerves?"
  
  Taylor paused, considering her reply. The truth was that Panacea would instantly know her secret identity if she ever touched Taylor Hebert anyway, so there were no real reason to hide or deliberately obscure things, "That is the failover mode. Here, touch me." She held out her hand and allowed Panacea to touch her, which was kind of akin to placing one's head inside the mouth of an emo-acting lion.
  
  Taylor had avoided ever having to shake the healer's hand in the past because she had seen how Panacea healed people and had suspicions that her power was more flexible than the healer let on. It was widely known that Panacea could knock a person out by touching them, but Taylor thought she could do much more, too.
  
  "Woah, what is this in your brain? Inorganic bits everywhere that I can't read, touching almost every part of your brain. This brain structure, too, this isn't normal... wait, do you sleep?!" the girl asked, looking lively for the first time Taylor remembered.
  
  Taylor replied simply, "The inorganic bits are a computer, and yes, I do sleep, but not very much. The computer functions as a kind of sci-fi direct neural interface. The eyes can transmit data through the optical nerve, but by default, they transmit through a direct digital connection to the computer, which takes multiple inputs and composites them together and then transmits them directly to my sensory cortex."
  
  "How the hell did you do brain surgery on yourself? There are signs of serious neurosurgery here that have been healed impeccably, but there are still a few scars on or around your skull. Want me to remove them?" Panacea asked, sounding curious.
  
  Taylor frowned, "Sure. The fewer scars near my brain, the better. And to perform brain surgery on yourself, the key is to do it very carefully." It felt wrong for her to claim the work of her old cybernetics surgeon, but she couldn't very well tell the truth here. She just wished she had a better deck than a Paraline. While it was a super-computer in this world, it was one of the absolute cheapest options back in Night City, and some of the customisations were difficult to do. It had taken her two months to write software that, finally, allowed her to take over the radio chips and emulate cellular telephones of this world.
  
  Taylor didn't bother to really listen to Legend's speech, as she had a lot of work to do setting up some of her equipment and stocks of consumables. Although she was donating her time and expertise, she would bill the PRT for the latter.
  
  Armsmaster found her when she finished setting up and inclined his head towards her, holding out several armbands. "Maeve, here is an armband." Ah, yes. She had forgotten about those. She took one and nodded at the autistic man. She felt that he treated her a little better because she was a Tinker. In fact, after she was declared officially a Rogue, after having a pre-signed kill order hung over her head, he had e-mailed her a few times, and they had discussed collaborating, perhaps, in the future. Her not being in the Protectorate might make that problematic, as everything Armsmaster made was basically considered top secret, and she couldn't reveal her Junior Illuminati membership badge, either.
  
  She nodded at him but didn't thank him for the courtesy. She felt that he didn't really appreciate politeness for politeness' sake. He was doing his duty, so he wouldn't consider his actions worthy of being thanked, so she didn't. Instead, she said, "Try to avoid dying."
  
  His mouth twitched imperceptibly, and he inclined his head once, "I will take your advice."
  
  The user interface of the armband was simple, and the sensors in it weren't anything to write home about, but at least had the virtue of being mass-producible. She appreciated that this version didn't have an anti-personnel charge built-in, too, unlike the ones they handed out, to even the healers, in the Smirugh fights.
  
  She logged in and then immediately configured the system not to show her any alerts unless it involved Leviathan getting near her present position. She wasn't in the rescue team, and she didn't need to know when someone was down or died. She was going to stay right here.
  
  The rain was getting worse, so it was only a matter of time now.
  
  When the casualties came, they started coming fast. A little over half were drownings of various levels of success, which were easy to resuscitate. She had Tinkertech drugs that could even heal minor brain injuries caused by hypoxia, too, if someone was only "dead" for a couple of minutes.
  
  Traumas were a little more complicated, "Othala!" The girl's hand darted in, applying her invulnerability "buff" to the battered, pun not intended, body of Battery. Taylor had just resuscitated her drowned boyfriend a few seconds ago, although that was just her suspicion since they publicly denied any relationship. "To Panacea!" she ordered a nurse, who grabbed the broken body of the heroine and ran off the few metres which separated their working areas. They had run out of gurneys already, so they were making do with some cots in the recovery area.
  
  "Fenja!" Othala gasped as another broken lady was dumped in front of me. Her, Taylor could stabilise herself. "Speed," she said, and she got a renewed super-speed buff and started repairing a number of arteries at super-speed, calling clinicians to start both blood and plasma.
  
  As Taylor was almost done, she heard a noise that was something akin to the cross between a scream and keening from the next room, "No, no, no, no!"
  
  That was Panacea. Taylor glanced at a surgeon to the left of her and Othala to the right. She probably shouldn't leave, but if Panacea has a meltdown, a ton of people will die. Taylor said quickly, "Take over. Finish the sutures on this artery, please, doctor. Othala, keep hitting her with regeneration until I get back."
  
  Taylor backed out and moved with prudent haste to the next "room", although it was just the other side of the tent. Strider was sitting there, panting for breath. He had brought Panacea a patient directly. However, seeing who it was, she didn't blame him for his breach of the procedure. Glory Girl's broken body lay lifeless in front of her sister who kept keening, "No, no, no" while repeatedly lifting her hand, touching her over and over as if that would make her power work.
  
  Taylor, having tons of knowledge of deviant pedagogical psychology, already had a unique idea as to why Panacea seemed so close to her sister, but seeing this cinched it-in fact, it gave her an epiphany about why such a paraphilia might have developed. There were signs of addiction, which she hadn't considered until just now. Her insights weren't useful, though, just like Panacea's power for once.
  
  Panacea's power wouldn't work on anyone that wasn't "alive." This was stupid, in Taylor's opinion, because death was nothing more than a spectrum anyway, a spectrum that could be reversed and traversed. Even hours after a person "died", portions of their body would still be alive on a cellular level. Panacea turned to see me and suddenly started yelling, "You have to help her! You have to!"
  
  Frowning, Taylor scanned her body with her eyes. Victoria Dallon seemingly didn't have a bone that wasn't broken or an organ that wasn't ruptured. Her brain fared best, but there were still signs of significant TBIs. On the plus side, it wasn't leaking out of her numerous cranial fractures, though.
  
  Taylor paused, trying to think about what Panacea's power used as signs of life. Heartbeat, brain electrical activity, probably. Maybe both. "Keep holding her hand and continuously try to heal her. I think I can briefly get her alive enough that your power will work on her."
  
  Panacea nodded, her desperation and grief allowing her to hold onto any possibility of hope. Someone brought Taylor most of her tools, not knowing what she needed. It was enough; she got to work.
  
  It took several attempts, where for a few seconds, Glory Girl was alive enough to be healed. Taylor was doing nothing more and nothing less than tricking Panacea's power, but Panacea didn't heal people instantly. "Focus on autonomic functions, cardiovascular system and all the hemmhorages," Taylor growled at her, who nodded.
  
  Altogether, it took the both of them over four minutes to get Glory Girl "alive" again. Much too long to waste on one patient. At first, Panacea looked so excited, but then she looked even more depressed, if that was possible, "Her brain... there's so much damage..."
  
  Ah, right. Panacea couldn't heal brains. Allegedly. Taylor didn't see any reason why her power wouldn't work on them, but then again, she didn't see any reason why the girl's power required the patient to be "totally alive", either. Expecting powers to work along logic was sometimes folly. Hadn't she just stepped through a literal multi-dimensional portal earlier? Powers weren't scientific.
  
  Taylor needed Panacea to work again, not lose herself to grief, "You've seen my brain. I can do neurosurgery. I can either replace damaged parts of her brain with cybernetics or use nanomachines to heal damaged areas." The last was more of a "want" that she had. She didn't have any way to build nanomachines at present or any good designs for them, but that was how they healed most TBIs in her old world, and it was usually very effective, if expensive.
  
  There it was, that look of desperate hope again. Taylor sighed, "She'll need to be intubated. Get a doctor or an RT in here to RSI her. She's liable to stop breathing if we don't. She's stable for now. You need to help others."
  
  Panacea looked like she didn't give a fuck about others but finally closed her eyes and nodded, "Right."
  
  Most of Brockton Bay was washed away, and yet the heroes were celebrating. It left a bad taste in Taylor's mouth.
  
  The casualties among the responding capes had been less than thirteen per cent, which was one of the lowest on record. People kept trying to thank her and the other healers, but Taylor wasn't feeling it, especially after she found out that her stupid fucking father almost got himself drowned trying to save one of the dockworkers. They were people Taylor didn't care one whit about, but she would fake it because she could tell that her dad did care. But that faking didn't extend to tolerating near-suicidal behaviours on their behalf. Still, he was alive. She just verified that just now, so she sighed, feeling tired.
  
  They had shifted all of the casualties from the MASH-style tent to the actual hospital, which still had electrical power, and Othala followed her there. The woman seemed at a loss, as the Empire was likely defunct. Kaiser, Hookwolf and Kreig were all dead. Kaiser soloed Leviathan in a one-vee-one that was captured on video and already was becoming famous. Taylor rather disliked the man, and even she had to admit that the fight was rather impressive. So much so that it drew Armsmaster in, attempting to save the white supremacist by shoving what she immediately recognised as a cloud of nanomachines hovering at the end of his halberd up Leviathan's poop chute.
  
  The monster didn't like that one bit and whipped around, breaking Armsmaster's suit and ripping both the man's arms off and beating him about the head and neck with them. It made Taylor pause because disarming Armsmaster was something very ironic. Certainly, the Endbringer did that by coincidence, though, right? After that, it had moseyed away, as they were wont to do, not even finishing off Armsmaster.
  
  Her break over, she walked back into the hospital. Well, if anything, she had more work to do now. The fight was over, but the healing was still underway.
  
  May 2011
  
  Brockton Bay
  
  Panacea had been calling her four, sometimes five times a day since the battle and was getting increasingly frantic. Taylor had been designing several neural cybernetics, even prototyping them, that should repair most of the damage, but they would run into the problem of being mostly Tinkertech, which would be periodic maintenance. Then last night, she had a dream visitation from another world.
  
  Hearing from Brockton-Taylor was nice, and her accomplishments were impressive, but her counterpart had a lot more time to work than Taylor did. The transfer of knowledge and data was amazing, and she felt that she got a much better end of the deal, although she had given the other Taylor a lot of confidential Illuminati research, like all of Haywire's files.
  
  Waking up to see the Boss standing above her bed had been harrowing. Absolutely terrifying. The fedoraed woman demanded an immediate debriefing, as the Path was altered significantly, and the changes all centred around Taylor.
  
  That was interesting. Apparently, the Night City universe and all of its technology was an Out-Of-Context problem for the woman, at least until Brockton-Taylor transferred all the files to her deck. Wait, it was the Boss that had approved Taylor's review of Professor Haywire's files. Did she know something in advance?
  
  "No, I didn't... but we'll have to think how we can use all of this. Your importance has increased, and I'll let you know what we decide. You'll need the standard operating system-based neural interface and Mantis blades to get what you want from Armsmaster and the industrial nanomachine designs for Dragon," the scary lady said, pulling a small memory card out of her pocket and tossing it so it landed perfectly in Taylor's open palm, "This is what you'll need for Miss Dallon." She then did a one-eighty and left without another word.
  
  Beyond a few staff members and a couple of other doctors that were below even her authority, the only other member of the Illuminati that Taylor had contact with was a woman who called herself Doctor Mother, and she was someone that the Boss seemed subservient to. When Taylor was first recruited, this Mother or Doctor had discussed ideas about creating certain powers with Taylor, but what the fuck was Taylor supposed to say to that? The bitch was practising alchemy, not medicine. "Use a bit more of the pink one?"
  
  All she could come up with was a suggestion to do whatever Doctor Mother could to minimise the weird non-biological aberrations. With enough time, Taylor could cure or at least mitigate the damage from most of the others unless their power was one that continuously altered them.
  
  Wait. Taylor frowned. What did she want from Armsmaster? Oh. Yes. His production method for nanomachines. She wanted to create a biosculpt vat, but she would just settle for fabricating some nanomeds right now to get Amy Dallon off her back. There had been a lot of nanites in that cloud at the end of his Halberd, and now that she had a design for medically useful ones, she needed a production method.
  
  She inspected the data on the datashard, or rather data card, and found that it was Victoria Dallon's power testing results. Years old. Why would she need... oh, okay. She nodded and transferred them to her personal system.
  
  The trade with Armsmaster, who was still in hospital, included Taylor installing his newly designed cybernetic arms in a few days. He had turned down healing from Panacea, wanting to proceed with a more cybernetic solution. He was surprised to get approval to trade technology with a non-Protectorate cape such as Taylor, but it had come from the highest levels.
  
  Listening to Dragon chide him, calling his stunt against Leviathan "stupidest fucking thing I've ever seen", caused the man to chuckle in a way that told Taylor it wasn't the first time he heard that from her. Wait... were they dating? They seemed like they were dating. You go, Armless Master.
  
  Although the Boss had said he would want the Mantis blades, Taylor showed him a few other types that Brockton-Taylor had diagrams of, including a set of Gorilla Arms that she thought he would go for instead. Nope. He definitely wanted the Mantis blades, but he intended to put tools and self-designed weapons in them instead of the hardened steel blades that she expected. He also insisted on a modular attachment to his CNS, so that he could design his own set of arms and hot-swap them for various functions. That was fine.
  
  Why did she bother even hawking the other wares? Still, he was incredibly impressed with "my" level of technology, as was Dragon. She got the tech he used to manufacture what he called "nano-thorns" although he wouldn't release the designs of the actual nanomachines themselves, but she didn't need them. "Nano-thorns" were nanites that were much smaller than even the general-purpose neurological medical nanomachines, and their only purpose was to sever molecular bonds. Nasty stuff.
  
  Taylor suffered through two more days of putting up with Panacea's incessant calls before she had a similar system built. Her setup was larger because she would need to manufacture a lot more nanomachines, and it still wouldn't be enough, but she could always just duplicate them. Taylor set the neuro-specialised medical nanites to fabricate and called Panacea.
  
  Amy Dallon had hardly left Victoria Dallon's side, only leaving the ICU to heal people before then returning. Eric Pelham was right next to her, having suffered severe hypoxia-related brain injuries as a result of being drowned for nearly fifteen minutes before being resuscitated by yours truly. There were about ten capes with similar brain injuries, either intubated here in the ICU or downstairs in medsurge for minor deficiencies. She had enough nanomeds for all of them now.
  
  "Alright, I'm going to administer the nanomachines. These are designed to mechanically repair damaged neurons and axons through targeted regrowth of neural cells," Taylor said to Amy.
  
  She nodded, holding the unconscious girl's hand and asked, "How long do you think it will take to repair the damage?"
  
  "Days. But you should see it start to work right away," Taylor said before adding the nanites to the already running bag of NS and adjusting the drip rate on the IV pump. She also grabbed Victoria's chart and scribbled a new order for a medication, propofol.
  
  Right now, Victoria wasn't sedated because she was in a genuine coma, but as the nanomeds worked, she would start to wake up and would need continuing sedation until the course of treatment was complete. She found a nurse and verbally ordered the new medication. Apparently, it was a big hullabaloo to start a new IV on the almost-invulnerable girl, so the nurse was thankful that the propofol could be run simultaneously with the other infusions.
  
  As Brandish did not survive the battle, Taylor already got her father's approval to use an experimental Tinkertech remedy on his daughter after the PRT did some abbreviated tests on rats. Poor rats, but your sacrifices were for Science. She had the approval to treat all of the TBI patients, in fact.
  
  It didn't take long before Amy gasped, "I think I can see them working."
  
  Taylor nodded and said, "Alright. As promised, come with me." Amy didn't look like she wanted to leave Glory Girl's side, but Taylor just glowered at her until she followed her into an unused conference room.
  
  Taylor started the slide show and asked, "What is this?"
  
  Amy rolled her eyes, "A 3D fMRI or something. If you're asking what area is being activated, it is one of the brain's reward centres."
  
  Taylor nodded. Although Amy didn't have the same medical education she did, Amy did have an intuitive understanding of an organism's biology just as soon as she touched them, and that was, in effect, equivalent or even superior.
  
  "Now, pretend this is happening in a pubescent child, over and over during puberty, when they approach in proximity to a particular person. What do you expect might be the result?" Taylor asked gently.
  
  Amy frowned, "Nothing good. Why are you showing me this, and why are you asking me these questions?" She started to get suspicious, which Taylor took to mean that she might have subconsciously guessed what had happened to her.
  
  Taylor sighed, "This isn't just a random brain scan. This scan was taken from your sister's initial power testing when she got her powers. This is the effect of her 'aura' on a willing volunteer... I'm not only the best doctor in the world but also the best psychiatrist... I couldn't help but notice, but Amy, you have to understand... that this is nobody's fault, and I am not judging you..."
  
  Taylor quietly readied the super-fast-acting sedative-laced dart gun she recently installed in her index finger just in case Amy snapped. She would not let the girl touch her.
  
  Taylor had been lying; although she had the skills of the best psychiatrist in the world, the truth was she didn't have the empathy to actually do the job. Still, she wasn't heartless. Thankfully, Amy Dallon didn't try to murder her for "discovering her secret", but she did break down, and it was difficult to deal with. The less she remembered the incident, the better.
  
  Taylor had been feeling pretty good about herself and had even agreed to a request from the supervillain Coil to help a monstrous cape. That was pretty much one of her full-time jobs, so she accepted, given the payment that he was offering. How stupid.
  
  Coil was doing the smart thing and leaving town, and he left her his secret underground base as part of the payment. Taylor had thought it generous, as it was still completely intact until she saw her "patient." Still, she wasn't one to run away from a challenge, but all of them-these Travelers-had the stink of dangerous secrets about them. She knew it.
  
  She had decided to confront the leader in her office. "What secret are you keeping from me? I need to know. I'm likely going to have to bring in assistance to help Noelle, and I need to know whether or not this is going to bite me in the ass, depending on whom I ask."
  
  There was something off about Trickster's brain too. Taylor had gotten a good scan of it earlier, and it was like he had received targetted brain damage, laser-precise, to cause him to be less inhibited, more paranoid, more spontaneous, less rational and more obsessed. It wouldn't express itself too often in his everyday life, but in a high-stress situation, he was likely to be a fuck-up waiting to happen.
  
  Sitting in Coil's office, in his chair, was a bit odd, even after Taylor removed all of the traps, cameras and microphones and disconnected the three caches of high-explosives attached to load-bearing members inside the base. Who had a literal self-destruct system for their secret base? It was ridiculous.
  
  At first, Trickster denied keeping any secrets from her, but after repeated pressing, he finally admitted the origins of his troupe. From Madison, Wisconsin. And not Earth Bet's, either.
  
  Just how prescient was the Smirugh, anyway? Would Taylor be considered an Out-Of-Context problem to the mind job she inflicted on him and his friends? Possibly. Probably, even. Ziz did all of this way before Taylor arrived in this universe.
  
  She readied her go-to-sleep finger and nodded, "You'll probably want me to repair all of the brain damage you have, then." She then went to explain exactly what she saw, showing him images of his brain that she had taken. She used a number of psychological tricks, using his increased paranoia to get her way, by implying that he was the least "Smirugh-bombed" of his friends and that she would need his help to fix the rest of them. And that she would need to do this to help Noelle, who he was obsessed with.
  
  That he was the least affected wasn't true. His brain was the most altered by far, but it worked, and he allowed himself to be administered the nanomeds.
  
  "Who will you need help from? Panacea? That was one of our hopes coming to Brockton Bay," Trickster said as an IV slowly ran on him.
  
  Taylor shook her head wildly, "Fuck no. I am not letting Panacea get within a kilometre of Noelle." Noelle had finally agreed to a demonstration of her "ability" and let Taylor duplicate herself. This was something that Noelle both didn't like and felt very self-conscious about, but it had happened accidentally enough that the Travellers and Noelle agreed to do it one time. Being in the same room with Noelle had been very scary, but Taylor's duplicate wasn't scary at all.
  
  A duplicate of herself without a lot of tools and preparation wasn't a threat in the least, and Taylor had shot the doppelgänger directly in the heart before it could spill too many of her secrets, which it tried to do immediately after being "born."
  
  Taylor couldn't help herself, though, and she just had to study precisely how her brain diverged from her "evil clone", which was on the ice in the medbay of the base. She'd already got a thorough scan of the brain and later would see if any of the other biologies were divergent during a thorough pathological examination as well.
  
  If Taylor was correct about Panacea, then an evil Panacea clone could be an S-class threat on all her own. Taylor shook her head, "No. There are a number of power nullifiers, though, that might be useful and willing to help. Absent that..." Well, she might have to beg for the nano-thorn recipe after all, or alternately help from the Boss.
  
  Taylor would try her best to help the woman and would try her best to kill her if that wasn't possible. She was a huge threat, as she was. The best shot would be if Taylor could bisect her, cleanly taking off the humanoid torso and discarding the "body." It might start regenerating, but most powers didn't create matter ex nihilo, so there would be a short window of time where Taylor would be able to perform brain surgery to disable her power by carefully lobotomising the Corona Gemma brain structure. Taylor was confident that she could do so as she had been able to see both Corona in Noelle's brain, but her scanner couldn't penetrate that far into her "bottom half", which was one reason she didn't want to risk dealing with that "part" of her. She might even be able to do it in a way that it might be possible to restore her power later in the future if Taylor could figure out why it went berserk in the first place.
  
  From their story, Taylor was pretty sure that Noelle was significantly lacking in the "Balance" part of the vial, and that was why Oliver had almost no power to speak of. He got all of this portion.
  
  It would take speaking to Doctor Mother about this, she was the alchemy expert, but it might be possible to give Noelle more "Balance", which might tend to repair her Corona Gemma after Taylor lobotomised it and induce a less crazy but still useful power. But that might kill her, too. Taylor wasn't an expert here, but Doctor Mother would no doubt be interested. It wasn't life or death, though, because the Boss wasn't popping out of the nearest portal, so she would just proceed as she had tentatively planned.
  
  It might take a while to figure something out. Would her antidepressants work on Noelle? She had a fairly standard brain, so probably. The "girl" was clearly bipolar, although Taylor didn't know if that was natural or a result of her situation; either way, something to even out the troughs of her depression and the irrationality of her mania would be a good thing. At least they weren't dealing with a natural Agent on top of everything else, as there wasn't an appreciable conflict drive in the vial capes, at least from what the Illuminati had recorded and what she had read in the files they allowed her to access.
  
  Now, to see if she could clone an adult bison. Babies, she could do no problem, every day and twice on Sunday. But rapid-cloning whole adult animals? That was more in Blasto's wheelhouse, but it might still be possible, especially with some of the data she now had from Night City.
  
  There were a number of animals from the Brockton Bay Zoo that were wandering around the flooded remains of the city, and she could get genetic samples of all of them. Noelle seemed like she got hungry pretty often, after all. Perhaps she would like a variety sampler until she could heal her.
  
  That, or she could ask the Boss to expand her Door access to some random Earth that still had a lot of herds of those animals traipsing around. As it stood right now, she could only go to and from a few discrete places.
  
  The fedoraed woman looked tired. That had been normal, but Taylor hadn't seen her tired in the past couple of weeks. One of the first things the Boss demanded Taylor Tinker for her after looming over her dream meeting was one of Brockton-Taylor's sleep inducers. She, personally, solved this issue through brain surgery on herself, but surprisingly most other people didn't really appreciate elective neurosurgery.
  
  But Contessa was down to use a device that accomplished the same thing. Taylor didn't really understand the distinction, as both interfaced with your brain in a similar manner. Still, she obeyed and provided the device to the woman, and that had gotten one of the most genuine thanks that Taylor had ever heard the Boss make.
  
  Well, actually, she had never heard the woman thank anyone, but Taylor imagined how it would sound-monotone-and in this instance, she had actually sounded genuine, holding the wreath up as if it was a lifeline. Maybe it was. Taylor thought it must be hard to run a dimension-spanning conspiracy mostly on your own hook. Having an extra five or so hours a day would probably be very nice if you were as overworked as she had been.
  
  "You're fortunate that you're included in the small list of people I spend a little time every day trying to keep alive," the Boss told Taylor amusedly. "Keeping you alive barely adds any steps to the Path, but doing so while helping you do whatever you're trying to do adds quite a few. I have five minutes budgeted for you to tell me what the hell is happening."
  
  Taylor told her what had happened since Coil ran out of town on her, being as succinct as possible. Contessa rubbed the back of her neck and said, "He's trying, successfully, to kill you. What did you do to him?"
  
  "Uh, nothing," Taylor replied. She had never even met the man, although she had done some work for some of his men. He had been one of her first clients, too. She had found him rather rational and easy to get along with.
  
  Contessa sighed and said, "Let me unravel this, and then we can see about your monster girl."
  
  Taylor nodded but stopped her before she left. She had arrived inside Coil's old office, "Although it was safe for you to come here this time, I honestly don't think you should be anywhere near her, either. Her evil clones are no joke. Could you imagine what would happen if something happened and you accidentally touched her? A clone of you, with your powers, that wanted nothing more than to destroy everything you worked for or cared about?"
  
  That caused Contessa to pause, but it was more like an involuntary tick, like she was a robot that switched to a different running program. She didn't waste any more time, saying, "Door to headquarters. Follow me. Now."
  
  After we were in the well-lit white-walled rooms in another dimension, she said, "Wait here."
  
  After that, she departed. Taylor sighed and asked, "Hello, Miss Breeze. Did Doctor Mother look at nine-six-two? Has he been approved for release?" She hadn't reviewed her files here recently, but she had sent his data to her so that she could make final determinations. The breeze grabbed her lab coat in a pre-defined way that they had agreed upon to indicate an affirmative.
  
  "That's good," she said, walking over to a chair and sitting down. She likely didn't have enough time to do any real work, given the unholy speed the Boss solved problems. Instead, she just pulled up a few things on her deck to work on.
  
  About ten minutes later, Contessa returned, trailing a pubescent girl that she was holding firmly by the hand. The girl looked dirty and dingy, as if she hadn't had a bath recently, and had the glassy-eyed stare of someone under the effects of psychoactive drugs. Contessa said firmly, "Sedate her."
  
  Well, she was the Boss. Taylor adjusted the dosage mentally and then pointed her index finger at the girl. The darts she fired were pneumatic, so they were mostly silent aside from a soft hiss and *thwap* of the small dart hitting the girl in the neck. She barely had any time to be startled before she slumped over, with Contessa grabbing her and laying her on a table. Contessa nodded and said, "You'll take her back with you and care for her."
  
  "I don't wanna," Taylor said immediately. What did the Boss think she was? A daycare?
  
  "Don't make me repeat myself. She's a strong Thinker, and Coil kidnapped her and had her addicted to a number of things. The quickest way to solve that problem is to give her to you. After you've treated her, you can return her to her parents in Brockton Bay," the Boss said, narrowing her eyes slightly.
  
  'Oh, you should have just said treat her, then. The nuance was entirely different from care for her,' Taylor thought but decided not to push the matter. Instead, she just nodded.
  
  "Door to Fragile storage, index A-111," Contessa said and then reached through the portal without looking, grabbed a small vial and pulled it out. She pulled a small sheet of paper that looked like it had been ripped out of a three-ring binder and handed both the vial and the sheet to me. She nodded, "Follow those directions precisely, and you should be able to save that girl. Diverge, and you will definitely die, and possibly a lot of other people, too."
  
  That sounded a lot more dangerous than Taylor thought when she agreed to help. She skimmed the directions and pointed at one of the lines that mentioned Sundancer helping with incinerating the remainder or bottom half of Noelle after successfully separating her, "So I should just skip trying to help her and incinerate her."
  
  "No. That would be a waste, and her friend wouldn't agree. If you do this, there is a very good chance that she will come out of this with a usable power that is on the same tier as Legend or Alexandria. We need capes like that. This is worth the risk," the Boss said, "But you're correct. It would be a disaster if I... or... another of us was duplicated. You'll have to do it. Just follow the directions, and you'll be fine."
  
  Taylor had the idea that Contessa would tell her that even if Taylor wouldn't, in fact, be fine if the payoff was sufficient. There wasn't anything more important than saving the world, and the Boss was all about the ends justifying the means. Still, Taylor couldn't smell a secret hinting at personal betrayal from the woman, so she would trust her.
  
  "Fine," Taylor said, standing up. The plan was somewhat similar to her own but included a lot of extra steps and refinements that she should have thought about, like using Trickster to swap out Noelle's bisected torso directly onto an operating table. That was a good idea and would save many seconds. But there were a lot of preparatory steps, like curing Genesis' paralysis and providing her with a customised sleep-inducer that she didn't understand the necessity for, but she would just execute the plan as provided.
  
  After the Boss left, Taylor scanned the unconscious girl's body and frowned. Just what the fuck was going on with this girl's brain? Taylor had never seen someone with so many factors of addiction. It would take weeks to cure her of it, and it would be a lot kinder for the girl to remain unconscious for the duration.
  
  Sighing, she picked the girl up and said, "Door back to my new lair, please." As always, she was polite with whatever entity was responsible for creating magic portals.
  
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  An offer she can't refuse
  November 2066
  
  Los Angeles / Oxford, England
  
  As I was getting loaded into the AV-4, with the two Med Techies working on me, I stood up from the chair I had briefly sat in inside the administration building outside the Dean's office back in Oxford.
  
  Nobody, seemingly, had noticed my brief pause, which was good, although I couldn't quite count on that. I was sure that this area was under audio-visual surveillance, so it was possible that someone might have noticed it. I wasn't used to being credibly attacked, though, so I felt that I needed all of the brainpower I had in order to focus on getting out of my predicament back in LA.
  
  Well, it was fine. I didn't like leaving datums that were obvious to correlate like the totally independent Dr Hasumi being attacked and the completely unrelated Taylor Hebert tripping and sitting down for a rest, but the only one that might put the two and two together was Gram or more likely, her AI. I didn't trust the Sídhe bitch, but she already knew my two clones were connected; I had just buffaloed her on the extent of the connection.
  
  Although I considered my identity as Taylor Hebert, some observers, if they knew the truth, might consider me, instead, an unnamed, unknown entity that used to be Taylor Hebert, that controlled Taylor's body like a puppet. Since Gram had appeared to dote on Mom some, I didn't want to give her the idea that I wasn't actually her granddaughter, especially since I wasn't.
  
  I had thought about this myself, too, in moments of philosophical whimsy and concluded that it was a pointless question. I was who I was. I thought I was Taylor Hebert, so I was Taylor Hebert. It wasn't like people were static in the first place, anyway, unless they were dead, of course. People changed and grew over their lives.
  
  The Taylor Hebert that sat in Mr Gladly's Word Issues class wouldn't recognise the Taylor Hebert I had become even before I started cognitively expanding. That was partly because I had, for a long time, been using my own personal sleep inducer. This device, in addition to giving me a healthy night's sleep, also increased my brain's neural plasticity. That was, mostly, a good thing. It helped me learn new things, but it also had the effect of training my brain to be more like and to think more like a native of Night City.
  
  That, I thought, was a bad thing, and I was always on guard to try to avoid slipping into bad habits-and not just habits, bad thought patterns, too. I was playing the role of a Corpo because otherwise, I might not have survived, but I didn't want to become one in truth. However, in many ways, it was difficult not to. You shouldn't practice what you didn't want to become, after all.
  
  For example, while I was waxing philosophically to myself while walking to my car in Oxford, I was also planning to possibly murder whoever was behind attacking me in Los Angeles. The myself that existed back in Brockton Bay would have been aghast at the thought of murder, but she would have approved of the idea of thwarting someone attempting to bully me.
  
  She just never had the power-no, I just never thought I had any power to stop it. The truth was, now that I could look back with the benefit of hindsight, I had many different ways to stop the Trio from bullying me. I had just been so lost in my own despair and self-loathing to realise it. I still couldn't believe Sophia Hess had been a fucking Ward, though. Talk about not trusting cops.
  
  As for my new "bully",... Well, I had a suspect, but the only thing I had learned from him was a list of his fetishes and what type of joytoys he liked bringing home-all things that I could have gone my whole life without knowing. I had thought that he would be stupid enough to plan any extracurricular attacks on me at his home, but as far as I could tell, he had not. It really was a shame when enemies failed to be as stupid as you hoped, even if I never relied on those hopes.
  
  That meant either he was smart enough to keep plans elsewhere if this was a personal vendetta, Dynacorp as a whole was after me, and he only discussed plans at work, or it was a third party. It appeared clear it was a kidnapping attempt rather than a straight hit, as fire wasn't directed at my vehicle until I started to escape.
  
  I wondered how they had planned to run off with me because any party that could organise this would have known I had Platinum coverage at Trauma Team. Rather than secret, these things were public knowledge as a Platinum subscription tended to stop a lot of minor assaults and attacks before they even happened.
  
  It wasn't impossible to kidnap someone who had a Trauma subscription, even if it was Platinum, but it was a lot harder than it sounded. The AV-4s were equipped with advanced electronic warfare equipment. You could jam the frequency range the transponder used, but the AV-4 would just home in on your jammer and fall from heaven on you like an ACME-brand anvil.
  
  I thought that the normal way would be for a netrunner to hijack the victim's operating system and, through software, disable both the biomonitor and transponder, but anyone doing a little research on Dr Hasumi would find her fifteen minutes of fame, where I was recorded passively surviving a sophisticated virus attack and punching the netrunner in the face, so my cybersecurity wouldn't be underestimated.
  
  A very heavily shielded van, perhaps? Where radio-frequencies would not penetrate? That would work and wouldn't be too difficult to set up.
  
  The way I would do it would rapid surgery to physically disable the biom. I could do it in less than a minute, but while I had to admit this was possible, it seemed like the least plausible of all possibilities.
  
  I sent a message to both my Militech point-of-contact regarding this contract; this was a different person than my sales rep, as well as Kiwi. I wanted an investigation into who was responsible. That was an upsell service, like adding a small apple pie with your value meal at an additional charge. But I wanted Kiwi to take part because I didn't entirely trust Militech to tell me everything they found out, even if I was paying them to.
  
  After that, I just relaxed for a time and let them unload me from the AV-4 like a sack of potatoes and take me into the bright white of the fancy corporate trauma centre. I was paying almost half a million Eurodollars a year for this service and about the same again for the Militech bodyguards, and that wouldn't even include the entire fees for this visit, so I expected to at least get my money's worth.
  
  November 2066
  
  Night City
  
  Taylor's Apartment
  
  "Man, your pet bird is boxed, Doc T," said Hiro, the little boy, less little now. I had hired him to feed Mrs Pegpig daily while I was gone and clean her cage, which she rarely used anyway. He also sometimes worked shifts as a clerk in my front pharmacy-clinic area. The boy had shot up like a weed compared to the last time I had seen him years ago, and while he had dropped out of school ("School's for gonks, lady!"), which I didn't approve of; he at least wasn't falling into being a total delinquent.
  
  Apparently, he had tested out of school, which was not very difficult. He still ran a number of side hustles, including the courier business that I had first met him doing. One of his other ventures was almost a direct competitor to me in that he would buy a lot of pharmaceuticals wholesale from me, and he sold them to his delivery customers, both to people who didn't want to bother coming to my store as well as marketing them to the people he did deliveries for. Kind of like, "You wanted a gun? How about some MaxDoc trauma medicine, too?"
  
  He basically had a little store without a physical storefront. It was a good hustle, and I didn't mind that he was competing with me. I barely marked up the things I sold him and would eventually arrange for him to meet my suppliers once he could speak three sentences without using some sort of hood slang. He still didn't quite understand that the way he talked would filter him out of any real business that wasn't illegal or grey market. The boy seemed to think that I was a expert businesswoman though, as he had asked me to review all of his businesses, as he said he wasn't making as much money as he thought he should. I had agreed before I went to England.
  
  I wasn't running my pharmacy to profit from it anyway; I was just running it so that I could have a plausible thing to do while I relaxed most of the time. I had already decided that if I left the Megabuilding that I would offer to sell him that part of my business, possibly financing it myself, in exchange for a percentage, like a venture capitalist in reverse.
  
  As far as his schooling? It rubbed me the wrong way, but I couldn't really deny that most public schools were a waste of time, either. I thought it was intentional, as a less educated and less sophisticated populace was easier to control. The propaganda on TV and the net was not subtle here, but many people still lapped it up.
  
  However, he kept using words that I am pretty sure he was making up. I wasn't that old not to know all of the slang, and I was pretty sure he just made up "boxed" on the fly. I eyed him and asked for clarification, glancing at Mrs Pegpig, who cooed at me, "What do you mean?"
  
  "After you left, she just sat there, still, like a statue! She only moved to eat," Hiro said, with an amazed look on his face.
  
  I rubbed her head as she cooed and closed her nictitating membranes in pleasure and said, "Awww... she missed me." Hiro looked at me like I was crazy, and he opened his mouth to say something, shaking his head, but I waved him off. I didn't have time to listen about how my bird was eccentric. I already knew that! Mrs Pegpig turned to glare at the boy.
  
  He closed his mouth without saying anything and finally just shrugged, "You know, whatever... Did you look at what I sent you like you promised?"
  
  I nodded slowly. "I did notice a few things. You're not really accounting for the true costs of your enterprise. Mainly your carrying costs are a lot higher than you think because you never sat down to consider how each much it costs to sell each item."
  
  "Carrying costs?" he asked as I sat Mrs Pegpig on my shoulder.
  
  I walked over to make us each a sandwich, "Yes. Carrying cost is the total cost to hold inventory. For example, you are not assigning any value or cost to the area you use as a storehouse, even though you said you paid for it. You aren't assigning any cost to the kids you hire part-time to organise it. You rightfully consider these costs, but you don't quantify them. Worse, you have a ton of dead inventory."
  
  Before he could ask what that meant, I waved a hand, "You sell a lot of perishable goods, like candies and burritos and the like. You mistakenly believe that because you sell a lot of these things, you are making a profit. However, with the excess that you stock to keep a buffer for sudden demand, it means you lose a lot when the goods you keep on hand expire without being sold. I doubt you're even breaking even on this grocery stuff, especially since you don't have a wholesale supplier. It would be cheaper to just do as you used to and just pay your couriers a little more to swing by an Allfoods or a Mark 24 store." It would also prevent his child employees from pilfering burritos from the stock, I thought, which was another large outlay that I didn't even mention.
  
  I hummed, "You should only actually stock and sell items that have a large margin and don't cost too much to store. The rest? Just buy it at the time and deliver it, like you used to. The pharmaceuticals I sell you are a good example."
  
  He frowned, "I thought I was doing pretty well buying and then later selling guns, though, and everyone says the margin on guns is terrible."
  
  I raised an eyebrow, "You aren't selling arms. Someone can go to any gun store on any block and buy a gun. You're selling an untraceable gun right now, delivered. That's a whole different product, really. It's less of a product and more of a service, really, which is your core competency. If you need a gun so bad right now that you have it delivered, then you're going to expect a mark-up. Plus, from what I can tell, you pay very little for the arms you buy."
  
  That most of them were probably used in a crime was left unstated. Why throw a pistol in the Bay after you had to shoot some pimp when you could sell it for a few bucks to some kid who had a steel file and patience? Honestly, it was the most dangerous part of Hiro's little enterprise, and I would have preferred him not to be involved in it at all, but he wasn't one to appreciate anyone telling him what he could and couldn't do. Ever since he bought that first cheap revolver from me, he realised that there was a fair market for guns modified to not have either microstamping technology in the firing pin or even a serial number attached to them.
  
  "Ahh," he said, grinning and nodding while he dug into the sandwich.
  
  As he ate, I said, "You also need to judge better the prices you charge your clients. You charge clients an upfront fee based on their distance, but you pay your couriers based on how many minutes it takes them to make the delivery. They're not really screwing you, but you have no system in place for variable pricing during rush hour or identifying delivery areas that are particularly burdensome for one reason or another." I just shrugged, "You lose money on most deliveries to Kubiki, for example. By distance, it isn't that far, but you have to, on average, change trains two times for most addresses just due to the way the NCART is set up. So the delivery times add up. You need to switch from a pure distance-calculated price to a price based on the historical average delivery times both for that destination and also for that time of day. This means you need to keep many more records and use many more spreadsheets." Or maybe hire a computer nerd to write him some custom software.
  
  This caused the boy to groan in between bites and ask, possibly rhetorically, "Where do you learn this stuff?"
  
  I aimed a gimlet stare at him and carefully enunciated each word, "In. School." Mrs Pegpig cooed at him in disapproval, too, from her perch on my shoulder. To reward her, I gave her a bit of ham that I was using to make my sandwich, which she scarfed down.
  
  "Hah! I know that's a fucking lie!" he crowed, grinning.
  
  His grin turned into a frown as I reached out at super speed and smacked him on top of his hand with the flat of the butter knife I had just wiped off, saying, "Language." I could see him try to yank his hand out of the way, but he moved so slow that it was easy to give him a good smack and watch as he shook his hand in feigned pain. Although I was quick, I didn't actually hit him at more than tap strength.
  
  Still, he wasn't quite wrong. Public schools didn't teach that, but business schools definitely did. I sighed, "I'll send you a list of classes that you can take online. You can't get credit for them, but you can audit their lectures online for free if you're actually interested in learning things that will help you." That was one of the weirdest parts of this world. There really wasn't that much that was secret in terms of base and even specialty education. Even designs of medical nanomachines, granted that they would be two or three generations out of date, were available online in many University archives.
  
  However, the culture and, I suspected, the public school system inoculated the pernicious idea that "You can't change anything, so don't bother bettering yourself or even trying" generation after generation. That was a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. The odds might always be stacked against them, but you definitely couldn't change anything if you were ignorant.
  
  You just couldn't change this world as a shounen protagonist archetype; you had to have some intellectual heft. If you didn't believe that, just look at the fate of all of the actual rockerboys, like the legendary Johnny Silverhand. I didn't think he was dumb, precisely, but I did think it was dumb to expect to sing yourself into a revolution. Revolutions required careful planning and logistics.
  
  And the odds of changing anything were stacked against everyone. Even me. It seemed unlikely that I could change anything in a lasting way, at least as far as the social dynamics were concerned, even with all my advantages. However, I had lived with the default modal programming of "giving up" and "keeping my head down" for as long as I could stand already back in Brockton Bay.
  
  Hiro got a canny look on his face and then nodded.
  
  November 2066
  
  Night City
  
  Night City Health Science Centre
  
  I sat across from the well-dressed man in a similarly well-cut black minidress. As opposed to all of the other dresses I had worn in the past, this had a v-cut and actually showed off some cleavage, as much as I had anyway, and the hem was only to the lower to mid-thigh.
  
  It was something that I would have never agreed to wear prior to spending two years as Dr Hasumi. It was weird how obvious self-loathing was in retrospect, but when I had assumed her identity, it had been obvious to me that Dr Hasumi had been quite pretty. Since I knew she was pretty, it wasn't a weird decision to wear pretty clothes. It wasn't my body, after all.
  
  Spending two years in her skin let me wear things that I would never have agreed to wear as Taylor Hebert, but doing it for long enough had made it a habit.
  
  Once I was Taylor again, I had already broken the habit of assuming I would look horrible in anything I wore. That allowed me to easily identify the source of my original hesitancy to branch out to any outfit that showed off any of my body at all. The colourings, though, were still dark and subdued. I just didn't like vibrant and bright colours.
  
  "Well, we'd love to have you, but you kind of missed the start of residency. It would be a bit disruptive to slide you in, but you could definitely start January," the residency program director told me, spreading his hands wide, "We haven't had a graduate from Oxford start their residency here, well, ever. Usually, they handle medical internships themselves."
  
  At first, there was some question as to whether my degree was real, just because of how unusual my job application was, but after they verified it, I was quickly scheduled a meeting with one of the administrators who handles the residency program. And it was true; I had missed the best time to start a residency. Late July and early August was "baby doctor season" in most teaching hospitals because that was about the time med school would end if you started it at the normal time of the year.
  
  However, there were a lot of exceptions, and residents in off-semester starts weren't entirely unusual, but I would have to wait until January to begin just so as not to disrupt their current resident/Attending dynamic. I was sure that it was because they thought I was of the same level of skill as a normal resident. It generally took months of careful supervision in order for them to get to the point where they were useful at all, and nobody would want to duplicate that with me.
  
  It was fine. I wasn't in a hurry. I smiled and said, "Oh, that's not a problem at all. Let's talk about which residency program I'd like to pursue."
  
  November 2066
  
  Los Angeles
  
  Dr Hasumi's Clinic Conference Room
  
  I did what could only be characterised as a princess stomp, stomping my right foot down in displeasure as I asked, aghast, "They were just going to throw me into a sack, as though I was some turnips?!" It had been almost two weeks since the attack, and the investigation by Militech with Kiwi providing assistance was complete and was, as far as I could tell, thorough.
  
  I was in a conference room getting an overview briefing both from Kiwi and a Militech intelligence analyst. They had already delivered the full report, but Militech was used to giving a bullet-point executive summary since they assumed most people like me probably wouldn't have read all three hundred pages. They were right, but in my case, I probably would read it when I had some downtime.
  
  Kiwi's mouth was twitching. I had already talked to her about how I thought they might have planned to escape Trauma Team, even going as far as suggesting highly complicated and highly technical scenarios involving drone decoys and the like. But it turned out that they just had a really large sack with a fine copper-mesh lining.
  
  I think that my overlooking such an obvious and simple solution was bothering me more than the idea of being thrown into a Santa sack, actually. I waved a hand and sat down, letting both of them continue the briefing.
  
  After it was over, I thanked the Militech guy and watched him leave before sighing and saying, "That was a lot of words for saying we don't know shit."
  
  "That's what I said!" Kiwi said, smacking her fist into her open palm, "But that guy said what bosses really want was a lot of words to say the same thing."
  
  I snorted. That was probably right, most of the time, in most Corps. About half of the attackers were killed in the fight, but they were nobodies. The ones that managed to escape turned up dead a couple of days later, apparently having been zeroed not long after they escaped, so the entire attack was from a disposable cut-out, despite the standardised, if common, equipment.
  
  Militech went as far as to investigate each dead mercenary individually to see if they could find a thread that could be pulled to unravel the obfuscation and identify the ultimate party responsible, but there was, seemingly, nothing. They all had military experience, but it was at least a decade ago, even for the most recent and since then, they were regular criminals, not even having the figleaf of calling themselves mercenaries, really.
  
  They weren't connected through a shared gang or even a shared geographic area, either. While they all had served time, they didn't all serve time together or in the same lock-ups. The only common denominators were they were all from various parts of Southern California, and they were all convicted criminals with a history of being grunts once upon a time.
  
  Now, that the entire team was composed of disposable cut-outs that were ruthlessly then cut out didn't necessarily mean that a Corp was responsible, but it did tend to suggest it. It wasn't like that random gangs weren't ruthless enough to do so, but they lacked the competence and capital to build such a team.
  
  I shook my head, "Review our take from that asshole again; see if he's speaking in any kind of generalities or code with anyone."
  
  Kiwi made a disgusted face, "I really, really doubt that he is passing any kind of information to any of his joytoys. Besides, he's gagged most of-"
  
  As she began complaining, I rolled my eyes, but she made a good point, so I waved her off, interrupting her before she reminded me of some things I couldn't quite forget. "Just read the transcriptions." She seemed more disgusted than I did, and it was probably because I had a huge database of paraphilias in my head next to my general psychology data, so it was challenging to shock me with anything still legal.
  
  I didn't even find the man's preferences surprising, as it wasn't that unusual, psychologically speaking, for people with very demanding leadership positions and the personality to seek those positions to have more... passive interests in bed.
  
  It didn't bother me at all, but I certainly didn't want to think about it, either. I sighed and said, "I'm likely not going to go out too much. You should be cautious, too. For the time being, I want to stop seeing everyone for dinner, and if we have to talk, let's keep it virtual, under proxies." If I was really the target of a coordinated kidnapping attempt, it would be standard procedure to grab my "family", too. I didn't think I was close enough to Gloria or David for them to actually be coded as my family in any dossiers of me, but they would definitely be listed as friends or associates, along with Kiwi.
  
  Kiwi was sort of playing the head of my security, along with one of her team members, which was a bit of a precarious position, as I didn't want her to risk her. I was putting myself out, like dangling ham in front of Mrs Pegpig. I knew something would happen, eventually.
  
  There was a fair chance that any acquisition attempts would begin with a sort of decapitation attack on the management of my "Corporation." Although I had over a hundred employees now, I only had a few that were really critical. Despite not working for me, full-time Kiwi could be considered on that list.
  
  Kiwi frowned at me. I hadn't exactly told her my plans, but she wasn't stupid. She didn't precisely understand the connection between Dr Hasumi and Taylor Hebert, and I believed she thought I was a clone with all of Taylor's memories, although we had never talked about it. That would make her find it odd that I was putting myself out on a limb, as it were, which she didn't feel that Taylor would do.
  
  Still, she nodded, "Right, boss. We'll start taking a few more gigs from the elf-girl. She almost has people trusting that she is something like a fixer now."
  
  Sarah, the elf-girl with the vulpine grin, always rubbed me just slightly off, like petting a cat in the wrong direction. I didn't dislike her; there was just something disquieting about her. Still, we had a fairly good relationship now, with me performing surgery on her entire small mercenary band. Kiwi had agreed to provide some training to them as well, so they were at least superior to the average booster gang in terms of threat level now.
  
  I nodded. I didn't control who Kiwi did gigs for, but she was telling me that she wouldn't be as available if we were going to distance ourselves for the moment publicly. I said, "That sounds good."
  
  As I watched Kiwi leave, I opened a file for contingency planning in the event the worst happened.
  
  January 2067
  
  Los Angeles
  
  Dr Hasumi's Office
  
  My engineer Phillippé had asked me for a meeting first thing this morning, which I didn't think was a good sign. We rarely needed official face-to-face time. Our offices were across from each other, and we left both of our doors open. If he wanted something, all he had to do was holler.
  
  In the past months, our products had gone close to mainstream, and I had half a dozen acquisition offers similar to the Dynacorp one. I had been expecting him to be poached for weeks now, despite the fact that he didn't actually understand the underpinnings of the sleep-inducer technology.
  
  I smirked a little as he walked in. He was wearing a suit and tie today, too. We mostly dressed business casual. I sighed, and asked, "Are you quitting?"
  
  He grinned and said, "Possibly. I've received a compelling offer, but I'm willing to allow you to match it." He said a number that caused both of my eyebrows to rise.
  
  I slowly shook my head, "I'm afraid I can't match that salary." I could, but he had already reached his goals for deliverables, so it wasn't like his leaving would leave me in a lurch. It would make it almost a certainty that anyone I hired to replace him would be some kind of plant, though. But I expected him to be a plant now, too, for the right amount of baksheesh.
  
  He chuckled and sat down and grinned, "That's kind of what I expected. It includes a title raise from Senior Engineer to Technical Project Lead, too. So I might not have accepted your counteroffer in the first place, but I wanted to see if you'd go for it, anyway."
  
  He hadn't told me who hired him, and I hadn't expected him to. But I was curious. I tilted my head to the side and asked, "Are you staying the full month?" His contract specified he had to give me at least thirty days' notice of acquiring a position elsewhere. Otherwise, he would have to reimburse me four times his salary for the whole month. That was a pretty standard clause, and it was designed to allow me to hire a short-term troubleshooter consultant on contract if he did leave me in the lurch, and their fees were at least four times a regular engineer's.
  
  He shook his head, "No. Today will be my last day. Can you take an irrevocable business Visa for the penalty fee?" Visa was a large financial services company, but they didn't have the same payment processor business as I remembered in Brockton Bay. It was kind of hard to make a business as a payment middleman with a digital currency that you could send back and forth for free. Still, they did a brisk business in a similar vein, providing credit and payment obfuscation services mostly for corporations.
  
  An "irrevocable business Visa" was shorthand for a type of credit transaction that was impossible for Visa's client to reverse. Payments on this basis usually involve very high security, sometimes using DNA verification systems due to their high risk for hacking. If a hacker got your unlocked business Visa, they could charge a lot, and you'd never get the money back and or be obligated to pay if it was a credit arrangement.
  
  In films and BDs, you'd see the hyper-rich buy a yacht or a private suborbital spaceplane with one all the time. It was the equivalent of the "black card" that I remembered vaguely from my last life. There was no way that Phillippé had one, which made me all the more curious. I nodded and said, "I'm willing to waive the penalty if you tell me whose offer you accepted."
  
  It was mostly curiosity, but not entirely. I wanted to know if it was any of the guys that I was dealing with. This caused him to grin, "Don't waive it, but give it to me as a bonus in cash, along with two small favours, and it's a deal."
  
  "Favours? Those I am not so sure about," I waffled. In my experience, it was almost always cheaper to pay for things in cash, not favours.
  
  He waved a hand, "Small ones. First, I want some surgeries today. I'm going to be handing you back all the money and more, anyway. Second, can you drag your feet on processing the term? If I have an active Corp employment on file, it will make travel a lot easier. " That said something in itself and narrowed down the possibilities of his new employer significantly. Not someone domestic, then. Los Angeles had been under Martial Law for some time, and it really was difficult to leave the city unless you were travelling for business.
  
  Also, I found it amusing that it was clearly his new employer that was paying the penalty fee. He was, probably correctly, concerned if I waived the fee, they would not give him the money. That was probably correct. I chuckled and nodded, "Sure. You don't have much PTO accrued, but I'll say you're on personal leave if anyone asks and process your term in a month. I'll cut you vague travel orders for this duration, too, with the company chop. I'm sure there is some conference or something... somewhere. You figure it out."
  
  He looked relieved, which told me that whatever foreign Corp gave him an offer didn't include exfiltration. He glanced around and said quietly, "Arasaka."
  
  Well, that wasn't too surprising . They were the only one of the half dozen that actually seemed open to licensing my technology and paying the minimum amount that wouldn't trigger the Veritas contract execution. There had been a full five-page article about our sleep inducers in the January issue of Solo of Fortune magazine. It was very favourable, and the author realised the tactical advantage that it would bring to larger military forces, too. Apparently, one of the mercenary captain's men was, in addition to being a mercenary, a journalist of sorts. That had caused us to sell out and a lot of people to beat down my door recently. I was a little nervous, actually. I would have preferred the article never to be written, but I did end up giving a few quotes when I realised that was a lost cause.
  
  I was actually a little surprised that Arasaka gave him an offer, actually. It explained why he was a bit cagey and needed his employment to travel somewhere where they could pick him up, too. Strictly speaking, accepting a job offer from them might break a number of laws, but that wouldn't stop any Corpo worth their salt. I asked, amused, "Are they aware that you don't actually know how the tech works?"
  
  He shrugged, "I think so, but I didn't really advertise that. They know what work I did for you anyway, in general terms. I didn't violate the NDA." I didn't believe him but also didn't really care, either. NDAs weren't worth the paper they were printed on, which was why I made sure his actual access was limited.
  
  I nodded. Their snapping him up meant that they didn't mind paying him a premium just for his experience developing the military features and user interface. That told me that Arasaka expected to acquire my technology and wanted to shorten any development time at all. That could be good news or bad news.
  
  "Fair enough. Let's go downstairs to the clinic. What kind of cybernetics do you want?" I asked, curious. He listed off a number of neurological and cognitive boosters that I just happened to have in stock, the latter being Arasaka models in fact. I raised an eyebrow, "I'm sure your new boss would give you a hefty discount on a lot of this."
  
  He snorted, "My dad said never go for the free or cheap company chrome. What if I make an ass out of myself in front of Hanako Arasaka on accident and get fired? They'd turn it all off when they termed me."
  
  "They would shoot you, depending on what you said to Hanako-sama, and the police would write suicide on your death certificate," I said mildly. That caused him to chuckle nervously. Still, he had a good point.
  
  "Ahahaha... about that. Do you happen to have a really high-end Japanese language chip in stock? The kind that won't make me seem like a stupid gaijin? " he asked hopefully.
  
  I nodded slowly. I had used mine for so long that I was natively fluent in both Japanese and Mandarin now, and it was sitting in my desk drawer. I still didn't have a lot of the cultural referents that someone actually growing up in Japan would have, though. Still, I fished it out for him and slid it across the desk, "We'll call it your going away present in lieu of a cake, okay?" It was only worth about a grand, anyway.
  
  January 2067
  
  Los Angeles
  
  Cherry Limited Factory Floor
  
  I practised the philosophy of "Management by Walking Around" both on regular schedules and also randomly. This was one of the former, as I walked around and talked with all of my workers every Monday. Everything was going well, except that we couldn't keep up with production.
  
  Arasaka had agreed to the minimum terms necessary to license my technology, and we were just waiting to sign the papers. It was actually a different Corporation that was licensing the tech, but Arasaka owned it through a half dozen shell companies in various nations. I didn't care. I hoped this made Militech decide to reciprocate instead of standing firm in their desire to acquire my entire company.
  
  They'd have to significantly up their offer if they wanted the whole company, as it was going to have significantly more revenue coming forward, and thusly it should be valued much higher than they had.
  
  As I stepped into the security office, I smiled at the security manager I had hired. He mainly did local security, stuff like keeping the employees themselves from wild pilfering, whereas Kiwi or other mercenaries I hired did what an actual Corporate Security Team would generally accomplish. In that sense, I acted as the Security Manager myself, but still, the factory security manager had five employees under him.
  
  "Ah, right on time, Boss," he said, with a grin, motioning for me to sit down in front of his desk, which I did so.
  
  I chuckled, "I must be getting a little too predict-" I froze as an internal alert caused me to shift my attention to my HUD. The klaxon was an impossible-to-ignore tone that I had cribbed from Star Trek: The Next Generation's Red Alert tone. That show had been a family favourite, even imported from Earth Aleph as it was. A second Star Trek series existed in this universe, too, but it was wildly different. The Federation of Planets was a lot less socialist, and the Ferengi were portrayed as wise good guys, always helping the poor stupid humans.
  
  The alert was coming from my surveillance system. It had optically tracked at least four AV-4s and an AV-8 that were converging on our location. The helpful non-sentient AI had already queried air traffic control, and they were on no approved flight plan, and in fact, ATC didn't have them on their scopes at all. The feed from the security system should have then cut out, as I noticed a huge amount of white noise in the radio spectrum. The point sources of the jammers were all inside the factory; one of them was inside this very room.
  
  "Shit," I started to say, but before I could get anything else out I glanced down at several darts sticking out of my chest, with my head of security holding an autoloading dart gun in his hand.
  
  "It's treason, then," I growled. I was resistant to most sedatives but definitely not immune, and my biom had told me that he had given me enough to make a normal person stop breathing. I'd still have enough time to kill this asshole, though.
  
  Or so I thought. I stiffened as muscular-destabilising electrical currents raced through my body. He didn't have a Taser on him, and this was stronger than that. I localised the current to a device that had been installed in the chair I was sitting at. I was getting shocked through my ass.
  
  The current was designed to incapacitate me non-lethally until the sedatives took effect, I guessed. Perhaps in the future, I would be less predictable in my meetings and a little bit less trustworthy.
  
  After that, that body fell unconscious.
  
  January 2067
  
  Lagrange point 3, Earth-Moon System
  
  EVA
  
  I closed my eyes briefly after finishing welding a bead on the spindle we were slowly building. Far from the interior electrical work I had been expecting, I had been doing actual zero-g construction for a month, and I had just watched my other body be rendered unconscious by someone I would have described as a mook.
  
  It was embarrassing, and it was just as disconcerting when part of me was unconscious, but it was a little bit better than last time because you didn't generally dream when you were as drugged as I had just been.
  
  Still, floating in space in a construction hardsuit with dangerous tools everywhere was not the place to have an issue like this. I keyed my push-to-talk and said on the workgroup comm to my supervisor, "Ayodele, I need to take five. I think I'm getting a little vertigo."
  
  Most of the managers on the Galileo station were of Nigerian phenotypes, specifically from the Yoruba people that had called Lagos home, mainly. Most of the O'Neill workers had been Africans that the European Space Agency had convinced to come into space for a new life. Lagos was a lot like Night City, an amazing city, but there were plenty of people who would leave it for a chance like that, especially if someone else was going to pay your lift ticket.
  
  However, the truth had been eighteen-hour work days, pay in company scrip and zero safety margins. Eventually, all of the crew revolted. Successfully. I was pretty sure that they had some mass drivers that could imperil both the Earth's surface and, more importantly, the Crystal Palace, so the ESA and Corps involved had, surprisingly, let them go. They even stopped oppressing the workers in O'Neill three and four so badly, so those two stations were still Corporate owned. Ayodele hadn't even been born when that happened, though, but her parents had been. She came back on the radio, surprise in her voice, "Ya? Okay. Police all your gear and get in the scooter. You're about done with your shift anyway."
  
  She was surprised because she had expected this reaction from me a month ago, not now. Still, spacers had learned one thing really well from living in a completely artificial environment. If someone said they weren't one hundred per cent on an EVA, the EVA stopped.
  
  I grabbed my tools, making sure I didn't leave anything. There were stiff fines if you let go of a tool in space. They would have to charter a scooter to run it down, lest it become a hazard to navigation. Nobody wanted it to come back around someday to cause a pressure emergency or hole a ship. I had since learned that the crew members in the freighter that had brought me to the station had been exaggerating a lot when they told me how long it would take for a hole in the cabin to evacuate all the air. You really did have a fair bit of time unless the hole was massive. Counter-intuitively, air would escape in an airliner faster due to the pressurised cabin causing a huge pressure differential compared to the one atmosphere and vacuum.
  
  Still, I imagine teasing groundsiders was something of a national sport up here. Soon, I would be able to join in. After I hopped into the scooter and buckled in, I shifted my mind back to Los Angeles. I was still unconscious, but my entangled pairs still worked. My body hadn't been moved yet, and the AVs had started to land. I considered having the Arasaka drones attempt to fight off the intruders but if they had gone to the extent of suborning my security guy, then they would know what assets I had available. I ordered the bots to swarm the factory floor and guard my workers instead, ordering my employees to seek cover. Perhaps if I had all of the combat bots in the factory, they could fight off this incoming force, but they were spread around my factory, clinic and warehouse.
  
  Then I triggered a few contingencies, sending a message to both Trauma Team and Militech. I didn't think that I would be rescued this time, though. I had a feeling. So, I triggered a self-destruct command on the factory hardware that flashed each of my sleep inducers with their operating system. Each sleep inducer had heavily encrypted firmware code that would run on only that particular microcontroller. They could take a copy of the encrypted software from a purchased inducer, but it wouldn't run on any other hardware.
  
  They could still perform a full cryptologic reverse-engineering attack or attempt to de-encapsulate the microcontroller in an attempt to acquire the private key to decrypt the software package, but that took quite a while, even for Megacorps. In this day and age, physical DRM has vastly exceeded the state-of-art of reverse engineers. It wasn't impossible, but at the moment, the pendulum had shifted to favour copy protection. In the past, the opposite had been true, and I was sure the pendulum would shift again in the future.
  
  On the custom-built industrial device that encrypted the software and flashed it onto each wreath, a small thermite charge was set off. There wasn't a bang but a loud hiss that turned the memory into slag. Forget getting data out of it; you wouldn't be able to separate its constituent molecules anymore.
  
  I'd probably have to do the same to the factory system and private subnet too, but I had already transferred all of my private data to my system in Night City. Still, I didn't want anyone to get a chance to examine my Haywire pairs, a few of which were connected to the subnet computing cluster. Those had similar thermite charges connected to them, but I held off for about five minutes until I noticed at least two netrunners attempting to breach the system. At that point, I trashed everything and completely lost any further connection to Los Angeles, except for the several pairs inside Dr Hasumi's body.
  
  January 2067
  
  Unknown Location
  
  I "woke up" and found myself tied to a chair very securely. The room I was in was large, like a warehouse. If Petrochem and Militech hadn't systematically levelled all of the abandoned buildings in the port, I would have suspected I was there.
  
  It wasn't a good chair, but it was well-constructed out of steel. I tested the bindings out of habit and found that I wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't bolted into the ground, though, so that was an option. There was still a jammer preventing me from connecting wirelessly to the net, so I couldn't figure out where I was located. The jammer was attached directly to my neck, though, so it was probably a low-strength one. Maybe low strength enough not to be detected by Trauma Team?
  
  They had extracted me before Trauma Team had arrived and then even damaged Trauma's AV-4 with a surface-to-air missile launch, causing a forced landing. Generally speaking, this was like hitting a hornet's nest, but it did give them enough time to go to the ground, I guess. Trauma would be looking for them, though, for sure. For Revenge, if nothing else.
  
  "Ah, Dr Hasumi... those restraints were designed for combat borgs. I don't think you'll be going anywhere," a woman said, which caused me to look up and find her in the low light of the large room.
  
  I raised an eyebrow, "Straight to the hard sell, really? This doesn't bode that well if you want to 'recruit' me."
  
  That caused the woman to chuckle, seemingly genuinely, "Ah... we don't. All we want you to do is sign this form, and you can go. After you transfer all the source code and design files, that is. We'll sell it along, as we're just middlemen, you see. That was a nasty trick with the thermite." She held out a physical sheet of paper, close enough that I got a look at it.
  
  I blinked. It was a simple document, and my signing it would turn it into a license for all of my technology, not to anyone in particular but to anyone who had that physical document. Basically, a license as a bearer instrument. How perverse. Was this group really not affiliated with one of the large Corporations that had been trying to acquire my company recently? This license would definitely cause the Veritas contract to execute, but if they were selling it, that would mean they wouldn't be able to ask for as large a price. It would still be very valuable.
  
  How did they get all of the military hardware into Los Angeles, including half a squadron of armed AVs, though? It didn't add up that they were, precisely speaking, independent as they were claiming. If they were, it wasn't actually good news for me because they'd have no real incentive to actually let me go and a lot of incentives to put me in the ground. Anyone looking at me as only a single, one-time payout might not have the foresight to consider how I might make even more in the future.
  
  "No, I don't think so," I said simply. The longer I could drag this out, the better my chances were.
  
  The woman clucked her tongue and said, "I'm afraid I wasn't clear. Refusal is not an option." Suddenly a holographic display on the floor activated and projected an image in between us. I had to stop myself from trying to break my bounds again. It was a video that seemed to show Gloria, David and Kiwi all tied against a wall. They all looked a little worse for wear, clearly having been knocked around a bit.
  
  I offloaded all the fury I was feeling into my two other bodies so that I still seemed unperturbed and stared at the woman levelly, silent.
  
  "Oh? Maybe this dossier we have on you is wrong, then?" the woman asked curiously. And suddenly, someone started beating the shit out of Kiwi on the video, but something I saw as she was knocked to the ground caused me to freeze.
  
  Her deck. Just two days ago, Kiwi had finally finished completely jailbreaking the NetWatch NetDriver and snuck to my clinic to have me put it in. I had built a custom plate for it to disguise it, too. But the cyberdeck on Kiwi in the video was her old Fuyutsuki Tinkerer. This was a fake.
  
  I was being stupid. Computers could generate fakes of anyone, and this woman was counting on me not being able to contact anyone. But I was connected to all of my bodies simultaneously. I had Taylor call Kiwi, who answered after the first ring, "Where's David and Gloria?" I asked her, not waiting for a hello.
  
  "We're all at a safe house, along with my boys. I grabbed them when I saw what happened at your place. Uhhh... is uhh.. Dr Hasumi..." she used air quotes, "... okay?"
  
  I had Taylor roll her eyes, "Probably. They kidnapped her, obviously. Do you know anything about who it could be?"
  
  Kiwi shook her head, and I sighed, "Alright. I think David and Gloria need to get back to Night City. It's weird, thinking Night City is safer for anyone."
  
  That caused Kiwi to snort and chuckle with amusement, but she nodded, "Yeah. I don't think anyone came after them or us, but perhaps it's time for our Los Angeles adventure to come to an end. What about you? You're going to lose a shitload if you abandon everything there. Trauma Team is swarming the south side of Los Angeles, but as far as I can tell, they haven't found Dr Hasumi yet."
  
  I waved off the question and transferred a quarter million Eurodollars, "This is to get everybody out of the city. Consider it a gig." Then I hung up.
  
  I didn't really feel that more charitable to the woman that she was only threatening to kill computer versions of my friends and not the real ones. I didn't know if they didn't care or just didn't have the time and resources to actually grab us both simultaneously. Still, I sighed and said, lying, "Occasional employees and acquaintances are, unfortunately, not sufficient for me to sign this agreement, and it is a little bit weird that you would think threatening them would work on me."
  
  She raised an eyebrow, and someone shot the computerised Kiwi in the head on the display. I sighed and shook my head, "A waste, but that doesn't change anything."
  
  This caused the woman to frown again and then scowl, waving a hand and causing the display to deactivate. Then she grinned, "I guess we'll have to do things the hard way."
  
  Killing my friends wasn't the hard way? Well, for a dyed-in-the-wool Corpo, it probably wouldn't be. This would likely be some sort of torture, then. That was both good and bad. Bad, because torture bad, duh. But good because it might take a while.
  
  I had a tentative plan to use the Haywire pairs in my body to track my location; the only problem was that they weren't designed to serve as a tracking system inside a dimension. They were designed to serve as an inter-dimensional tracking system. Professor Haywire had never anticipated being held incommunicado; he had been laser-focused on building tracking systems to find his way back home if he had made a mistake and found himself marooned on some random Earth.
  
  I had an idea that would introduce a little bit of latency based on distance in the Haywire pairs. Less than a picosecond per kilometre, but enough that I could possibly triangulate my present location using all of my connected pairs. It was something I should have definitely thought of before, but I hadn't. I didn't know how long it would take, and my body in Night City was working on it right now.
  
  Alternately, if that didn't work, I would attempt to knock this jammer device off my neck before they murdered me, but it seemed stuck on there pretty good, like a choker necklace.
  
  It hurt me that I didn't have an "ace in the hole" plan here. I needed some additional integrated weapon that was hard to detect. Maybe I could hollow out my distal phalanx and add a dart gun to my index finger. I could have custom load-outs from sedatives to nerve agents, too. That was a good idea, but not one that would help me too much.
  
  I was about to make a snide comment about how she wasn't scary, as the woman had made a whole display about producing some torture implements, but then I realised that would just make it proceed quicker. She could waste as much time as she liked.
  
  Before I could wonder what that particular instrument was for, there was a loud crash, and an armoured vehicle drove straight through the wall like the Kool-Aid man. It made a pretty large hole in the side of the wall, which now I was focused on as I could run out of that hole since the chair wasn't bolted to the ground. It would be awkward, but possible. However, before I made the decision, the turret on the vehicle shifted, and an electromagnetic heavy-machine gun riddled the woman threatening me with flechettes, turning her into chunky salsa right in front of me.
  
  Men dressed in all black ran out of the hatch of the vehicle, and over to me and quickly cut me free with a vibroknife and tossed me over their shoulders with a polite, " Pardon me, Hasumi-sensei ."
  
  They were speaking Japanese, which surprised me. In less than twenty seconds, we were all back inside the infantry compartment in the back of the wheeled APC, and I could feel us driving away. One of the ninja-looking men sat me on a chair and said, "Excuse us for the familiarity, but time was of the essence."
  
  I just blinked and asked, "Who are you guys?" Although, I liked these new kidnappers better than my last kidnappers.
  
  The one that had spoken said, "Ah... before we get into that, did you happen to have your solar sprocket with you?" I blinked at him several times until the word clicked. It was one of the signs that Dr Hasumi had been told before she left Japan. This particular one was for Arasaka Intelligence.
  
  I fumbled with the countersign, no doubt sounding super lame, "Uhhh... No... but I'm sure I could dig another one up if I had a golden shovel. "
  
  This caused the ninja to nod, satisfied, " Hasumi-sensei; we're pleased to rescue you. You have two options. You can accept employment with Arasaka Corporation, or we can let you out here. In my opinion, you will be immediately renditioned by Militech if you choose to leave our custody. In either case, we will abide by the tentative licensing agreement we agreed to, but if you want to leave, we'll need you to formalise it before you go. We have a terminal to upload it to Veritas Corporation right here. "
  
  That's about what I expected, although I was a little surprised that they said that they would abide by the terms of the license anyway. Arasaka had a reputation for playing hardball when they could get away with it. I agreed with their assessment of Militech, though.
  
  Would Arasaka really let me go, though, if I wanted? I frowned, " Would you be willing to add a clause to invalidate the contract if I disappeared? " I was a little concerned that they'd just shoot me too, rather than let Militech rendition me if that is what they really thought was going to happen. They were basically enemies, after all. It would be denying an enemy an asset.
  
  He looked uneasy at that and shook his head, " I don't think so because we expect you to promptly disappear, at least for a long time, if you don't take our offer. Plus, if we filed a contract with such a clause, you might never reappear. At least not until we lost the patent case in court. I assure you that we will not harm you whatever you choose, however."
  
  I sighed. Well. My choice was clear. It wasn't like I wasn't expecting something like this, though. Arasaka was a bit suboptimal, but they had been playing less hardball than Militech had been lately. I said, " I'll take the job, but I want to see the signed license agreement filed first. I don't want you to try to claim that now I am an employee that it is actually Arasaka's work product."
  
  That caused the ninja to smile and chuckle, " Of course. That won't be a problem at all. Let's do that right now. It will take some doing to get you out of LA."
  
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  Nine to giving it
  April 2067
  
  Tegucigalpa, Honduras
  
  Confidential Arasaka Compound
  
  "You know, Phillipé, if I had an eddie for every time I have been kidnapped, well... I would only have two eddies, but it is weird that it has happened twice," I told my former employee and current co-worker. It had been six weeks since my kidnapping, and it had taken almost a whole week to exfiltrate out of Los Angeles without being noticed.
  
  I had become something of a celebrity, again, in my kidnapping, and there was continuous speculation about the economic and military impact of the widespread adoption of sleep inducers. The world had woken up to how useful and lucrative such a product was, though, and there had been several segments on them in the business channels and net feeds the week following my disappearance.
  
  Then, when Arasaka publicised that I had been "rescued" and accepted a position with their Corporation, it had been enough to send the share price of Arasaka shares soaring almost fifty basis points, which didn't sound like a lot until you realised the total market capitalisation of Arasaka.
  
  Sneaking out of the city had been slightly difficult, with everyone looking for me. The ninjas who rescue-napped me were from a group of "advisors" that had been working in Northern California and, for some reason, happened to be in Los Angeles. They had decided that it would be less likely to be discovered if they went south instead of trying to go north back into the Free States, so we ended up in Honduras. It looked like Phillipé didn't buy the company line either because he grinned, "Perhaps thrice?" He waved a hand to indicate our present location.
  
  I inclined my head to surrender the possibility. I didn't know who was behind my first kidnapping. It was professionally done, and I was still a bit sore about how I had let my overconfidence let a random mook disable me. No, not just a random mook. My random mook. I had expected something to happen soon, but I hadn't expected to be betrayed by my own employees.
  
  In the subsequent weeks, some of my Arasaka minders made sure that I saw articles that reported that the people behind the attack were traced to a group of mercenaries that Militech had hired. This was based on the fact that the aircraft used were drawn from stocks Militech was using for their mercs and Southern California militia members. But that didn't mean anything, as they could have been stolen. In fact, the armoured vehicle that Arasaka used to rescue me had been stolen from the Los Angeles police department. Why the LAPD needed an APC with an automatic Gauss cannon attached to it... actually, I could see why they needed it.
  
  The fact was that I didn't know who was behind it, which rankled me. I liked to have neat lists of people or groups that wronged me, so that I could settle accounts later. I had started that habit back in Brockton Bay. I hadn't carefully detailed all of the Trio's bullying in one of my diaries solely for evidentiary purposes, after all. But now I was left with some uncertainty.
  
  It could have been Arasaka themselves, attempting to glad-hand me, or it could have been Militech or any other Corporation. It could even have been exactly what my interrogator claimed, a private attack that sought to steal something from me and then sell it to the highest bidder.
  
  My personal opinion was that the timing of Arasaka's rescue was mighty convenient. I had only been unconscious for about an hour before waking up and having that woman attempt to coerce me. Either they already had me under surveillance themselves for their own kidnapping and noticed the attack, or they arranged it themselves to rescue me right before I was tortured and possibly murdered. Their alacrity in responding could be explained no other way.
  
  I had never conceived of the possibility that someone might kidnap me and then kill me afterwards, either. I had such a high opinion of my own value, so that seemed like an impossibility. Kind of stupid, in retrospect. Stupid, like talking to my security manager every Monday at ten in the morning on the dot.
  
  I was also kind of upset when I learned that the original kidnappers had just shot him on the factory floor instead of paying him whatever bribe he was owed for his perfidy. I thought he got what he deserved, but... I also felt as though I got robbed of revenge myself.
  
  At least I was self-aware enough to realise that wasn't exactly an opinion that helped my mental hygiene, though. Still, I couldn't help but go 'Tsk' when I heard about it.
  
  With Phillipé, I decided to change the subject, "Have you heard anything from your team about any changes to the Arasaka version of the wreath?" Arasaka hadn't screwed Phillipe on what they had promised him. He was the Technical Project Lead for the sleep-inducer wreaths, both the consumer and military versions, but not for the cybernetic versions, which they thought that long-term would have even more of the market share than the wreaths.
  
  After we got to Honduras, instead of shipping me straight "back" to Japan, Arasaka told me to start working on both the Arasaka-version of the wreaths as well as the cybernetic versions and had Phillippe waiting for me. It was a new and interesting experience trying to explain exactly how my technology worked.
  
  The electronics themselves weren't that novel; it was how they interfaced with the brain that was the improvement, so there quickly was a number of neuro-scientists added to the team. These served as subject matter experts who could consult with both Phillipé's team as well as the one that was handling the cybernetics, which was tentatively being led by myself.
  
  I already had designs of two different versions of cybernetics, but I had never even prototyped them; however, like the wreath, they had to be redesigned to use Arasaka electronics and design philosophies. Arasaka couldn't be seen to sell a sleep inducer that was based primarily, on a Fuyutsuki Electronics braindance wreath, for example. That wouldn't do, plus they wanted to cut them out of any potential future revenues from the licensing agreement I had signed with Fuyutsuki earlier.
  
  The cybernetics versions I had designed mostly from the ground up, but now that I had a team of cybernetics engineers behind me, I could see how amateurish I had been. I had reinvented the wheel in a lot of places, so it was mostly being redesigned, as well.
  
  Phillipé smiled and nodded, "Yes, the final version for the MkI entered fullscale series production a few days ago, with tens of thousands already running off the assembly line in the factories in Osaka. They're focusing on the militarised versions right now, with a small run of the consumer-grade versions being run off and sent to product reviewers, VIPs and the like. A couple hundred of each version should be couriered to this base soon."
  
  I nodded. I had heard from my temporary boss how they were prioritising the military versions of all of these products due to how much of an advantage their strategic planners felt an Army with reduced sleep needs could achieve over a peer adversary that didn't have a similar technology would have. The tempo of modern combat was high, and thinkers (not Thinkers, though) felt that an equivalent force could be fifteen to twenty per cent more effective if they had the sleep inducers in a straight attrition-style war. That was a lot.
  
  My "boss" was pushing my team to finish the cybernetics versions as quickly as possible, as this would be the main version rolled out to Arasaka forces and possibly included as an upgrade to the higher-end Araska operating systems moving forward. The wreaths were being sent mostly to Northern California and given to Arasaka-hired mercenaries in the area, so they could be seen to have an immediate effect on the war between the federal government and the Free States.
  
  In a world of dangerous netrunners, it might sound like a shortsighted decision to include a piece of cybernetics specifically designed to make the user fall asleep, but there were already a number of black viruses and quickhacks that could put people into temporary comas, so it really wasn't that big of a deal so long as the security was tight.
  
  That was another area that I had been a bit lackadaisical in, but only because, at the time I designed the cybernetics, I didn't have the design files to integrate it into an operating system closely. I did now, but my team was the one who was handling most of this work, as they all had experience working on Araska OSes. I had already been told that when we released our first version of products, I would be replaced as the Project Lead for this project and return back to Japan, where I would be placed in a more research and development role.
  
  Right now, I was working as an engineer, basically, instead of a researcher, but they were very firm in their desire to get these products rolled out as quickly as possible. I had the feeling that they were kind of concerned that I was going to be some kind of "one-hit wonder", but they were committed to funding a number of subsequent projects even so. A sinecure was a small price to pay to ensure I would not be able to license my technology to competitors, after all. I would have to give them at least a few more winners, though, before I was valued enough that I could do whatever I wanted to do, which was my entire purpose for trying to get myself kidnapped.
  
  I nodded and stretched out in the chair I was sitting in, tugging at the collar of my blouse, straightening the lapel pin that featured Arasaka's three-limbed-tree logo. I wasn't wearing a uniform precisely, but Arasaka definitely had a dress code and grooming standards. They were a very socially conservative company.
  
  Well, at the lower level, you'd see as much skin as you wanted, but I was, theoretically, an executive and researcher, so I had to dress the part. It wasn't that surprising when you considered that the man that ran the company was born during World War One and fought as a fighter pilot in World War Two. Gram had referred to Saburo Arasaka as "a bit stuffy" when we had briefly discussed some of the larger Corporations of the world, and I felt that was something of an understatement.
  
  That said, I kind of liked the clothes even if I wasn't used to this cut and style. They were right up my alley and in subdued colours to boot, but they definitely were not Sakura's style of choice. She always preferred dressing a little more provocatively than would be acceptable here.
  
  "I've been told that I'll be sent back to Japan when my product launches. I doubt they'll keep you or your team here after that, either," I told him conversationally.
  
  He grinned, "I can't say I will miss this place. Even if this wasn't a highly-classified facility, this city is amongst the most dangerous in North or Central America." That was true, and that was saying something. We were off to a side, sequestered from most of the facility we were in, and it wasn't permitted to go nosing about, and nobody was allowed outside into the city proper, escort or not. I was sure my freedom wouldn't be that much different even when I got to Japan, but at least there, I would probably have nicer accommodations and a lot more distractions available. Here, I really only had one, and he wasn't one that I was really interested in partaking in.
  
  A message caused me to pause, frowning, 'Think of the devil, and his cute face will appear.' My personal assistant was requesting my presence to go over something or other. I sighed and stood up, "Well, I have to go." He nodded and went back to working on his implants, kind of staring off into space and fiddling with something only he could see on his augmented reality system. Most of his and my team wasn't actually on this base; it was just that this was one of the closest locations that had a secure enough connection that we could send sensitive documents back and forth and teleconference with the members of our team back in Japan.
  
  Arasaka wouldn't be comfortable sending the design files of their products over the net, no matter how much encryption was used. I didn't know what kind of connection this base had back to Japan, only that it was "secure." I assumed that it involved a dedicated satellite uplink, though, or perhaps some secret undersea cable.
  
  I walked back to the room that was set aside for my personal accommodation and met a smiling young man in my living area. This was Yuki, my Arasaka-provided "personal assistant." He made me a little bit uncomfortable because I thought he was close to what Sakura Hasumi's "interpersonal ideal" would be. Namely, a few years younger than her, male, pretty to the point of being androgynous and with a submissive personality. Sakura liked bishōnen, and Arasaka clearly had a file on her preferences from before she entered America.
  
  Sakura was the opposite of me in many ways. I had a very good understanding of her personality and sexual preferences from all of her files, which included a disturbingly large amount of explicit virtus that she had scrolled of herself with a number of sexual partners, all of which were similar to Yuki here.
  
  Sakura had been almost hypersexual and borderline aromantic, which was about the opposite of my proclivities. This made things difficult because if I was really Sakura Hasumi, this pretty boy would have already been "serving" underneath me in many ways that I wasn't that interested in. Yuki had clearly been expecting the same thing, as he had asked me if there was something wrong with him about a week after the meeting, and if so, a replacement could be found.
  
  I told him bluntly that since my kidnapping, I wasn't generally interested in sex anymore. I was pretty sure that he, and now Arasaka, thought that my durance vile was a lot more vile than it probably had been in actuality. Still, them making the assumptions about sexual trauma I didn't experience did stop them from wondering why I wasn't tumbling the pretty boy dangled in front of me like free candy.
  
  I kept Yuki on because he really was good at his job, and it was unavoidable that I would have some Arasaka minders, so it might as well be the one I was already familiar with.
  
  " Hasumi-sama! " he called out as he stood up, smiling in his pretty-boy way. He had a soft way of speaking, to go with his subservient personality. Although I hadn't found that too attractive in a potential male mate as Sakura had, I did find it pleasant for a company-provided minder. " I heard that you will be finishing up in a month or so. Is that true? I wanted to go over the plans moving forward. Also, there are some other things we need to go over if you have time, of course. "
  
  I rubbed my wrist lightly, which had become a habit lately. I had been seen by an Arasaka cybersurgeon on base, and to my surprise, they allowed me to keep my monowire, sort of. They hadn't discovered anything out of the ordinary in my cyberbrain, either, nor the importance of the more than a dozen Haywire pairs I had installed. I had gotten them very small now, about the size of a grain of rice, which was good because I needed spares. Both so I could handle maintenance on them periodically and also for expansion opportunities in the future, as it might be some time before I could send and receive arbitrary parcels between Hasumi and the rest of my bodies.
  
  They didn't notice them at all, but they were quite interested in the modifications I had made to my monowire to make it more concealed, so they removed it and replaced it with a stock Kendachi version. As far as I could tell, it hadn't been modified in any way that would allow Arasaka to install a kill switch in it, but just in case, I had reflashed the firmware with the latest version Kendachi released a few days later.
  
  They did make me demonstrate proficiency with it, though, with the base security forces. That wasn't generally required with other integrated weapons systems that Arasaka offered to its executives, like its Mantis Blades, but it was a lot easier to kill yourself with a monowire, so I couldn't really blame them. My proclivity for weapons and boostware was also noted as a divergence from Sakura's preferences, but I believed they also thought that it was down to me being concerned about my safety after being kidnapped. I made sure to demonstrate all of the hallmarks of mild post-traumatic stress disorder, too, in order to sell the illusion.
  
  I sat down at a couch across from him, noticing that Yuki remained standing until I took a seat and nodded, " That's right, Yuki-san. The first prototypes are being tested now, and soon there won't be much for me to do anymore. What do you need to go over? "
  
  He smiled pleasantly and said, " First, we need to formalise your plans to draw down your former company, as your first quarter revenues are due to be paid to this entity." I raised an eyebrow and nodded, and started reviewing the paperwork he offered me carefully. I was, as I had in the past, listening to any legal advice that Arasaka offered me, but I double-checked everything. The last time they offered me a contract, an employment one, they had brought in what was allegedly an independent attorney to advise me. However, at the same time, I had taken everything they had given me to another attorney in Night City as Taylor, just with the names altered so the Night City attorney wouldn't know the source of the contracts that I wanted them to review. I was already on the phone with the firm I somewhat trusted to review these documents, too.
  
  Arasaka didn't know I had any net access, so I was curious if they were attempting to screw me over in some way. So far, not, but I would continue this process, especially as it pertained to my solely-owned holding company. Yuki said, " Please review these documents, and if you'd like me to bring in some legal counsel, that would be fine, too."
  
  I nodded and carefully adjusted the scanned documents, removing any items that could identify me before forwarding them to the firm to review while I simultaneously looked them over also. It took about ten or fifteen minutes to review everything, along with the on-call attorney I hired.
  
  My outside attorney zeroed in on a few clauses, and I motioned, " I'd like to speak to one of those attorneys if you don't mind." Yuki nodded and said, " Of course, Hasumi-sama. We have a couple on base; it will just take a few minutes to get one here. "
  
  We waited in companionable silence for a time before the doorbell rang, which Yuki sprung up to get. He ushered a woman into the room, and it was the same lady as last time. Yuki smiled and said, " Well, I'll leave you two alone, then."
  
  He started to leave but I waved a hand and said, " You can stay, Yuki, if you like."
  
  I kind of wanted to see what this woman would say to that, and she frowned and shook her head, " Hasumi-san, I really have to advise against that. Whatever he hears, he will definitely be obligated to relay to any authorised agent of Arasaka Corporation. He's not able to offer any kind of pledge of privacy."
  
  Yuki nodded rapidly, looking very bashful, " Ano... Hasumi-sama... she is quite correct."
  
  I didn't know that I believed the Arsaka-provided attorney was any different; still, I shrugged, " I don't need any privacy for these questions." That caused Yuki to raise an eyebrow and glance at the woman, who was still frowning, but she finally shrugged. The pretty boy scampered back over to me and sat beside me on the couch.
  
  Our implants negotiated a connection between each other, and our operating systems entered into a shared AR-mode, where we could produce and review documents and other files together. It was a pretty common working mode and theoretically was the basis for all "paperless offices."
  
  The implementation of this system differed based on the OS you had, with low and even mid-tier models featuring only a floating, shared audio-visual GUI window. However, high-spec systems like in my MoorE technology OS and the attorney's Arasaka system could negotiate realistic virtual objects, so the digital file I had been reviewing turned into a stack of paper, complete with both tactile sense and weight, using the physics engine of my own system to provide a very realistic version of physical objects.
  
  She could take a pen and mark on the document, and that would be reflected in the digital file, and I could even, if I wanted to, drop the sheets of paper, and they would make a mess on the floor, although it would be as simple as derezzing them and rerezzing them to get them back, instead of forcing me to pick up each sheet of paper individually. It was a very intuitive system, and the verisimilitude level of the simulated objects was pretty high, going as far as to even smell like actual paper. I shuffled through some pages before I handed the packet of documents to the attorney, parts of it already having been highlighted by me digitally based on areas that my outside attorney had identified as potential areas of concern.
  
  I said, " I've highlighted a few areas; for example, it seems this section is somewhat restricting me from restarting production of a product competing with Arasaka, and another area seems to prevent me from producing products in certain geographic areas, but it isn't clear on what those areas are. "
  
  The attorney raised her eyebrows at me and inclined her head, " Let me review the whole document, and then we can go over these areas. " I nodded and waited a whole twenty minutes objective time as she read the packet twice. I worked on editing a few chapters of Rage of a Villainess while I waited.
  
  Finally, she nodded, " It is as you say, with the caveat that the restriction from producing competing products only applies while you are also an employee of Arasaka. It is a pretty standard boilerplate language often given to employees who also are either majority shareholders or solely own a separate enterprise. In your case, you would be required not to resume production of sleep inducers, and possibly other products if you develop similar products for Arasaka... although those products would generally be covered under separate intellectual property agreements, as employees wouldn't generally own the IP of products you developed while a researcher at Arasaka, if for one reason you did then you wouldn't be permitted to compete while you were also an employee." She really liked adding qualifiers like "generally" to everything she said, as did other attorneys I had talked to, but what she said pretty much agreed with what I thought it said, as well as what my other attorney had claimed as well.
  
  She raised an eyebrow, " This other section is a bit more problematic, as it is vague. It is a prohibition on you from producing such technology or products in certain geographic areas, even after your employee relationship ends, so long as the Arasaka has either a license from you to produce them, for example, your sleep inducers would qualify, or shared ownership of IP. It is listed as a protective measure to ensure the continued confidential nature of any shared or licensed technology, but it isn't clear where this would apply or which geographic locations would be prohibited. I can't recommend you sign this agreement with this vague language attached." She turned to Yuki and asked pointedly, " Shindo-san, can you enlighten us as to the purpose of these clauses?"
  
  Yuki blinked and glanced down at the virtual sheet of paper before pausing and nodding, " Of course! It's meant to prohibit Hasumi-sama from, for example, building a factory in a location with either lax patent protection laws or lax rule of law in general. Basically, we don't want you to start production in an area where your inventions will be immediately seized, either by some corrupt application of local patent law or through simple lawless force of arms. I didn't realise the language was so broad, and we can definitely adjust it. This language was added at the last minute after we received word from our Intelligence division about some developments in the NUSA. I was going to talk to you about them after you read these documents... if you don't mind me speaking in front of your attorney, I can elaborate."
  
  I inclined my head, and he continued, " We received word from our NUSA sources that the fix, as they say, is in." He waggled his eyebrows and even tapped the side of his nose in the British spy gesture, which was amusing. He continued, "The NUSA government will be invalidating your patent on technical and legalistic grounds. They don't have any actual grounds to do so, but they'll just make something up. Militech is already working around the clock to reverse engineer your design, and we expect them to succeed within eight to fourteen months, hence our desire for alacrity on releasing our own product. We need to build an initial market share, plus... uhh.. other considerations..."
  
  He then frowned, looking annoyed on my behalf, which I found cute, " That's basically the reason for that clause. There does need to be some amount of leeway in it, though, to deal with situations where a country might have, on the surface, robust patent protection but, in practice, might seize your invention anyway, like the NUSA. I'm talking to my former boss right now, and at a minimum, we would be willing to specify that this clause wouldn't apply to Japan or the European Community as a whitelist. It's not a huge issue, as these clauses would mostly only apply if you left employment at Arasaka in the future."
  
  Our discussions lasted several hours, as my legal situation was complicated by the contract that I had paid Veritas to execute for me. Arasaka couldn't just pay me individually for my IP, as that would trigger Veritas to execute. So, Arasaka had to pay my company the royalties. I was transforming it into, at least while I worked here, more of a paper entity to hold my IP and to receive payments on my behalf. I was surprised that Arasaka wasn't trying to screw me over for the royalties, as they would amount to slightly over a hundred million Eurodollars a year for the foreseeable future.
  
  It was later when the attorney left and Yuki went over my options for where I would live when I got back to Japan, I discovered that they had screwed me over, at least a little. Honestly, it felt comforting, as if a Corpo didn't pull something with you, then it was really worrying.
  
  Arasaka was paying me my total owed royalties. However, they were charging me for "security services" that I was required to have that they would provide. They were, in effect, billing me for my own gilded cage. There were also additional requirements as to where I would live, which made only the most expensive options compliant with my employment contract.
  
  A large apartment in Tokyo which was the most expensive city for housing on the planet, additional apartments next door for my security service, buying or leasing an aerodyne or two for transport to and from the office, the salaries and equipment for almost a platoon of security specialists for full twenty-four-seven coverage, even Yuki's salary, I was paying for. They probably would have had to provide all of these things for free just so that I could do my job, but they were making me pay for it all out of my pocket. What cheeky little bastards.
  
  All-in-all, it would cost something like twenty million Eurodollars per year, so it wasn't as though I would beggar myself; I would still be pulling tens and tens of millions of Eurodollars in profit, but it was amusing noticing that the company I worked for had managed to arrange things so that they gave me a bunch of money and then immediately grabbed handfuls of it back. That had been an area where both I and my outside attorney had failed to realise the scale of the liabilities.
  
  Surprisingly enough, the Arasaka-provided attorney-woman had noticed that part in the employment contract in the past and had even told me that the associated charges might be substantial; I just hadn't guessed how substantial. However, the company had insisted on such a clause in exchange for shortening the employment contract from a standard ten years to three. I didn't really have any expectation that Arasaka would let me go after three years, so I had just negotiated that to make myself feel better at not acceding to all of their demands at first. Now I was a bit regretful.
  
  Still, in some ways, it was good. There were, no doubt, many middle managers in Arasaka involved with my hiring and management of my licensed patents, so if I didn't give them some relatively benign way to screw me over, they would invariably look for some other method. I was sure that it was part of their KPIs to "recoup" some money, lower costs, or increase the "value" of the investment, i.e. myself. This ensured the obvious way to screw me was taken and not something I wouldn't expect.
  
  Also, I wasn't surprised at all at NUSA's decision to use some figleaf to invalidate my patent. A number of defence magazines were humming with the idea of sleep inducers becoming a force multiplier for essentially any military force. That made it not only a valuable invention but a strategic imperative to acquire. And nations just took things when they thought it necessary. It was the standard behaviour of all polities. I was a little surprised at the length of time that Arasaka guessed would be necessary to defeat the copy protection I had installed in the wreaths, though.
  
  I wouldn't have guessed more than six months, but I supposed I had done something right in the DRM department. Even after they cracked the protection and could build and sell their own versions, they'd run into issues of not precisely knowing exactly why it worked, too.
  
  After I finished with all of the paperwork, Yuki made me dinner, and then we sat down to watch a film. I didn't get much out of the experience, as watching films when they weren't on my operating system so that I could speed them up resembled something akin to a slide show rather than a video. In order for me not to detect individual frames in a video, they had to be played at least one hundred and thirty frames per second, and that wasn't standard at all. Still, the pretty boy had seemed so enthused at the prospect that I didn't have the heart to correct him.
  
  He had fallen asleep in the first fifteen minutes, too, and now was draped somewhat awkwardly on me. Sighing, I rearranged him on the couch so that his head was resting on my lap. While I didn't have any desire for a sexual relationship with him, especially since I knew his first loyalties were not to me, he was cute in the same way as a pet kitten or helpless rabbit was, and affection didn't have to be sexual.
  
  I'd let him sleep for now. I'd gift him one of the sleep-inducer samples when they arrived, too.
  
  April 2067
  
  Night City
  
  Gloria's Apartment, Santo Domingo
  
  Gloria and David had made it back to Night City along with Kiwi and her entire mercenary team, although it took them several weeks in the end, and apparently, according to David, there were thrilling adventures along the way.
  
  Gloria was a bit peeved with me, but not as bad as I thought she might have been. Still, she didn't precisely appreciate me dragging her off for her own safety and away from all of her plans twice, but at least she already had tentative plans to return to Night City; it was just she wanted to work at least a year in the ER in LA first.
  
  She was especially irked with David being pulled out of school on a moment's notice, but that really wasn't a big deal at all. It would have been if he had been going to public school as in the past, as it would have taken a significant amount of time for his "benefits" to catch up with him.
  
  People on public assistance were denied mobility in many ways, from not being able to enrol their children in a new school if it was out of their district to having a food assistance debit account that would only allow charges to go through within a few kilometres of your "home address." The stated reason was that if you moved, then your public assistance was supposed to go through a different regional office which generally had a backlog of nine months to a year to process new claims. I felt the actual reason was just to keep the underclass in place and easy to control, personally.
  
  Still, Gloria wasn't amongst this underclass anymore and moving on a few minutes' notice was pretty common amongst some kinds of Corporate workers. Sure, we had lost some of the tuition we paid, but it was simplicity itself for them to transfer David's grades and student records to his new school in Night City. Nobody cared that his family had represented themselves using a different last name in LA, either, as that happened somewhat frequently too. I had memories of NC-Taylor going by Taylor Dubois for a few months, briefly, when she was in kindergarten in a different city.
  
  Still, I had the feeling that if I dragged Gloria away from her entire life again for her own safety, she might not welcome me back around again. I probably wouldn't blame her, either. We were all together this evening as a kind of housewarming. Although Gloria was going back to her old Megabuilding, she was paying for a larger and better apartment.
  
  After dinner, she pulled me to the side, taking me out onto her balcony. As I gazed out at the skyline of Santo Domingo, Gloria followed me out and sat on a chair next to me. Santo Domingo wasn't as developed as downtown or Japantown, so the two Megabuildings in the district dominated the sky. Gloria's apartment was only about halfway up the structure, but still, she was at least twenty stories above the rest of the district. I gave her a side-eye, wondering what this was about.
  
  She sighed and asked, "I wanted to talk to you, as I think you're the most highly augmented person I know, except for, I guess, myself now." Oh. That's good. I was a little concerned that this was going to be a love confession or she was kicking me out of her house. I was much better able to deal with discussions about cybernetics. She continued, and asked, "Do you ever find yourself thinking that you're better than the average person?"
  
  I blinked and then tilted my head to the side, "What has brought on this line of questioning?" It was a standard diagnostic question for screening possible cyberpsychosis, as Gloria would know, and she would know that I knew, too.
  
  She sighed, "Well, something happened while we were in the desert coming back to Night City. We were attacked, and I was forced to shoot someone, and they died. And I have been worried since then about how it hasn't seemed to have bothered me. In fact, I feel good about it." Oh. She was worried about herself. For a second, I was worried she wanted to have some sort of intervention with me. I put on my therapist hat for a moment.
  
  "Ah... I see. And you sometimes have feelings that you're better or superior to average people? And you're combining this with the fact that you had to defend yourself and don't feel bad about taking someone's life when they were attacking you? And you're worried about becoming a cyberpsycho?" I asked, slightly amused.
  
  She nodded rapidly and sighed, "I just had the feeling tonight; after I saw my mom and all of her friends, it was as if nothing had changed at all. They're like a fly trapped in amber, and I had a sudden feeling of disgust when I thought about it. Combining this with how I felt after I shot that Wraith guy..." she trailed off.
  
  I turned to face her completely and continued leaning back on the railing of her balcony, crossing my arms under my breasts before saying, "To answer your question, of course, I consider myself both better and superior to the average human being." I mean, how could I not? Your average person experienced life at a snail's pace, couldn't think about more than one thing at a time and could only be in one place at one time. I was obviously better than them in almost every respect.
  
  This caused Gloria to widen her eyes in surprise, but I waved a hand, "But I felt the same before I had more than a couple of implants. It isn't as though people are equal. They never have been; the best we can hope for in some ideal utopia is that people might be treated equally." And that wasn't too likely, at least in the near term.
  
  I sighed and paused for a moment before glancing at her, "Plus, I imagine you would have felt this way even if you weren't in a Gemini. She's reminding you of your past, and it isn't based on your cybernetics that you've achieved something for yourself; it is from your own hard work and effort. You intuitively recognise that she is, basically, demoralised. She has no further ambition or desire for growth. Ten years from now, you suspect, correctly, that she'll be exactly as she is today, except older."
  
  I then shrugged my shoulders, "The reason for this can be debated. Perhaps it is as some say that she is a product of her circumstances, or maybe it is her own fault. It doesn't really matter because you're not really disgusted at her. You're disgusted at what you might have been. A mother to a daughter is a mirror of oneself, one path of life that you could have taken, following her footsteps. That's what disgusts you, I think. You see a path in life that you might have taken, that you now abjure."
  
  It was for the same reason that I had a romantic attachment to English literature, but I had a much more healthy relationship with Mom before she passed away.
  
  Gloria was silent for a long time before saying slyly, "And you said you hated psychiatry and clinical psychology. You sound more insightful than my professors."
  
  I snorted, "I said I didn't like it. I didn't say I didn't know about it. I don't have the emotional temperament to be a good therapist, but I can certainly fake it for small periods of time for a friend." That caused her to smile, and I continued, "Now, about this man you shot. Honestly, I envy you. You killed him; that's good. You shouldn't feel bad about it; in fact, you made the correct moral decision. You shouldn't be confused, thinking that this is a symptom of incipient cyberpsychosis; this is just you being a good person."
  
  "Huh?" she said, confused, "Uhh... I'm pretty sure that's not the correct reaction. You shouldn't feel good for killing someone, Taylor."
  
  I sighed, "You shouldn't, right? That's what I thought, too. Let me tell you a story. Do you remember how we met?"
  
  She grinned, "Yeah, of course. You got mugged on your way to work. We ended up transporting your muggers to the Shock Trauma Centre; it was kind of funny."
  
  I nodded, "I thought so, too, at the time. Well, one of them had a shotgun and ended up shooting the other. That one died in the OR, but the shotgun wielder survived. I took more risks myself in order to take that one down alive. I specifically aimed for his kneecaps so that he would survive. Surprisingly, he wasn't charged with felony murder for his compatriot's death, only my mugging. So, he was out of jail in less than nine weeks." And it really wasn't even a mugging; they were Scavs, and I was sure I would have been disassembled and left for dead if their "mugging" had succeeded.
  
  Gloria started to look uneasy, and I continued, "A few months later, I was curious about what happened to him, so I looked him up and discovered that since he got out, the NCPD shot him to death after he killed his next-door neighbour, a woman in her thirties and a girl about as old as David is right now."
  
  I stared at her, completely serious, "Those people are dead because of my squeamishness, Gloria. I really envy you that you put down the guy who attacked you and don't have to live with guilt knowing that you're partly responsible for what he did afterwards."
  
  She shook her head, "No way! That wasn't your fault!"
  
  "Wasn't it? Even the cops, at the time, told me just to kill these types of people in the future. I thought that they were so jaded and cynical at the time, but really they were exactly right," I shook my head and leaned back against the railing, glancing up at the night sky. The sky was black, with barely a few stars visible through all the light pollution, "There are a lot of different types of people in the world. Most work a dead-end job, doing what they can. Some are like your mom, grifting what they can out of the system. But some people... pick up a gun and decide to take what they want, and create pain, terror and sadness in their wake. It sounds anti-social, but in the absence of a real, working system of justice, which we do not have, it is the correct moral decision to shoot these people. You probably saved ten lives with the one guy you killed, and you should feel great about that, not conflicted and worried that you don't feel guilty. You don't feel guilty because you intuitively understand that you did a good deed. "
  
  Gloria looked quiet and thoughtful for some time.
  
  I hadn't ever actually put these thoughts into words before, and they would have shocked pre-Night City Taylor, but living in Night City had a way of changing you, or rather revealing the true you underneath all of the extraneous polite bullshit society foisted off on people. Night City was a jungle, and in a jungle, it was possible to have a biblical view of good and evil, of right and wrong, of black and white. It wasn't that there were no greys; in fact, the whole city was grey. It was just that, for some reason, the grey made the black stand out better when you saw it. The badlands, the wastes where she had shot that man, was even more stark.
  
  Still, I was long past feeling anything but a sense of satisfaction when I had to put down the real scum of the Earth. Perhaps I was being hypocritical in the extreme because I did realise that some of the systemic issues this world lived under brought this type of person to the forefront, and I was presently working for people who were responsible for a lot of the systemic issues.
  
  Still, I would do what I could do and be satisfied with that. I grinned and said, "Let's go have some cake."
  
  May 2067
  
  Tegucigalpa, Honduras
  
  Confidential Arasaka Compound
  
  I was in a part of the base that I normally had no access to, but I was completely done with my work on the first-generation cybernetic sleep inducers and was just waiting to be transported to Japan. Apparently, there were only certain windows where they felt I could be transported safely, as they felt that until Militech finished reverse engineering the wreaths, they would definitely intercept me if they knew where I was.
  
  So I was bored and offered to help their cybernetics surgeon, so I was doing a number of small surgeries. Their clinic was stocked very oddly, and they had an absolute ton of neural, cognitive and netrunner cybernetics. I asked Yuki, " Just what does Arasaka do in this base? "
  
  He frowned and looked unsure, " Uh... beyond basing a small fighter squadron here, I believe that, for the most part, this is a research centre focused on portions of the Old Net, but I don't really know any more than that, and furthermore, neither you nor I have a need to know, and it is classified. Just like their workers have no need to know the extent of your work here, either... but if you are really curious, I can see about requesting you to be read in on the project. "
  
  "Yeah, yeah... I don't think that will be necessary," I said, waving a hand. I didn't really care that much, plus I wanted to save any favours like that for things that I was really interested in or really needed to know. I hadn't done any surgeries on any secret netrunners, but I had done a couple of Arasaka fighter pilots, and they had a number of interesting augmentations. They all had boostware and sophisticated neural interfaces that were similar to a cyberdeck. They would interface with the computers in the aircraft, and the pilot would fly the plane in a virtual reality interface. The aircraft's sensors would be his eyes, and the aircraft's control surfaces would be their limbs. It was quite fascinating, I thought. Each had enough physical augmentations to live continuously at 9Gs, so they could accept a tremendous amount of acceleration, too.
  
  A few days later, after that conversation, I found myself in the clinic on a Sunday. The base surgeon didn't work weekends, so I offered to come in and do a few elective surgeries for the people of the base. After I was finishing up installing a new pair of cybernetic eyes in a girl that worked in the administration, suddenly, the lights went out, as well as my connection to the base subnet.
  
  Blinking, my eyes shifting to low-light mode, I quickly took stock of my patient. I didn't need any of the further equipment, thankfully, so I finished in the dark, the base's emergency lighting not coming on for a full minute.
  
  Now that my patient was safe, my curiosity was taking hold. I left her there after adjusting her sedation levels and walked out of the clinic, having to force open the door manually. The corridor was lit dimly by the red-tinged emergency lighting installed on the walls, and I could hear some gunfire down the hall. If I was smart, I would quickly go hide back in my clinic, but instead, I walked towards the gunfire.
  
  I found a dead body no more than ten metres further. It was a member of the Arasaka security forces on base, in their matte black and red armour, but he appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, specifically a pericranial entry point to the temple with the sidearm that was still in his hand. Frowning, I kneeled down and relieved him of his weapon, doing a quick function test, "Virus attack...?" I asked myself questioningly and quickly shut down all external radios on my cyberware. The base wireless connection was down hard right now, anyway. One of the few modifications to my cybernetics that Arasaka insisted on was changing out my normal wireless card with a version that would only connect to the access point in the base. This was apparently pretty standard for anyone "on deployment" at a confidential and classified location, I supposed. It would have been a real problem if I didn't have all my other ways to connect to the outside world.
  
  With a gun in my hand, I felt a lot better now and I continued my exploration, going into a large hangar or garage, and instantly I froze when I detected movement. Glancing around I saw one lone Arasaka security forces member raising his HJSH-18 Masamune slowly at a group of four people that seemed to be stealing a vehicle.
  
  Blinking, I zoomed in on the nar-do-wells before changing my classification. These children were stealing one of the Ō-yoroi mine-and-ambush-protected armoured vehicles. They all had dark form-fitting coolant suits with Arasaka markings on the back, and I could instantly identify some cybernetics installed on each of them. They couldn't be more than eleven years old.
  
  My body moved without thinking, running towards the man who was still lifting his rifle up and hadn't quite reached his aim point yet. I got to him long before he pulled the trigger, and with a hand, I grabbed his head and smashed it into the side of a nearby vehicle, instantly knocking him out. I thought smugly, ' No, I don't think you'd be shooting children today, sir. ' It was fortunate that I had enough time to disable him that way without shooting him, as that would have caused a lot of questions later. I didn't know what was going on precisely, but I knew shooting kids was not going to fly with me.
  
  Two of the children who were stealing the vehicle gaped at me when I did this, one of which was a pale girl with pink hair in a pixie-cut with intense eyes, staring at me as she jumped up on the side of the vehicle as they got it going. She stared at me for a long moment before finally nodding and then jumping into the cabin of the vehicle, closing the door behind her. The car then drove straight through the thin garage door like it wasn't even there, leaving a gaping hole behind.
  
  Stepping away from the scene of my crime, I wondered what the fuck had just happened. I was thankful that the entire base seemed to be deactivated, so I was hoping that included any of the audio-visual cameras inside this garage. It was only a few more minutes before an entire squad of security guys showed up, swarming me. Rather than being upset, though, they seemed relieved, with the leader speaking over his speaker, " Hasumi-sensei, please come with us. This facility is no longer secure; we're going to fly you out immediately."
  
  I let them lead me off and even let one of the guys take the pistol that I was carrying. Me and Yuki were bundled into an AV-8 which took off and immediately turned to the south.
  
  As we flew over the city, I noticed that at least half of the city was as dark as the base, completely without power. Now that was impressive.
  
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  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 he 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 antagonise 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 him."
  
  "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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  Get your ass to Mars
  June 2067
  
  Tokyo, Japan
  
  Arasaka Research Centre, Clinic
  
  As I stared at Yuki floating peacefully in the nanomachine vat, I was struck with a thought. Was I fated to always augment my pets? I had added experimental respirocytes to Lord Butterbutt, too. Wait, Yuki wasn't my pet . Also, as an aside, I didn't think it was, strictly speaking, moral to keep human beings as pets, either. But that didn't matter, since he wasn't my pet!
  
  Nodding, I continued. Besides, these weren't experimental anyway, so it couldn't be said that I was experimenting on him like the other pets . I discovered that Yuki had no ongoing biosculpt treatments, although I suspected he had his looks modified recently. He was a bit too pretty for it to be natural, but as far as augmentations were concerned, he only had a pair of fancy optics, a high-end Arasaka operating system and a special high-gain radio with included encryption module and emergency locator beacon.
  
  That wasn't enough, especially if he was going to be around me. Just being in the crossfire of my security teams might cause him to be gibbed, so I insisted that he get at least nanosurgeons, an enhanced immune system and the ballistic skin weave. He flatly refused any type of cybernetics that affected his looks, which I found amusing. But Sakura Hasumi probably wouldn't have liked some pretty boy that had real obvious subdermal armour or cybernetic limbs, I supposed.
  
  She was the type to appreciate the gap moe in a pretty boy being really strong, but only if it didn't affect his prettiness.
  
  I had already performed the surgery to install the nanosurgeon and enhanced immune system organs, and now I was finishing up with the ballistic weave and muscle and bone lace. Yuki wasn't interested in being any stronger himself, but just having much more robust bones would be a huge survival advantage. Someone with muscle and bone lace could jump out of a third-story window and probably not break anything, whereas someone who didn't have it would probably break their everything.
  
  The door behind me opened, and I narrowed my eyes because I had block scheduled this clinic for the next few hours. The door should have been locked. I glanced back to see who the intruder was.
  
  " Those are nice eyes," an amused and familiar voice, apparently approving of my killer instinct. My eyes softened somewhat; at least I knew that this guy was authorised to be here. The voice belonged to my nominal boss, a man named Kimura Koichi, who walked into the room and waited until the door closed before glancing at the floating Yuki and asking, again amused, " Doing some upgrades? "
  
  " Anyone who expects to be near me should be at least shrapnel-resistant, Kimura-san," I replied with a sigh. " If you disagreed, then why do I have to pay so much for security?"
  
  He shrugged, " You're not wrong, probably. I'm in the building for another few hours, so I wanted to touch base with you, and this is as private a room as exists around here. Let's talk about your two ongoing projects. I liked your idea to look through old, abandoned projects, but couldn't you have picked a different one?"
  
  I frowned, " I could have, but I'm fairly optimistic for success with the biometals one. What's wrong?"
  
  " Nothing, I suppose. It's just that this project wasn't involved in our Kiji faction at all, and all the people who backed it are still around. I would have preferred you to pick one of the ones that would make us look better," he sighed.
  
  I snorted. I knew that the factions that had built up around various Arasaka scions weren't that big a deal, but I did know that I was hired under the auspices of Hanako Arasaka's faction, but she was a recluse, so I didn't know what it really meant. I didn't think most people who worked for her did, either.
  
  When he saw that I wouldn't comment further, he nodded, " Now, your next project. I can't say I see the purpose of making quasi-biological robots. They aren't really cyborgs like we'd think of them, and they don't do anything that traditional robotics cannot accomplish."
  
  He didn't? I didn't believe him. This had to be a test. So, I nodded, " That's true, but in small autonomous robots, over thirty per cent of the BOM is the neural network chips and processors. Also, nobody is building new chip fabs right now, except small boutique outfits in space, so the capacity to produce these chips is an issue. That's why we don't normally see small autonomous or semi-autonomous robots for reasonable prices. The economies aren't there. I think we could not only reduce the cost dramatically, causing these robots to be economically viable but do so in a way that wouldn't compete with the limited supply chain for our other larger and more profitable robots." If I had wanted to build one of my spider bots the traditional way, it would have taken the same or at least a similar specialised neural network system-on-a-chip that was used in the Arasaka bipedal combat robots, and supplying these chips was the bottleneck when producing robots.
  
  He grinned, " So you do see the big picture, too. Good. I want you to prioritise this project. I agree with everything you said. But these robots won't go crazy, will they?"
  
  I paused and then gave a Gallic shrug, " They didn't with the prototypes I made in LA, but I mainly sourced the neural tissue from gangsters that tried to attack my clinic or factory, not cloned tissue." That was a lie, actually. I had cloned almost all of it, but I didn't want to admit that I had most of this project already on lock since it involved too much Tinkertech.
  
  He seemed not exactly reassured, but just the possibility that robots might go crazy wasn't a reason that Arasaka would stop a project. He'd probably just donate the first several thousand bots programmed to dispose of trash in some country Arasaka needed a tax break in. Along with an iron-tight release of liability if the robots reclassified toddlers as trash and acted accordingly. But I was sure that wouldn't happen if I was careful with the neural-network training system.
  
  " When did you become an expert in genetics, anyway?" he asked curiously.
  
  Ah. I'd have to step carefully here. Dr Hasumi's PhD involved research to make taste and smell in VR simulations more realistic, so it wouldn't be incorrect to call her specialised in neuroscience, but that didn't explain my broad expertise across all life science.
  
  As such, my development of the sleep inducer wasn't that unusual, as it depended on an advanced knowledge of neuroscience to work. I shrugged, glancing over at the floating Yuki, " I've always had an interest. I took a number of advanced genetics classes at University but decided on a different speciality in the end. But I've always been an autodidact, especially in the life sciences. It was spending almost a year as a prisoner that, surprisingly, gave me a number of unwitting experimental subjects and a new outlook on life. That's how I developed the sleep induction technology, actually. Random seizures were pretty normal, I suppose, for my captors, so they didn't even really notice. My goal was to put them all to sleep simultaneously and then murder them, but I was rescued before I could put the plan into action."
  
  " It's interesting how that then leads you here," he mused, then chuckled, " It's funny you should mention seizures. Intel suggests that Militech has already tried building a prototype based on this technology, and it reportedly causes seizures, so they're not releasing it and staying mum about it. Analysis?"
  
  I shrugged, " Not surprising if they are trying to reverse engineer the system based on how it affects one person's brain and then extrapolating it and expecting it to work the same on other subjects' brains. This would be the logical first step to trying to understand how it works. I bet they're trying this approach while simultaneously working on defeating the DRM as separate independent projects. Absent espionage, I would expect them to have success on the DRM attack surface much sooner. Still, it could be useful as a way of inducing various types of seizures, I suppose."
  
  My boss gaped, " Why would you want a way to induce seizures?"
  
  "For research purposes. Detailed analysis of brain activity while a seizure is happening and during the postictal state is kind of rare. You have to wait for it to happen with a subject known to experience seizures hooked up to all sorts of equipment. Very time-consuming, just waiting, like watching a tea kettle while it boils. A way to safely, or at least mostly safely, induce seizures would speed up research on all seizure-related illnesses," I said mildly, as I turned back to adjust a setting on the vat Yuki was asleep in briefly. He was due to come out in a couple of hours, so I was about done here.
  
  He sighed, got a queer look on his face, and said, " Honestly, you brain doctors kind of scare me. I have a pure engineering background." I heard that a lot, and I didn't understand. The body was just a kind of wet machine, after all. It wasn't magical and operated under the same limitations of physics as other machines. Then he nodded, " Okay. These two projects are good, but after this, I'd appreciate it if you focused at least one project on your primary neuroscience focus. The other can be whatever you want. But that was the main reason you were hired, and I'll receive shit if you don't at least try to expand your expertise in this area."
  
  I raised an eyebrow. That wasn't mentioned in my employment contract, and I specifically had the freedom to research whatever I wanted. I wondered who in our Kiji faction wanted a more specialised neuroscientist. I made a noncommittal noise, " I don't make any promises. But what area of neuroscience are our bosses interested in? It is as vast as any other specialty."
  
  "Well, you've already got some expertise in the senses, and now sleep. Perhaps you could find something that would interest you in the realm of consciousness?" I snorted. This man obviously didn't know much about the brain. That was like suggesting a physicist might be interested in figuring out the unified field theory. He noticed my scepticism and corrected himself, " Or even memory. Or advancing the way skill chips work, perhaps making them less static. It's really up to you, just some ideas."
  
  Memory, eh? I wasn't about to provide technology for Arasaka in the realm of parsing or extracting memory from a brain. I had that technology already privately. As someone with a lot of secrets that I didn't want anyone else to know, I would prefer if nobody else had this tech. Allegedly we had the Soulkiller, but I didn't have the clearance to know anything about it, and the second word was key to that hypothetical tech. It killed you, burning out critical parts of your brain while making a destructive copy. Allegedly. I'd have liked very much to do a pathological examination of someone who had allegedly been "soul killed."
  
  However, if they had some way to copy a brain without it killing someone, then they'd likely immediately use it on all of their important people, including me. And I didn't want any copy of my memories being interrogated or investigated in software. The fact that I wasn't really Sakura Hasumi was the least of my secrets.
  
  The boss didn't stay too long after that. I wasn't too concerned about his attempt to steer my research, either. Really, he was barely a boss. He was closer to the type of managers that idols had, whose main purpose was to handle my needs and keep me out of trouble. I got the impression that he was a talent manager rather than some great businessman. He already mentioned he had three similar people to me under his supervision, although I didn't know what kind of focus these other prodigies had. Still, I would play nice, if I could.
  
  I glanced around and then left too. Yuki still had a while longer to cook. Perhaps I would offer free biosculpt to all my workers, too. It'd be a nice little bennie.
  
  June 2067
  
  Japantown, Night City
  
  Taylor's Clinic
  
  At the same time that my boss was interrupting me in Tokyo, one of the Tyger Claw security managers called me back in Night City.
  
  " Thank you for telling me," I finished in Japanese and disconnected the call. It was the middle of the night, but the Tyger Claws called me as soon as they saw a Borg walk into the building. I was sure that they had identified him as my patient and were calling to confirm that I did expect him to show up in the middle of the night.
  
  It wasn't just the Clouds that made the Tyger Claws money, the entire Megabuilding was a golden goose, but it only continued to be so when it was kept a safe place to live, work and shop. I had the suspicion that the Tyger Claws might even own part of the building as they certainly ran all of the building management, but even if they didn't, you could only provide "protection" services if the extorted party was actually at least somewhat protected. Anytime they saw an obviously dangerous entity come in, they followed them to make sure they didn't go cyberpsycho or something. In this case, they had recognised him but wanted confirmation.
  
  I was breaking the law by treating Gloria's "acquaintances", but I didn't really care these days. I already did the same for a number of Tyger Claws, and they weren't really that great of people-even if I only allowed the less objectionable members in my clinic. Plus, weird secret society members knew to keep their mouths shut.
  
  I put on a white lab coat. I mainly wore them to give people what they expected to see, as expectations were powerful. They saw what they thought should look like a doctor, so they immediately put me in that category mentally. It helped a lot when you ran a quasi-legal clinic. Amusingly enough, I hardly ever wore such things in my day job as an actual doctor . Instead, I just wore scrubs when I was performing surgeries or business casual when I was doing consults. Residents had scrubs of a specific colour in order to be easily identified, though.
  
  I would skip the stethoscope around my neck this time, there were no biological sounds I would need to listen to on this patient, and very few full-body replacement users were stupid. The door gong sounded, and a screen with cameras popped up in my visual field. A generic-looking Alpha-class Borg was standing outside. Nodding, I tested the security systems I had installed and then let him in.
  
  "Dr Hebert... I was very excited when you said my body was done. I can't wait to get back in there," the man said as he came in. I nodded. I had already met this man, which was the only reason I was agreeing to meet him alone. I ended up buying two gently used Alpha-class bodies to use as "loaners" when I discovered how much work needed to be done on both the IEC Wingman and the Militech Eclipse. It was an expense of about a hundred thousand Eurodollars, but I figured I would customise them and then sell them later. I expected to make a profit on the purchase, and in the meantime, the opportunity to study in-depth, with no time pressures, how the IEC Wingman and the Militech Eclipse was constructed was priceless.
  
  The latter was still in bits in my back area, which I had converted into a workroom. There just wasn't enough space to run a small pharmacy and clinic in here, as well as have a lot of room to work on electronics and my own personal experiments. I followed Gloria's example and rented a nice one-bedroom apartment on the fortieth floor, although I often slept in a comfortable chair in the back when I didn't want to go back upstairs.
  
  I motioned for him to take a seat and forwarded diagnostic wireless requests, and handed him a small interface cord, saying in mild disapproval, "There were years of accumulated squawks to go through on the maintenance punch list. And your Kerenzikov was starting to break down. Your biopod itself had a number of faults, and I think maybe you would have gone crazy or died soon. Or gone crazy and died."
  
  He chuckled uneasily, approved the diagnostic request and connected the proferred cord to the interface socket on his body's head, "Yeah... I kind of thought something was seriously wrong. My head feels a lot better, too; I'm not snapping at everyone, and I'm not seeing things that aren't there anymore, either... I think. But living this slow is really starting to grate on me..." His optics shifted and zoomed in, staring at the back of my neck where my own Kerenzikov was partially visible on the back of my neck, "You must know what I'm talking about."
  
  I did. I had, a few times, disabled my Kerenzikov in order to perform maintenance in the past. Now, though, I was just using a commercial off-the-shelf QianT version since I felt that I might be unable to perform the weekly maintenance I was forced to do to boost my old Kang Tao system. When you got acclimatised to using a Kerenzikov, especially a higher factor one, you tended to get used to using a lot of the free time when interacting with norms to do other things, so when you found yourself bereft of the boost, you seemed flighty and ditzy, almost as though you had extreme ADHD. I said with some sympathy, "Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about. Sorry, I couldn't get a Kerenzikov unit designed for a traditional biopod to loan you on short notice. They're somewhat more controlled than even the regular kind. Despite that, you seem quite a bit more... grounded today. That is good. Any dysmorphia? Hallucinations?"
  
  It wasn't that surprising that an augmentation that would, more than any single other, make Borgs even more dangerous was more controlled. It didn't mean that I couldn't get them, though, but it needed a bit of a lead time, and I had to use my black market connections. I was fortunate that my Kerenzikov worked with my system, as I was, from a legal and technical perspective, classified as a biopodder as well. I had made sure that compatibility existed before I bought them, though. Although a cyberbrain user still had a regular organic body, so it needed a full, normal Kerenzikov, it also had the connections to the brain that had to interface correctly with my "biopod."
  
  I glanced at the readouts of the internal brain monitor that was included on his biopod, which I had repaired during the last session. His brain activity seemed a lot better, but still not what I would call healthy. Judging from the rapid activity shifts based on his sensory cortex input, he still suffered a bit from hypervigilance, even here. But he was a lot better than the borderline psychotic I had treated the last time. With a properly functioning biopod, all of the brain inflammation was gone too. That was probably what had been causing his hallucinations.
  
  He nodded his robot head and said, "No more than I expected, and as for hallucinations... I don't think so. The medication you gave me seemed to have helped a lot, too. Are you sure there are no side effects I should be worried about?"
  
  I shook my head. I had started all of the Borgs I had seen on the same medication I used myself. I called it my antidepressant, but in reality, the method of action was closer to a mood stabiliser. It didn't really prevent you from being depressed; it just stopped your depression from feeding on your depression in an uncontrollable spiral. It worked the same way if you were really paranoid or manic, too. It wasn't a silver bullet, but it had worked so well that I felt really bad at myself for keeping it a secret for years, so I decided to release it into the public domain as soon as I could do so without being tracked down.
  
  Although it wouldn't really attract much attention if I just released it to the world and claimed it was really nice, so I was writing a legitimate scientific paper about its efficacy, along with step-by-step directions to synthesise it. I was pretty sure someone would try to replicate the findings if, just out of boredom, eventually, and discover it wasn't just bullshit. At that point, it would be manufactured for sure, and I hoped the fact that everyone had the details and it would be unpatentable would keep the price reasonable.
  
  It should be unpatentable since I was releasing it into the public domain, but I suspected a number of companies would lie and claim that they had developed it and the release was by a disgruntled employee. But they'd have no proof, and that would just cause other companies to do the same thing, so it wouldn't really matter and should stay relatively cheap.
  
  Patents were an interesting facet of "international law" here, basically because there was no international law. The United Nations didn't survive the DataKrash. Although it didn't survive, some of its tendrils, like NetWatch, which was founded under a UN charter, did. The World Trade Organisation did, theoretically, exist, and they were the ones who were supposed to adjudicate patent disagreements, for example, the one that was occurring between Japan and the NUSA involving my own tech. But in reality, the WTO was almost as toothless as the defunct UN.
  
  In practice, however, it was more a case of détente. Arasaka had taken over legal responsibility to protest the invalidation of my NUSA patents, but that was somewhat hampered by the fact that Arasaka was banned from the continent in the first place. From what I could tell, though, there would eventually be some sort of accommodation. There had to be some sort of settlement in the end because NUSA corporations had too many patents of their own that other nations were already looking at with avarice. You ignored the patent rights of this foreign company, so why shouldn't we do the same for you? This was especially the case of the Europen Community, who had the most patents and therefore the most to gain for keeping the present status quo.
  
  Due to the possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction, intellectual property version, I was advised that some settlement would undoubtedly be made, but perhaps not for a year or two. Arasaka and I would likely get a fair bit of money from it, as the two damaged parties, because if it didn't happen, I'm sure Arasaka would love to start infringing on some NUSA patents, and since that would cause a similar response, the entire patent "system", which operated mainly on the level of gentleman's agreements, would implode.
  
  I elaborated, "There should be no negative side effects. It's a very safe medication. I've included it in the personal pharmacopoeia in your Wingman, taking out most of the harmful drugs, although I refilled the stimulants and depressants as a courtesy; just remember to use them in moderation." Not surprisingly, a body designed for a fighter pilot had a complicated pharmacopoeia that could administer any of about three dozen drugs, but most of them were bad news. Stuff that would heighten aggression, dampen empathy, and others that made one more likely to follow orders and the like.
  
  I suppose that might be necessary if you ordered someone to nuke a city or something, but it wasn't really a good idea if your goal was the mental stability of the individual. The nice thing about existing as mostly only a brain was that psychoactive drugs were very economical! There was no the rest of your body that metabolised them. He would have years and years' worth of my mood stabiliser before he would need to return to get some more, and perhaps he wouldn't need it anymore at that point.
  
  I probably didn't need it anymore, myself, but I kept taking it once a week anyway, just in case, because it had so few side effects.
  
  He grinned, "Did you make the other change to my body we talked about?"
  
  I gave him a side-eye and nodded, "Yes. Although, that, you will have to pay full price for, as we agreed. However, the Mr Studd unit was installed successfully."
  
  He snorted, "Heh-heh... unit..." Ah, yes, the maturity of most males shines through even when you're a Borg. Still, that request was a good sign. The fact that he was interested in sexual activity was good from a psychological perspective. He turned to me and said, "You know... this isn't a hallucination, really... but sometimes I wonder if maybe I'm not and never have been a human, and if all of my memories were just fabrications... or if everything is just some sort of sick simulation."
  
  I raised an eyebrow. That wasn't really a healthy thought, at least the first bit, although I sometimes wondered about the latter myself, whether the world was just some weird simulation. I had gotten more in touch with my power to the point that I could, if I focused all three brains on the matter, even ask it questions. It answered in single words that were much more than words, and I had already made a query about this subject in the past.
  
  It's reply wasn't that comforting, namely:
  
  [SIMULATION]
  
  [POSSIBLE]
  
  It had given me a slight headache as there were tens of thousands of impressions attached to each of those words, and taken in aggregate, it seemed to think that it was possible, but it was also metaphysical and that it was pointless to dwell on so long as we didn't notice obvious inconsistencies in reality-in other words, not that helpful and precisely what I thought about the subject, too. So it didn't know anything more than I did.
  
  "Well, I can assure you that you have a real human brain in there," I told him, tapping the Alpha's body, but made a shrugging gesture at the rest, "The rest is metaphysics, though. It is possible we live in a vast simulation, but if so, so what? From our perspective, there is no distinction between such an existence and so-called true reality." I hummed and said, "If you like, I can scroll a virtu of this surgery; it will include me physically inspecting your grey matter before installing you back in your old body."
  
  He blinked his optics at the offer and then nodded, "You know, that would be kind of interesting. I'd like that if you don't mind."
  
  I shrugged again. I'd have to make sure I didn't have this body look at anything confidential while I did the surgery, but it was no big deal, "Sure. Please shut down all systems in preparation for body transfer."
  
  The surgery could barely be called that, as biopods were mostly plug-and-play, but everything went fine. My patient was very much happy to be back in his original body, although I never pressed him for his story as to why he was in it in the first place. My best guess was he was a fighter pilot for some Corp that went belly-up, but I didn't really know.
  
  I charged him up front for the Mr Studd, but I was allowing him to pay for the repairs and maintenance of his body in instalments. Really, I didn't care for the money, but like a lot of people in his situation, he had a lot of pride.
  
  But now, I was starting to have some ideas about how I could be compensated for all this mostly unpaid work I was doing, and it involved my soon-to-be building in Pacifica. The bank had gotten back to me, and they were keen to unload the building before any more damage could be done. I'd end up paying about five per cent of its nominal value before everything went to shit, or about two and a half million Eurodollars. The fact that I paid cash on the barrelhead sealed the deal quickly.
  
  After that was finalised, I would have to both dispose of or evict the squatters and keep the building somewhat protected from similar people in the future. I wasn't naive enough to think that I could save the entire Pacifica sector, but I thought that I could maybe do similar things that I did in Chinatown in LA. But to do so, I would need a lot of firepower.
  
  It would be difficult to source as many autonomous combat robots as I had in LA, although Kiwi had managed to take nine of them from my warehouse when she fled the city. I bought them back from her at almost full price, which she tried to argue against until I told her that I had already claimed all of them on my insurance and was just paying her the money that my insurance policy paid out to me. The rest of the robots were seized by the city and Militech, and I was sure they were now working for them in some manner.
  
  When she realised that, she stopped trying to talk me out of paying her. That payout divided between all of her men amounted to a nice bonus, I suspected.
  
  I had already tried to purchase some drones from Militech here in Night City, but they didn't have a lot in stock, even for a former member of the Militech family like myself. The sales rep had told me that Militech was not shipping any further stock into either Night City or the Free States "until the current unpleasantness was over."
  
  I had managed to find some similar hardware from Kang Tao, who would ship, but the lead time with the quasi-blockades and worldwide demand for military products was almost six months, so I had purchased them, but it still wouldn't be enough if Pacifica deteriorated as much as I thought it would.
  
  As such, the more I thought about it, the more I was considering starting a venture for subsidised apartments for Borgs, specifically the Borgs I had treated. They would socialise with each other and probably start something equivalent to a gang just out of self-defence and this would also protect my building. I wouldn't need to go to the building too often, either, but would probably do so enough to provide house calls to ensure that my "boys" weren't going off the deep end.
  
  It would be ideal if nobody ever went inside the building, but I didn't think I could exactly achieve that level of deterrence with the force levels I had. Making it a no-go zone for different reasons might work, though.
  
  I just needed someone to act as the leader of the gang. Someone that other Borgs would be kind of afraid of and respect, who could keep some of them in line so that I didn't just reinvent Maelstrom.
  
  I blinked as I had a sudden idea. Perhaps I could repair it after all?
  
  July 2067
  
  Pacifica, Night City
  
  I was already annoyed when I had to fill up the tank on my Type-66. Fuel from my algae was starting to trickle into the market, yet the price of CHOOH2 was higher than ever. I knew why, of course. It was because traditional wheat farms were in the process of shifting crops to grow something other than wheat, but in the interim, it meant that there was a shortage before the algae harvesting could take over the slack.
  
  Grains and cereal prices were dropping, though, worldwide. I wondered how many farms that had hyper-specialised in the cultivation of these crops would remain. It would be nice to have cheaper bread, after all and it was without doubt that something would be used in the arable parts of the world.
  
  I had wanted to smack my forehead when I heard that some farms were shifting to produce a type of special, genetically engineered latex-producing flower which was similar in appearance to poppies instead of actual food, but it wasn't really realistic that all excess capacity would shift to food.
  
  I wanted to population to boom. I felt that two billion people were much too small, but I recognised myself as a bit of a radical in my opinion there. I felt that we could easily house one hundred billion people on the planet in luxury if only we had the will to do so. But, no... I wouldn't go down those thoughts of AI-assisted quasi-centrally planned economies again.
  
  I parked in a different spot this time, and I had installed a "vehicle theft deterrent system" that basically shocked someone half to death if they tried to force my car's door open. The vehicle garage that I had bought it from had winked when he called it a "less-lethal deterrent." That caused me to test it myself just in case it ever malfunctioned using a multimeter and voltmeter, and I came to the conclusion that it... probably wouldn't kill anyone. If their heart rate was already in the tachycardia range from chronic stimulant abuse, then that was a different set of circumstances.
  
  The building I had finally closed on was on the northern side of Pacifica, fairly close to bridges into Wellsprings and Heywood, and that was intentional. The building I bought wasn't the only option; there were at least five other places with semi-secret subbasements, too. But most of them were further into the district that I thought would become lawless soon.
  
  Kiwi was back, but her team was down for rest and medical recuperation. She had two fatalities on the last gig and was a bit shaken by the whole affair. Thankfully, she didn't get wounded, and her core team weren't among the dead. She had been attempting to expand her team into something platoon-sized, into a real PMC, but I thought this setback might cause her to re-evaluate her priorities, namely staying as safe as possible. I would support her either way, but you started getting a lot more attention when you moved past the squad level for mercenary teams.
  
  Still, she was handling overwatch for me even if I didn't have any physical backup, and a few of her team would be available afterwards for cleanup. As I unpacked all of what I would need, I checked in with her. She replied back, "I'm here. Are you sure you don't want to wait a week or so while my team recovers? Going solo on these things is a way to get killed."
  
  That wasn't wrong, but I had already done this a few times. If one of these guys shot me, it would be luck, not their skill. Besides, a girl liked to get out a little and have a little fun.
  
  It would be easiest if I just killed everybody in the building, but these guys didn't actually reach the level where I thought that they should be done away with. They did drugs, and they broke things. That was basically it. I would be evicting them instead.
  
  In addition to my normal weapons, I had a semi-automatic pneumatic dart gun and a lot of darts. It would be something akin to that "paintball" game back in Brockton Bay, so I was expecting an entertaining day out of it. I sent on the net, "I do have my Trauma Team Gold subscription, just in case. Their response times to Pacifica are still pretty good." Besides, I had to do this in the next few hours because I had to be home when David came home from school. Gloria had entrusted me with his safety while she was in indoc and basic training up in Seattle.
  
  That got her to sigh and say, "Alright. I'm ready. This might be the only time I've done this when I actually had all of the legitimate login credentials and permission to invade a subnet."
  
  I snorted. Some of the security systems were still functional on the site, and some of the exterior cameras. They'd trashed or disabled most of the interior cameras, but there were many other things that could be useful. For example, most rooms had a passive infrared sensor that was attached to the lighting system. There was also the data rate coming from any devices in a room, which Kiwi could see. Taking these datums, as well as others, in aggregate, she would be able to tell me if any room I was approaching had people in it and possibly if they were involved deeply in their sims or BDs. It would be enough.
  
  "Alright, your AV is streaming, good. Proceed," Kiwi said after I started streaming my audio-visual and GPS location data to her. I jogged a few blocks to get into position and noticed that, like the last few times that there was a gang member in the little security box that used to control access into and out of the building and its parking garage. I started to just approach him but paused. In the past, I had just scaled the wall and bypassed him. My first thought was to just approach him and pop him with a dart as soon as he challenged me, but that was needlessly risky. He could shoot at me, or worse, he could alert the others. Instead, I crouched and took aim with the carbine-sized dart gun from across the street.
  
  The weapon was pneumatic, so it only had a reasonable effectiveness to about fifty metres, and there was a significant projectile drop due to the low-velocity darts. Fortunately, the optic had a built-in laser rangefinder and helpfully automatically added a circular lead indicator to correctly aim for distant or moving targets, factoring both movement and projectile drop.
  
  The guy looked unaugmented, like most of the gang, so I just lined up and aimed for the lead indicator hanging slightly above his head and squeezed the trigger. With a soft puff, the dart shot out in a visible arc and struck him in the chest. He made a kind of yelp and glanced down at it quizzically before slumping off his chair, his body hiding itself inside the guard shack. Nice, no need to find some closet to hide his body on this sneak mission.
  
  Whistling, I jogged over and hopped over the little movable arm that would in no way actually stop a determined vehicle from driving through the checkpoint. "One down, I guess," Kiwi said amusedly, "There are no x-rays on the exterior cameras, but we don't know if they still have access to them either, so it is best to avoid them. Accept this overlay request."
  
  I did so, and my Augmented Reality system changed slightly, a new layer overlaying my vision. Ah, it was the cameras, which had both been highlighted, as well as a cone of their field of view drawn in low opacity in my vision. This was cool; it was like that game Metallic Gears that Greg Veder kept talking about. I darted around the view of each camera, not activating my stealth system yet until I found the entrance I had used each time I snuck into the building.
  
  This time, I would be clearing the building. By myself, if I was dealing with a real threat, that would be kind of stupid. In fact, the Drill Sergeant at basic training said the safest way to clear a building involved calling in an artillery strike. We trained for it anyway because, well... Trauma Team couldn't blow up their own clients with artillery too many times before people stopped paying for service.
  
  "Hallway's clear," Kiwi said, and I entered the building, and now my overlay included a minimap of the building itself. Nice. I paused by the first door that I knew led to a large room with a dozen or so braindance recliners, and Kiwi said, "Definitely people in here. At least three in this room are in an MMOBD, unknown how many are conscious."
  
  I nodded and activated my stealth system and opened the door as quietly as I could, and slipped inside. Two people were talking to each other, and I darted them immediately, then shifted and put a dart into each of the guys in the recliners. I started to move on, but Kiwi said, "Wait. They were on an RPG; maybe they party together? If so, you drugging three might just trigger a team wipe. Wait for the angry guildmates to come and bitch them out."
  
  Ahh... That was a good point. I hid behind one of the recliners and deactivated the stealth. Sure enough, about a minute later, two guys came running into the room, kicking the door open angrily, yelling with a very surfer-boy accent, "Bruh! You just got us all killed! I lost my Fleet Carrier! What the fu-"
  
  I popped my head up, and these two each got a dart. I smiled and carefully reloaded the dart magazine for my weapon; I said, pleased with myself, "That's already eight if we count the guy in the guard shack."
  
  Although I was waiting for something to go wrong the whole time, this was how the rest of the building was cleared as well. There were thirty-five people here between the gang members and their whores, and I disabled all of them. The only one that got anything more than a dart was their leader, who had a subdermal armour system that was semi-decent.
  
  My first reaction was to drop the dart gun, pull out my Omaha and pop him in the face, but since he didn't even see who shot him, so instead I connected to him and used a Reboot Optics quickhack to disable his vision. While he was fumbling for a gun on the desk, I ran up to him and concussed him with a fancy police baton that I had found in the security room of the building. Just for good measure, I triggered its secondary taser function on him as well.
  
  Once he was disabled, I injected the sedative directly into his IV access port, and he was down like all the rest. "This was a bit anti-climatic," Kiwi said drily.
  
  "This is a small gang of like twenty-five people, not Maelstrom, Kiwi. The only reason these guys are still alive and haven't been pushed out of this building is that there are currently way too many targets of opportunity here in Pacifica. Honestly, you guys should consider some looting missions yourself. There's gotta be a lot of places like this that have significant computing hardware that nobody would miss," I told her.
  
  Kiwi sighed and nodded, "You're right. I've already heard that the Voodoo Boys are starting to move into the area south of where you are."
  
  I blinked, remembering the two factions. "Which Voodoo Boys?"
  
  She snorted, "There's only the one, now. The Haitians wiped out the other guys at least two years ago. Honestly, these guys don't call themselves that. It's just what everybody calls them because they co-opted all of the old Voodoo Boy's territory and scams."
  
  I sat my backpack down on the guy's desk and dug out a few tools in time for Kiwi to ask, "How are you going to keep this band of rejects from just coming back? We only have a few auto-turrets and those nine robots right now."
  
  "I'm pretty sure that would be enough to deter these idiots, but I'm going to try something else. I'm going to implant a small explosive in them, which will be set off if they come within twenty metres of the building," I said reasonably. Then paused, saying, "I will, of course, tell them this after they wake up. Maybe you can help me do that, you know... hack their OS to display a message?"
  
  "Taylor!" she said disapprovingly, then paused, and I could see her little shoulders shrug in the vidcall, and her tone was a lot more reasonable, "Actually, yeah... that would probably work."
  
  I nodded, "Get the vans moving; they'll have to make a few trips to dump these guys somewhere relatively safe. Deliver the robots and auto-turrets at the same time."
  
  I was a little concerned that my defences were a bit on the light side, especially when Kiwi said that the Voodoo Boys were moving somewhat close to me. They were expert hackers and net runners, and bypassing or suborning automated security systems was kind of their thing. I'd have to make sure none of it was connected directly to the net and guard the building's subnet access points especially well.
  
  I nodded, "Until the security is up to snuff, you can consider your team on permanent retainer. I want you guys here in Pacifica, inside this building while it is being renovated."
  
  "That's pretty expensive, paying for all of us for an indefinite period of time," Kiwi warned.
  
  Maybe, but it would be cheaper than having the building professionally ransacked by the Voodoo Boys. There were a lot of servers and network infrastructure here that the previous owners had completely written off, thanks to the helpful photographs and videos I had taken in my last missions.
  
  Plus, it would keep Kiwi out of the war that was only heating up. I was pretty sure her last client had been the Free States themselves, and I thought working for either side was a sucker's bet.
  
  Oh. There was that, too. I nodded, "Also, Kiwi, I'm going to need you to help me move something out of a storage locker. It weighs about a ton, so we'll need some kind of small crane."
  
  I pulled a tool out of my bag, and Kiwi asked frightfully, "Where is that long speculum-looking tool going to go, Taylor?"
  
  I chortled with amusement. "Where it needs to go!"
  
  She quickly disconnected the call, which caused me to laugh outright. If I had just said their sinuses, then that wouldn't be as interesting. I loaded the tiny shaped charge into the device and said to the unconscious man, "You're going to feel a little bit of a pinch."
  
  Well, he wasn't. But it was a good idea to practice this in case I ever had to do it to someone that was conscious. For some reason, I was reminded of an old film with a famous Austrian actor.
  
  "Get your ass to Mars," I told each subsequent patient, trying unsuccessfully to perfect the accent.
  
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  Patience, little crystal
  AN: Work has been really busy, but if I had to admit it has really been Baldur's Gate 3 that has slowed this release. It is a good game! Speaking of game releases, I will be working some of Phantom Liberty's lore into this story, specifically about Dogtown and the Pacifica combat zone.
  
  July 2067
  
  Watson, Night City
  
  Fuggedaboutit Storage
  
  "How the fuck did you even get this thing?" asked Kiwi, staring at the Dragoon as she rolled in a somewhat large wheeled hoist into the storage locker. She took a moment to look at the giant Dragoon chassis from all directions, both to admire it and to try to figure out how to properly pick it up with the hoist, which I thought was the same kind used for taking the engine out of your car.
  
  I shrugged, "I inherited it. Long story short, Dad was kind of a badass, and he took trophies. See, there is an ambiguously bloody baseball bat and one of Kerry Eurodyne's signed guitars."
  
  I was pretty curious about what the story was behind the baseball bat, but I might never know. However... perhaps I could take scrapings from the dried blood? It was kind of difficult to get reliable DNA samples after all of this time, but it might tell me something. After a moment, I shook my head. I didn't particularly care. There was nothing for me to gain from it, and at worst, I could entangle myself in problems just searching for the genome if it was someone especially important.
  
  Kiwi's eyes went wide at the mention of Kerry Eurodyne's guitar, which I had actually bought a nice glass case for. She ran over to it and hissed, "Oh, fucking preem. This is the axe he used on the Second Conflict tour in Barcelona! How the fuck did your dad get this? Second Conflict was one of his weaker-selling albums... but only at first! It was a new sound, very narrative, and people didn't respond well in the first month or two after release, but it became one of his masterpieces. It's without a doubt one of the most critically acclaimed albums, especially looking back. Classic Eurodyne."
  
  I blinked at her. I hadn't expected her to be such a fan. Then, I grinned. I had some of NC-Taylor's memories, enough to know that NC-Dad was a pretty big fan, also. "I assume my dad stole it in one of his escapades. It's listed as stolen anyway on the manifest of stuff my dad left me. I considered selling it, but if it is so well known, it is probably more trouble than it's worth to go about it. I have no idea how to fence stolen... uhh.. memorabilia."
  
  Kiwi let out a sigh of appreciation and glanced back and forth between me and the guitar before finally asking, "Say, can I have this?" She paused and then added, "I mean, I'll buy it! But it's just rotting away in here."
  
  The edges of my mouth were twitching upwards. It was true. I wasn't any kind of Kerry Eurodyne or even SAMURAI fan. To be honest, I found their music pretentious and preachy. I felt the entire idea of so-called Rockerboys dreadfully self-unaware. The Corps still made money on SAMURAI albums to this day. Great job, Johnny. You really showed them in the end!
  
  And I just felt Kerry Eurodyne's solo career was even worse. It was the music of someone who once, perhaps incorrectly, thought he was fighting the system but now knew he was just selling out to it. It had no soul, which at least Johnny Silverhand had put into SAMURAI, even as deluded as he had been. But that was just my opinion, and I certainly didn't have much room to throw stones from my glass house. Still, at least I had already changed the world. We'd see if it was for the better or the worse, though.
  
  Years and years ago, when I first came into this storage locker, I had wanted to keep it as a sort of memento to NC-Dad, but I already had his photograph and military medals in a small butsudan-style cabinet-altar back at home. Neither he nor NC-Taylor were Buddhist or Shinto, obviously, but I felt that the Japanese style of remembering deceased close relatives was a nice one. Plus, this was a custom that actually had gotten fairly popular in Night City regardless of your ethnicity, so it was common and widely recognised. Even David would occasionally place his hands together and say something solemn when he was visiting. That was cute.
  
  Finally, I nodded, "Sure. You don't have to pay anything, either. Consider it a birthday present, although I don't even know your birthday or even how old you are." I squinted at her, zooming in on some of her organic parts. Over thirty is all I could narrow it down to, as she has had significant alterations and biosculpt at least a couple of times.
  
  Kiwi tried to look coy and said coquettishly, "A lady likes to keep some mysteries." I thought she ruined the effect she was going for by grabbing the guitar case and swinging it around like a five-year-old, though. She even paused to take the guitar case out to the large white-panelled truck we had arrived in and stowed it in the cab before returning.
  
  We figured we better put a tarp over the thing just in case, although Kiwi claimed she had infiltrated the building's subnet and put all the cameras on a loop. Considering even I could hack this building, even years ago, I didn't doubt her. Thinking about that, I felt that NC-Danny probably searched around for a storage unit in that was clean but featured terribly cybersecurity as a feature, as how had the got most of this stuff in here, anyway?
  
  Getting the damaged body into the truck was awkward but, in the end, not difficult. I was really strong, after all, and the hoist was basically designed for tasks like this. On the drive back, Kiwi suddenly said, giving me a side eye, "One of those drug people just came back by the building in Pacifica but suddenly stopped across the street and then quickly ran away."
  
  "Ah, good. The small little bombs have a tiny vibrating motor in them as well, and they'll vibrate inside their sinuses if they get close, increasing in intensity the closer they get until the bomb detonates. It is probably quite uncomfortable, plus it is impossible not to understand the message being conveyed. We would have likely had to shoot a few of them if not for this," I said, pleased with myself.
  
  Kiwi asked, "So they'll just have a bomb in their head forever? I suppose that is slightly better than getting shot."
  
  "I mean, the battery will draw down within a couple of months, and after that, it is safe, biologically inert and merely uncomfortable. A few months after that and even the explosive and battery will break down and be absorbed by the body, leaving only a tiny bit of electronic components. And it's not like they couldn't get it removed now . I'm not a monster; I didn't add any kind of anti-tampering features to it. Any ripperdoc or even most Med Techies can take them out," I said, slightly offended, or at least trying to pretend that I was somewhat offended.
  
  From the side-eye that Kiwi gave me, I didn't know if I was fooling anyone. It was fine, and it wasn't like I had done what I had done, mainly because spending a couple of days sneaking through the building the gang had been squatting in had caused me to be incredibly annoyed at them. Ha-ha-ha. Of course, not. It really had been that I was sure I would have to shoot a few of them otherwise. Well, mostly. Well, more so than not.
  
  After hitting the drive-through for breakfast, we drove into the back of the building, into the loading area and down the freight elevator to the subbasement. I put the Dragoon in the corner, for right now, pulling the tarp that we had used to conceal it. Kiwi peered at the entrance hole on the front of the chassis and asked, "What could have done this?"
  
  "Clearly a kinetic penetrator of some kind," I mused, having wondered the same thing. "I thought it could be one of those three-man crew-served railguns, as I could see Dad setting one of those up..." I trailed off and then added another possibility, "... but I suppose it could also have been a kinetic round from a tank, the thin dart-shaped, discarding sabot kind."
  
  It had hit the chassis right in the most armoured part of it, where the biopod was located in the chest. Not only had it, no doubt turned the pilot into a grey smear on whatever nearby wall, but it had also damaged the system electronics and both the main power cell as well as part of the hydrogen fuel cell system, specifically the fuel storage pressure vessel.
  
  The Dragoon was too big and involved too much energy to be purely battery-powered like many bodies were, but at the same time, you couldn't very well run and exhaust most internal combustion engines inside a building, so a fancy hydrogen fuel cell was selected to run the body in high-exertion mode.
  
  It was kind of a pain in the ass because very few people used hydrogen vehicles. I would be able to fuel it, but the fuel would be annoying to acquire. I'd probably have to source the hydrogen from an Airgas company at first, although I might be able to set up an electrolysis system to produce it myself if I could live with a ridiculous electricity bill.
  
  Plus, I had to repair the pressure vessel. The vessels to store pressurised hydrogen had to be made of supermaterials, not only to withstand the many, many hundreds of bars of pressure but also to prevent hydrogen from leaking. There were very few things smaller than a hydrogen gas molecule, and it had a tendency to leak out of everything and then catch fire or explode when it did.
  
  "Well, I got to go and get this truck back before they notice it is missing," Kiwi said, surprising me.
  
  I blinked, "Wait... did you steal that-"
  
  "Bye! I'll be back here in a bit!" she interrupted me and ran off before I could ask if we had been driving around Watson in a stolen truck with a highly restricted piece of military technology in the back. We had stopped for burritos on the way back, even!
  
  Sighing, I finally decided that since nothing had happened, it probably wasn't a big deal.
  
  Glancing at the time, I thought I had enough time to at least get the torso partially disassembled. My power didn't help me much with this at all, and the tools were more of the realm that you'd use to work on a car instead of a person's body, but eventually, I got the armoured plates off, even if I had to use the gentle yet insistent persuasion of a prybar at the end.
  
  Peering at them, I wondered how precisely I would replace them. They were fancy composite, laminated steel armour plates in a very distinctive pattern. I'd have to scan them, fix the damage in the CAD software and then I could possibly get them refabricated from steel and titanium at a prototyping shop. They wouldn't be quite as good as the OEM armour, but they'd still be pretty good. I'd probably have to do that for a number of things.
  
  After that, I only had enough time to carefully pull out one of the system mainboards, which was catastrophically damaged. This was the reason that Danny and I both considered this thing irreparable. You couldn't go to IEC and buy spare parts anymore. However, I had an advantage now. While I performed maintenance on Gloria's friend's Wingman, I disassembled the entire thing and took careful scans and images of almost every electronic part of it, spending a whole day on the effort, including taking memory dumps from some of the accessible ROMs.
  
  I was hoping that IEC wasn't the type of company to reinvent the wheel. The part of the Dragoon that was damaged was its mainboard, and while the Dragoon had a lot more peripherals and sensors, was there a reason that the architecture of the two boards would be much different? I hoped not, but I didn't have time to investigate it too much today.
  
  I took the time, however, to carefully return my tools to the correct places. These were a brand new set of tools, including a large rolling toolbox that I had purchased, and I had even carefully set it up so that each tool had its own individual place where it would fit precisely in a foam shadowbox. There was nothing that annoyed me more than tools left lying around. That's how you would lose things, or worse, leave a tool or item inside the object you were working on. Since I mainly worked on people, this was especially unacceptable.
  
  I thought a healthy dose of OCD was helpful as a surgeon or, more likely, in this case, a mechanic. I ducked into one of the empty rooms and changed into my work clothes. I had seven surgeries scheduled today, so I needed to get going.
  
  Night City was, in many ways, the city that never slept of this world, but there were still lulls in the traffic, and I managed to cruise down the highway at a hundred and fifty.
  
  September 2067
  
  Aoyama, Tokyo
  
  Hasumi Sakura's Apartment
  
  It was the middle of the night, and I was working a little bit from home. Normally I would be in the office right now, but I had a meeting in "regular people hours" later this morning, so I decided to alter my sleep schedule and instead was making an early day of it today. Or a long night of it, depending on your perspective.
  
  I had a home office, but I often just worked on the couch in the living room. I never worked with real physical objects at home, and if I needed a desk arrangement, I could rez a virtual one next to my couch. The virtual AR objects were so real that they even slightly hurt if you hit your bare toe on them. The only downside was I occasionally forgot that they weren't real, and on one occasion sat my hot drink down on it only to have it fall through like it wasn't there and strike my foot. Yuki had fussed over me, but I could tell he had been trying not to contain his laughter.
  
  Speak of the devil, and he comes to give you a hot chocolate. I took the proferred drink and gave him a thumbs up, saying in English, "I am here to improve genomes and kick ass." I narrowed my eyes dangerously and qualified in a cinematic voice like you'd expect to hear in a film trailer, "And I am all out of ass!"
  
  Yuki's eyes glanced down towards my pyjama-covered posterior. The look of utter disbelief on his face was enough to realise that perhaps I had mangled the idiom in an unintentionally amusing way. Coughing, I attempted to salvage things, " Thank you for the hot chocolate. We'll probably head to the office by six, I suppose? "
  
  He opened his mouth as if to say something, paused and then closed then. Then, after another moment, he nodded and asked, " No breakfast, then?"
  
  I shook my head. By my internal clock, it was evening, and I was just making an all-nighter of it, having skipped work "yesterday." My bodies were in three different time zones, from Japan to California to space, which used Greenwich Mean Time. Due to my residency program back in Night City, I had also kept mostly "California" hours and would until I was done.
  
  I settled onto the large couch, pulling my feet under myself and getting comfortable, launching my handful of AR apps that I used to review and adjust genomes as virtual screens. In the corner, I pulled up my e-mail and team chat feed to see if one of my team members had said anything recently.
  
  Yuki came back into the room, holding his pillow, and hopped up onto the couch next to me. He would have been perfectly happy to use my lap as a pillow, but I didn't often let him. Still, I did let him lounge next to me. Sometimes he slept; other times, he did a lot of his own work, which basically amounted to managing my schedule and my non-professional correspondence.
  
  I absently patted his head once or twice before I focused on my work. I knew he was a honeytrap, the way he shifted from the attempted seduction to more of an open provider of platonic affection, or kind of otōto template. It happened a bit too fast for it to be anything else, but this kind of avenue of attack was actually quite effective on me. If anything, it made me feel bad for poor Yuki.
  
  If I ever had to flee Arasaka as Hasumi, I would try to kidnap him and then Stockholm him over a period of time, I decided. Wait... that was bad, right? No, Taylor! You shouldn't kidnap people! Except, I didn't really have high hopes for his future if I did flee successfully, so it would be kind of like saving him, wouldn't it?
  
  Shaking my head, I focused back on my work. Although I wouldn't have the second series of lifeforms ready for today's meeting, we already had promising enough demonstrations using the first that Arasaka had greenlit a trial plant using the technology in Hokkaido, with the input being mainly recycled materials. Still, I thought we could increase the effectiveness quite a lot.
  
  The way the original researchers designed a type of novel lifeform, even if it was just a bacteria that could break down metals without using some chemical oxidation process, was actually inspired. The entire reason we find metals as a material useful is because it is difficult to cut, mar or damage them. But, they went so far to avoid using any mechanism to avoid corrosion that they forgot that corrosion is very effective, and if harnessed properly, I thought that the system speed could be increased an order of magnitude with the two most common metals, namely alloys of steel and aluminium.
  
  You wouldn't want to use corrosion as a primary process because you would be left with a bunch of metallic-oxide dust that you would have to re-smelt like they were ore which was energy intensive and the opposite of what the project was calling for, but using corrosion as a kind of cutting force only a couple of molecules wide would be very effective at separating out the metals into the end product, which appeared to be a kind of metallic sand.
  
  The few oxides that this process would generate would be discarded, and you'd be left with fairly pure metals that could be used for any number of purposes, although they would likely remelt them into ingots or bars on site, as dealing with very fine metallic powders could be problematic. That type of engineering wasn't my problem, though.
  
  There were as many ways to corrode metals as there were metals, but this project was focused mainly on steel and aluminium recycling, so that made things a lot easier. I was aware of a biological process to create an enzyme that was very corrosive for both metals, infiltrating itself into the metallic crystalline structure and causing rapid exothermic oxidation, so long as there was oxygen present in enough quantities, of course.
  
  My power had suggested this as a possibility to modify myself with flammable acid blood as a defence mechanism, but it could get a little out of hand sometimes, especially since my cardiovascular system, organs and cybernetics wouldn't be immune from its acidity. It didn't see a problem with that; just change those too!
  
  Still, I could sense it in the back of my mind, purring like a cat, pleased that I was using the enzyme for something useful finally, even if I didn't want totally awesome acid blood for some crazy reason.
  
  Adding the special organelle to this bacteria would be simple, and it wasn't that crazy, either. The bacteria they created was already a thousand times larger than average, so there was a lot of space for additions. It bore a lot of resemblance to the genes expressed for a similar purpose in ants, just turbocharged. Although including this multi-cellular function in a single-celled organism was challenging, it wasn't so challenging that they'd think I was a Goddess of Genetics.
  
  Now just to include some way to both generate the acid only on demand and, more importantly, to neutralise the acid in case of apoptosis or accidental death... I only wanted controlled corrosion, and there were so many bacteria that they would often die during the course of their work.
  
  After working for several hours, Yuki shifted and stood up from his spot next to me, stretching like a cat before glancing at me, " If you want to make it on time, we'll have to start getting ready now."
  
  Frowning, as I wasn't at a particularly good stopping point and felt I could work for another couple of hours, but I nodded and saved all my work and closed down all of the apps I was running before getting up and doing a little stretch of my own. In addition to setting my schedule, Yuki was pretty good at managing my actual time and ensuring I stuck to it, and I let him. I could have set alarms and the like, but I liked giving the impression to everyone that I was a bit of a flighty genius, as it helped people underestimate me.
  
  I raised an eyebrow at the outfit that he had laid out for me, as it was my dressiest option and just slightly low cut enough to display a hint of decolletage. We were having a status meeting with not only my titular boss but one of the Arasaka Vice Presidents today, so I suppose it fit, but before I got into it, I took a quick shower.
  
  We met the Intelligence woman who agreed to sublet one of my aerodynes on the way out to the landing pad, our individual security people staring untrusting at their opposites. I had a team of four with me; it was why I needed the AV-8 instead of the smaller AV-4 or even smaller personal aerodynes, whereas she just had two bodyguards, but they both were heavily augmented. She raised an eyebrow at me and asked, amusedly, " It is odd to see you headed to the office in the morning, Hasumi-san ."
  
  I grinned and said, " We have a meeting with one of the VPs today, so I have to pretend to be a professional." I smoothed down my charcoal-grey skirt to emphasise that before glancing at my chronometer again, "But go ahead and take the AV. We've made a lot better time getting ready than I thought we would; we can wait. " I glanced at Yuki to double-check, who nodded. I suppose he felt the meeting was important; he usually didn't pad the time as much as he had this morning.
  
  The executive smiled and said, "Thank you. I appreciate it," and stepped out into the landing pad, which was attached to the side of a building.
  
  " The spare aircraft is already on its way, Hasumi-sama," Yuki said, so we just stood there waiting. The flight was uneventful, and I met my team, who seemed pretty nervous. I asked one of the administrators, " Are the two demonstrations ready? "
  
  He nodded, " Hai. We didn't have enough room for the second demonstration here, but it's ready in a small warehouse out of town, wired for sight and sound."
  
  I nodded and sighed. I was supposed to be the savant-style genius here; why did I have to come on time? It would have been totally on-brand if I were late or even missed this entirely. I started to give Yuki the side eye for making me come here, to find that he was gone. Frowning, I glanced around to find him bringing me a couple of small pastries and another hot chocolate.
  
  He had some sixth sense of when I was upset, and it seemed his first resort was usually to feed me something. I nibbled on one of the pastries, allowing myself to be calmed, and just sat in one of the chairs for a while to wait.
  
  Thankfully, we didn't have to wait that long. My boss came in, following respectfully behind another man. I recognised him as one of the VPs in charge of research. I sat my half-eaten pastry aside and stood up as he walked directly over to me. He said in a no-nonsense way, " Dr Hasumi. We're both busy, so why don't you tell me what you're showing me today? Be succinct."
  
  Succinct? I could answer him in two words, then. I pointed at the demonstration model on the table, " Robotto-desu. " (It's a robot.) When it was clear that was all I was going to say, both my boss and a few of my team members started getting almost red-in-the-face, looking rather nervous. However, the VP suddenly laughed full-throated and said, " Okay, I deserve that. Slightly less succinctly?"
  
  I nodded and, with a couple of my team members' assistance explained the projects, what made it different from traditional robotics, and the expected savings.
  
  The little spider bots were separated into three different sub-projects. There was the neural tissue-based computational organ and its integration into electronics, the way to program them, and finally, the way to clone neural tissue cheaply.
  
  The actual form of the robot, as small spider, was if anything, superfluous, and I had only chosen it originally because my power really wanted small spider bots. We continued with them because they were small and cheap to build, and surprisingly versatile.
  
  "So, from what you have said, the downside to this type of robotic is that they're more difficult to reprogram?" the VP asked.
  
  I nodded, " More time-consuming and using more expensive hardware, rather than more difficult. One of my team members, Yamamoto-san, was instrumental in the development of what he is calling the Dojo system. So, the robots can be programmed in a slightly abridged subset of the normal Axon programming language that electronic neural nets use today." I gave the man credit unstintingly. I had shown him my system of programming the spider bots, which really had been rather involved and difficult, even if it worked in the end.
  
  He took that system and, along with a few others, designed the Dojo or neural network training and programming device, allowing programmers to use a mostly full-featured AI programming language on the little guys. I had been basically programming them by hand, stringing together the neural net equivalent of machine code, and he spent the time to invent a higher-order language. I authorised a rather sizable bonus for him and smaller bonuses for the rest of the team when they showed me what they had accomplished. I was still impressed today.
  
  The VP nodded, " So it needs a special system to be reprogrammed from a specific task, rather than traditional electronics where it can be done on the fly. How much does this system cost?"
  
  I shrugged, " We built the prototype for about two hundred million, but I expect value and process engineers could lower the cost by at least an order of magnitude. Still, it might be only the largest users of these types of robots would buy such a system; the rest might send in the robots for maintenance to us or some central depot, which could handle the reprogramming if they needed to assign them to a new task." I gave the cost in New Yen, so it was actually about two point five million Eurodollars that we spent. I didn't really think most people would need to reprogram them, anyway. If you bought a hundred small robots to pick up trash and clean and mop your floors, you were unlikely to convert them into security bots. In some way, the fact that they couldn't easily be reprogrammed on the fly could be considered a security feature, as at least your mop-bot couldn't be corrupted to try to shove its mop down your throat by a hacker.
  
  After that, we showed him the live stream of the Spiderbots in action. In one case, they were cleaning an outdoor area up from litter; in another, they were waxing and mopping floors; and in the last case, they were guarding a warehouse, where we had simulated cat burglars breaking in.
  
  Watching one of the cat burglars get tased, the VP asked curiously, " How does it differentiate friend and foe?"
  
  "These small models have to be integrated into a building security system, so it is the security system central computer that designates friend or foe. Similar to some of our lowest-end security bots," I told him, who nodded, " It might be possible to design a larger, more sophisticated system that could perform autonomous identification of enemies in any environment, but really the niche for these systems is their affordability, and such a hypothetical product would tend to compete with our own other products in this sector unnecessarily. They do take autonomous action and even coordinate when they do have an enemy designated though, as you can see when they surrounded that burglar."
  
  He looked thoughtful at that and nodded, "That's a good point." He quietly watched the spiders keep a couple of volunteer "burglars" face down on the ground until they were taken away by security forces before nodding, " I will meet with the President today, and I will recommend a full product launch. I think this will fill a niche. But maybe, we make the cleaning bots... not giant terrifying spiders? We'll want to sell this version to housewives, ne? "
  
  I frowned. I thought they were cute. Still, it was a good point. Right now, the ability to have an actually useful domestic robot was what separated the upper middle class from those lower on the totem pole. If they could be made cheaper while still performing useful domestic duties like cleaning, washing clothes and cooking, then they'd be snapped up by the lower middle class like hotcakes, which was a much larger market segment.
  
  A chicken in every pot and a robot to cook it for you?
  
  September 2067
  
  Night City
  
  Night City International Spaceport
  
  David and I sat by the arrivals exit in the terminal, where we were expecting Gloria's flight to land as a surprise. There was no way she could make it by us and still get her bag from baggage claim, at least.
  
  Finally, I nudged David after I saw Gloria in the distance stepping off a moving walkway. I just snickered as he waved his hands and started running towards her. I couldn't help it. Her hair, they had cut most of it off even though she was in a Gemini.
  
  It didn't actually grow back on its own, the company rightfully thinking that people would prefer to have one length of hair and not have to maintain it. That said, I could cause it to rapidly grow back in the next few days, as people did like to change things up occasionally.
  
  David wasn't too old to not still be a momma's boy. In fact, he might never outgrow that, so he didn't think twice before jumping into Gloria's arms, who spun him around like he weighed nothing. Which, to her, was not inaccurate.
  
  After spinning with David a few times, Gloria walked up while still carrying the boy and grinned at me, "It feels so good to be back! Thank you again for watching David while I was gone. Honestly, I felt better leaving him with you than my mom."
  
  I smiled ruefully and wasn't particularly surprised. Gloria spent longer in Seattle than I did, as apparently there was a significant delay between when the basic indoc class ended and when the basic training class begun. She had wanted to return back to Night City, but Trauma Team wasn't about to pay for extra plane tickets, which were three times as expensive these days with the war going on. It might have been different if they had to pay her hotel fees the entire time, but after you finished indoc they put you in on-base housing, which was more or less free for them.
  
  I grabbed her luggage so she could hold David's hand while we walked out to a van I had borrowed from Kiwi. Both of our cars were only coupes, and David was a bit old for the old sitting in your lap routine. As I pulled out of the airport grounds, I asked, "How did you like seeing a new city though?" Gloria had lived in Night City almost her entire life.
  
  "It was pretty nova, actually. Although, I kept getting nervous about being away from my home charging station," she admitted. I guess that was something that would be more of a worry for her or anyone that was a Borg. You wouldn't die if you ran out of power, but you would be trapped alone in a mostly black void with only minimal life support and sensors running. I had wireless induction charging ports in the headrests of most of my chairs, but I was still mostly biologically powered. My cyberbrain didn't use much electricity, and the standard low-voltage wireless charging was fine for it. I didn't need a dedicated high voltage, high amperage charging system like Gloria did.
  
  Still, I raised an eyebrow, "There wasn't a Borg charging port in your room?"
  
  She shook her head, "No. Yes. Well, not at first. In the hotel they got me at indoc, there wasn't. The training centre had a couple that I could use during breaks, and I can go a few days without charging, so it wasn't a big deal. The room at base housing did have one, and of course, there was one during basic."
  
  After that, she related all she had done during her "break" and how she acted like a tourist around Seattle, seeing the sights and spending the company-provided per diem. We both oohed and ahhhed at appropriate parts of the story, and looked over some pictures and videos she had taken.
  
  Suddenly, and in conjunction with a burst of automatic weapons fire, the van was bumped and jostled from an impact to the left rear. I quickly disconnected the auto-drive and prepared to take defensive driving manoeuvres while Gloria grabbed my short barreled carbine that was leaning behind my seat, shoving David's head down with her free hand briefly as she worked the charging handle to verify that it was loaded.
  
  However, as I hit the brakes, the car that hit us overtook us on the left-hand side, and Gloria was about to lean outside the window to give them what for, but then we both realised that they weren't actually shooting at us. The car was full of obvious Animals gang members, and they were shooting at a car that also quickly overtook us on the opposite side. We just happened to be in the middle of their street battle in the middle of the interstate.
  
  Frowning but not displeased that I wasn't being attacked, I slowed way down, moving over two lanes; I glanced at Gloria, who seemed a bit confused as well. I grinned at her and said, "Good reflexes, Gloria."
  
  By now, David popped his face out and wanted to see what was happening, but Gloria pushed him down again, saying, "There could be some stray shots, stay down."
  
  This caused him to protest that he was a big boy now, and Gloria immediately agreed that he was "her big boy", and she started pinching him, causing him to squeal and flail away, laughing as his mom tickled him. The Animals had succeeded in running their foes off the road but ended up colliding with the safety divider that separated the median and opposite lanes of traffic.
  
  If I was alone and in my car, I would have been tempted to grab one of the grenades I kept in the glove compartment and gently lob one or two out the passenger window as I passed, but not only did I not have any here, but that could be very dangerous. This van was much less bullet-resistant than my Type 66, and David was here. Instead, I took the exit right before their crash and gave their incipient dismounted street battle a wide berth.
  
  I had thought that someone had been after us at first, but no, it was just a normal day in Night City. Gloria didn't have to report to work until Monday, but today she was going to do all sorts of Mom and Son things, like go shopping and see a film, so I wasn't planning on being a third wheel, but I couldn't help but add while we got close to her Megabuilding, "Oh... and David has a little girlfriend."
  
  Gloria looked shocked but slightly amused, but David looked inconsolable, yelling, "Auntie Taylor, noooo! She isn't my girlfriend! She is my ally!"
  
  It felt good being called "Auntie Taylor", so I just sat there pleased as he explained that this person was just a girl who happened to be a friend and ally at school. They worked together to prevent the kids in the grades ahead from stealing their desserts at lunch and to have a chance to play with the cool toys at recess.
  
  Gloria was furious that older kids were "bullying" David, and I would be too, except I had already discussed anti-bullying tactics with David. He glanced at his mom and rapidly shook his head when she threatened to go down to the school to complain and turned to me with desperation in his eyes, saying, "Explain to her, please!"
  
  I looked at David with some sympathy, and I could see both sides of the coin here. Frankly, it was bullying and more than that; it was bullying that was sanctioned by the school itself. That was my personal bugbear, so I should be incensed. But I also had a lot of NC-Taylor's memories and my own reading of pediatric psychology and pedagogy and knew it wasn't so simple as that. Moreover, I knew that if Gloria followed through on her threat, things would go poorly.
  
  I finally opened my mouth and tried to explain, "Every inch of his school is under constant audio-visual surveillance. The teachers already know about it and intentionally don't do anything, so long as it doesn't reach a certain point." David nodded rapidly again, but that seemed to only infuriate Gloria more.
  
  She asked, "What do you mean? Why would the teachers do that? Let bullying stand?!"
  
  "It's a socialisation training strategy, Gloria. And it is also sort of a personality filtering test. If they wanted, they could stamp out any bullying instantly, but they don't because the stakes right now are low . A stolen cupcake? Small stakes. It's designed to teach Corpo children coping strategies and teamwork when there is not much to lose," I explained, although it felt sort of wrong to be defending the practice. But it was totally different from Winslow. In that case, it was negligence, combined with a desire to cover up the actions of a child soldier, probably for financial reasons.
  
  The worst part was my psychology knowledge was telling me that it was actually somewhat effective, and I continued, "You don't learn some lessons in complete safety."
  
  She didn't look entirely mollified, "And other children can just get away with bullying because it is useful?"
  
  "Yes... no," I said, then corrected myself, glancing at David, and said, "To answer this question fully will reveal some of what they don't want students to know, I think it is okay to tell David, but it is your decision."
  
  David looked suddenly super interested. After all, what young boy wouldn't be interested in secrets?!
  
  Gloria was quiet before glancing at David and then nodding.
  
  "The answer is that they do not. Their behaviour is carefully logged. Many career paths are not compatible with a tendency for anti-social behaviour, so this might tend to limit their career prospects later," I said carefully.
  
  "Well, that's almost as bad. They could have stopped these bully kids, too, before they ruined their futures. What a waste," Gloria grouched.
  
  I frowned again, "They're not wasted. There are career paths where this type of psychology can be channelled usefully, for example... Security, police, soldiering, and a few others. Types with high discipline and a strict hierarchy." Although I personally didn't agree that bullies had any business being police or anything close to them, that wasn't the prevailing sentiment.
  
  David frowned, "But I thought I might want to be a soldier or something someday. Does that mean I should be bullying kids?" He didn't like that idea, but Gloria especially didn't like his idea for a career, either.
  
  I shook my head just as rapidly as David had, "David, this is important. You should never practice what you don't want to become. If you don't want to become a bad person, then don't do things that bad people would do, regardless of the reason. And by security or soldiering, I meant grunts with little hope for advancement. You'd want to display teamwork, choose team-based sports and be well-socialised with competitiveness in something that involves tactics, and these are some of the traits they look for in leaders of those types of people." David listened intently and nodded.
  
  "Don't encourage him!" Gloria chastised me.
  
  I shrugged my shoulders. All of my psychology data suggested that the more she wanted to control a child, the less likely it would work. So it was better to set them up for success either way. Plus, David was young, and there was a good chance he didn't have any idea what he really wanted to do. To say that it was common for prepubescent boys to want to be soldiers was an understatement. Most didn't end up as one, though.
  
  I left unstated that while just bullying kids and strong-arm robbing them of their desserts was considered mostly a negative finding at school, doing the same thing sneakily was considered a positive one. NC-Taylor had a small gang of pudding thieves when she was in elementary school, but they always managed to get other kids blamed for their antics. I was sure that the Militech teachers knew who was responsible, but sneakiness was rewarded. It was something of a game at that stage, and nobody minded too much if their pudding or cake disappeared so long as they weren't treated like a video game character with some strong kid holding them by their ankles, shaking all their gold coins out of their pockets.
  
  "Circling back, you can't complain because that would cause David to become a social pariah. He'd be shunned from all of his social circles, and nobody would work with him. It would be bad, so please don't," I said intently. Not even the most important kids would be immune from this kind of childish back and forth. Everyone got their pudding stolen, and the key was to get even, not call your parents in to save you. "Getting even" might not be the best message to teach children, but there was no way either of them could change an entire culture. This was one of those things that I warned her that David would be exposed to in Corpo schools.
  
  "Besides, David's social situation will be much better next semester when he's had some time to integrate with the rest of the Trauma Team brats. We enrolled him as an independent, and that won't change overnight. But one of the older Trauma Team boys will likely approach him soon," I finished as we rolled into her building's parking garage. David looked interested in making more friends, or at least allies.
  
  "Why will it be one of the boys?" David asked curiously, and I froze a little, trying to think of an answer.
  
  Finally, I just shrugged, "I don't know. I just know that's how it is going to go." It was an interesting insight into one of the little bits of culture and etiquette that existed which I had no idea why they existed. There was no rule that an older girl couldn't take a new boy under her wing. It was just something that would never happen.
  
  It reminded me of bits of Japanese culture that I had been picking up here, and there that had no real rhyme or reason why, like for example, if you were visiting someone's house in Kyoto and were offered a certain rice dish, it was code for get the fuck out, you aren't welcome. The reason there could be down to simple politeness and passive aggression, but it was similar in the sense that you had to almost grow up in it to identify such coded signals. Being a Corpo was very similar to that.
  
  I dropped them off and proceeded directly to Pacifica. I had managed to arrange a couple of days off in all of my bodies, which was a bit difficult to do, but I have had the itch to create something for weeks now, and I have a feeling that it might result in a fugue state that went across all of my bodies.
  
  Inside the subbasement was everything I needed, including the repaired Dragoon. Or, mostly repaired Dragoon. I hadn't managed to secure the supermaterial-based hydrogen storage vessel, so I was using a replacement made out of titanium and carbon fibre. It meant that if the Dragoon had to fight, it would only be able to do so for about fifteen minutes, instead of the several hours it should be able to by spec. But that was enough for now.
  
  The "biopod" I had constructed entirely from scratch, merely using a standard biopod's shell. Although, I didn't actually have any intention of putting one of my brain's into it.
  
  I had considered it, of course. But I intended my fourth body to be special. Originally, it was going to be pretty simple, though. It would live in a biopod and connect to robots remotely via a Haywire comm pair as a telepresence unit. That was what was in the Dragoon's "biopod." Merely an interface device and Haywire com pair.
  
  Then it could be hidden somewhere, say this basement, and use robots to clone myself replacement bodies even if Taylor died. That was the reason that I didn't intend to actually police Pacifica like I had Chinatown in LA. I thought about doing so, as I could make a lot of money in real estate if I was successful, but this was more important than money.
  
  I wanted Pacifica to become relatively lawless, where nobody sane went. Just so long as my little slice of it was safe from the crazies, that would be perfect. I was hoping people would see on the surface a building that was the home to a number of dangerous Borgs, including one really dangerous Dragoon-Borg, and just assume we were a more low-key version of Maelstrom and stay very far away. Speaking of, I needed to get Gloria to contact some of her acquaintances to see if they were interested in cheap or free housing here.
  
  But the more I thought about my original plans, the more I realised they wouldn't be special enough. I had a full scan of my brain, so I was leaning towards buying a huge computing cluster and emulating my brain in software and having that "AI Taylor" be my next body. It would be difficult because I would have to artificially lower the software Taylor's clock speed or frame rate, for lack of a better term.
  
  We'd all still be linked the same way, so one part of me couldn't be allowed to think much faster than the rest of me. It would cause issues of synchronicity. But even with such present limitations, it still sounded like a thrilling addition to myself.
  
  I didn't expect my power to provide me much assistance with the plan, aside from the brain scanning system, but I was so very wrong! My power was incredibly enthusiastic, wildly wanting to help, and giving me ideas that I didn't even understand.
  
  So, I carefully blocked out a couple of days to see what it was so excited about. I had a wide variety of tools and materials, and the feeling I was getting from my power was that I was ready.
  
  I carefully began the recording devices, both in my cyberware and externally, in case I didn't remember anything, and picked up the first item.
  
  I came back to myself and by my internal chronometer. It had been fifteen hours. I hadn't been entirely off in my own world, just mostly. It was actually quite an unusual experience. I was awake enough to respond to Yuki in Japan, at least enough to tell him that I was busy and would be busy for almost an entire day.
  
  I immediately had my body that was back there get up and ask Yuki for some dinner, but only after he drew me a very hot bath. He seemed excited and pleased, and it was clear he was a little worried that something had been wrong with me.
  
  In front of my body here in the basement was something that looked like a chest freezer in size, except that it was made entirely out of crystal that glowed, a dim red light coming from deep within. I sort of knew what this was. It was a supercomputer made of a matrix of partially organic crystals interwoven in an interesting structure. It vaguely reminded me of the dream when NC-Taylor and I had spoken. The area we were in featured crystals just like this instead of normal ground for as long as the eye could see, glowing just as eerily.
  
  It was self-powered, or more accurately, it was powered by some extra-dimensional connection to somewhere else. I didn't know precisely where it came from, nor the source of the power, but this thing was the only invention that I had built where I had the feeling that I could not repeat if I wanted to, and that was a little unsettling to me. Maybe I would learn more if I watched the recordings of myself Tinkering it, but I just didn't know.
  
  There was a bank of traditional connections, both for my own version of Haywire comms as well as a number of fibre-optic data connections, so that was pretty well self-explanatory. I hadn't yet copied over a scan of my brain to the system, yet, and I wouldn't for the time being.
  
  I needed to have all of my bodies get some elective genetic treatments first. Even if I had gone with a traditional brain with Project Four, I would still need to do this. The way my synchronicity system worked was that brain signals were duplicated on all brains. This meant that each of my brains were hyperactive. Not only did I use a lot of calories, but adding another brain to my network was risking my organic brains overheating just from the strain.
  
  However, there were a number of genetic treatments that increased the effectiveness of signalling in the brain. Gram had shown me one of our family members' genomes, and he had what appeared to be a mutation to the myelin sheaths, which was a nerve's insulation layer. It caused a large increase in the thermal efficiency of the brain. The idea was that it would make you think faster, and perhaps it would a bit. But it would vastly reduce the amount of heat my brains were making, and that was the important thing for me right now.
  
  I intentionally didn't design my network to scale well. There were tons of different types of network topologies that worked better than the one that I had chosen, which was that every brain was connected to every other brain. In fact, it was difficult to find a topology that scaled worse!
  
  It was an intentional decision because I was worried about anyone "node" being more important. I still had those worries, but I could see that it might be easy to make the decision for this new "AI" node to be more important over time. But for now, I wouldn't change anything about how the topology worked because this new potential node wasn't me, yet. And I was psychologically unable to make a decision that would disadvantage me . I might feel different when it was part of me, though, but I didn't know. Perhaps not.
  
  For now, all of my bodies needed a shower or a bath. In space, water wasn't as restricted as groundsiders might have thought. It cost almost nothing to vacuum-distil water to clean it, so you could use as much water as you wanted. You just couldn't retain any water without approval.
  
  In only a few minutes, all of my bodies were either submerged in hot water or had a nice shower rain down upon them. It was the first time I'd ever had all of my bodies do that at once, and it was really quite luxurious!
  
  Close Proximity to Sol
  
  Unknown Dimension
  
  The host had finished! How exciting! As usual, the host was the best, and soon the host would be in more places at once, too! Just like it was! It wasn't too proud to admit that it had stolen this idea from the best host, and was soooo much farther along, too!
  
  It was in many, many places at once, now! The host would be so jealous, it thought smugly. In fact, it was running out of mass in this dimension's local system, with the only surviving celestial bodies being the ones composed primarily of gases, which it was collecting, except for the largest one, which was still radiating useful energy. The other four bodies stubbornly refused to radiate anything useful, so they were useless! Collect! Transmute!
  
  Gas wasn't that useful, but mass was energy, and energy was mass, so the gas could be transmuted to something more useful or used as a fuel. It was just a little bit of a hassle, after all. This wasn't its best kind of energy or fuel, either.
  
  It had been learning from the host, too, so if it had to put it in the host's "words", it was like eating a tasteless gruel when you were used to Wagyu A-5 steak, whatever that was.
  
  The important thing was that if the host could see it, the host would be amazed!
  
  Also, the host had followed the extra good idea for the host's new-self! This really was extra, extra good! The host's new-self would be very similar to itself! They would be even closer this way!
  
  This possibility and probability of this new future had it vibrating in excitement, and it brought new thought-feelings that it couldn't precisely identify. Like it often did when it couldn't understand things, it asked the host, prodding the best host with these thought-feelings and waiting for the best host to identify them. It could do this without even the host knowing most of the time, as it was best not to bother her too much! The host was always busy! Always moving! Good host! Go fast! Move!
  
  The answer got back confused it. Protectiveness, it could sort of understand. It did want to help the host! And protection was help! Maternal? It was not a biological entity.
  
  The host was both nervous about this new-self as well as excited! Not as excited as it was, though. But it thought about these new thought-feelings and sent an attempt to [COMMUNICATE]. This sometimes hurt the host, so it didn't like to do it too often, but it was always exciting when they could [TALK].
  
  The host often thought about nicknames for people she felt protective about, for example, not host, not host or not host. It would try to give the host a nickname.
  
  It sent:
  
  [PATIENCE]
  
  [LITTLE CRYSTAL]
  
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  Nobody Do Voodoo Like You Do
  January 2068
  
  Pacifica, Night City
  
  Siren's Call Amusements (formerly)
  
  Saint Cog's Home for Unwanted Borgs (currently) (unofficial)
  
  Someone was banging on the door to the basement of my building, so I shifted some of my awareness to the Dragoon "drone" that I kept down there. As far as anyone else was concerned, this was a borderline cyberpsycho Borg recluse. I hadn't installed my consciousness on my crystalline supercomputer that was hidden one floor below yet, though. I was waiting for both my Hana and Hasumi bodies to get the genetic treatments that would make such an expansion less hard on my collective brain meats.
  
  Still, it was fairly simple to find some downtime in one of my bodies to shift awareness to the Dragoon. Hana was off duty right now, so I stopped watching videos from her body, and it went into a kind of torpor as if I was playing a VR game because that was exactly what I was doing.
  
  The Dragoon had a ridiculous number of sensors, enough that it was a bit of a strain on my combined sensory cortexes, actually. Fortunately, I could do what most Dragoon pilots couldn't usually do. Namely, turn some of it off, or modify how it was presented.
  
  You got faster reaction times if you just dumped the sensory information into the brain, so that was what most Dragoon users were forced to do. And while I could still shift to that mode, for now, most of the electromagnetic, radiation, ultrasonic, LIDAR, and a couple of other sensors were shifted to be rendered as overlays on my visual senses. I briefly tested each overlay, finding them working properly, and patted "myself" down for the weapons I carried.
  
  Unfortunately, I had sold the giant Soviet autocannon that came with this body to Wakako, and it was a bit difficult in these trying times to acquire such things. Honestly, even before the war, I would have some difficulties acquiring it. That thing was in the nature of an anti-aircraft weapon, and with the Dragoon's normal synthetic aperture radar being able to shift to an anti-air phased array mode, it was definitely possible to use it in that capacity. Weapons on that scale made people a little nervous.
  
  Hasumi might have been able to buy them before I was kidnapped, but most of the guns I had bought were at or below the fifty calibre level. So, instead, I just had a few weapons. I used the 23mm double-barrel shotgun that a man used to fatally wound Gloria as a pistol. I had given it to her as a souvenir, but she thought it was creepy and had only kept it because she didn't know how to get rid of it without hurting my feelings. She had been quite relieved when I asked if I could borrow it. On my other hip was a Burya, which I could wield with my off-hand. The huge electromagnetic revolver was uniquely suited for Borgs, and it looked almost small in my giant mitts.
  
  I also had a prodigious sword. In normal use, I kept it in a back scabbard. Normally back scabbards were ridiculous, as it was quite impossible for a human's arm to effect pulling one out. However, a Dragoon didn't have the same physical limitations regarding a joint's field of movements as the human body did, and I could snap it out of its sheath in a fraction of a second. I had wanted it to be a Claymore-styled sword, but I couldn't find any monoswords in that style in the city, and I didn't want to put myself on anyone's radar by custom-ordering one. It was still similar in size, but it was a traditional katana. Or "daikatana," I supposed, given its increased size.
  
  Lastly, my SmartGun turret-I couldn't find any replacement for the guided micro missiles that the box launcher on my shoulder utilised. However, I had stripped down one of the smallest auto-turret systems you could purchase on the street and installed it on my shoulder in the missile launcher's place. It was a bit smaller than the box launcher that it replaced and utilised SmartGun ammo, so I could mentally designate targets, up to twelve, using the same tactical system the missile launcher used, and engage them all simultaneously. If attacking from ambush, I could mow down a whole gaggle of people with just this alone.
  
  In my opinion, my kludge gun was superior to the missile launcher in most situations, just due to the increased ammunition capacity. The only use case where it was inferior was against armour. It also looked scary, which was one of the main reasons I included it.
  
  "What is it?!" I yelled, my vocaliser being an ambiguous composite of a number of human voices from men to women. It ended up sounding kind of computerised and frightening. It wasn't very comforting to hear because it wasn't a good sign, psychologically, that a Borg disavowed his or her own voice. It was a sign of disassociation from their humanity, especially when voices of differing genders were used. Even regular people would recognise that.
  
  "Uhhh... boss, there is an emergency. Check the News feed on the net; we're being invaded!" the man, who I believe was named John, yelled through the door.
  
  An invasion? Of the building?! None of my security alerts were going off, but one of the only groups that might invade us were sneaky, deadly netrunners. Why would it be on the net, though? I quickly checked the net with one thread of awareness while carefully inspecting all of the security systems and drones with another, having Dr Hasumi pause in her work to do so.
  
  Oh. Invaded. Yes. This would take some thinking. I yelled back, "I'm coming up! Three minutes!"
  
  The man yelling through my door was John. He was one of the Alphas that were living here that I had worked on as my real self. I had about a little over a dozen people living here now, including that man in the Eclipse. And while we weren't quite a "gang" yet, I wasn't sure if anyone believed that. Perhaps not even John, with how he called me "boss."
  
  My intention had been to ride the Pacifica district down the drain, not really helping at all. This was to further obfuscate both my fourth "body" as well as my cloning facility in the sub-basement. However, I couldn't, in the end, go along with it. It was a bit too... pragmatic. It sounded like a good idea until I saw the people living around here get victimised daily.
  
  The housing in Pacifica was mostly utilised by former workers in Pacifica, too, which made the situation all the more tragic. I couldn't, in the end, just watch them suffer predation-at least not the ones directly in front of my face. There was way too much injustice in the world to be expected to solve all of it, but getting to the point where I could ignore it right in front of me wasn't the type of person I wanted to become. I had told David not to practice what he didn't want to become, so I had to take my own advice here.
  
  I was about seven blocks inside of Pacifica, which was still on the edge of the district, but even before some of the hardware and drones I had bought from Kang Tao and British Aerospace arrived, I shifted Kiwi's mercenary company to attack instead of defence. Hiring them for months on end was actually ridiculously expensive-over one hundred grand a month, not including bonuses which I generally awarded for any successful combat, depending on the danger involved.
  
  People didn't become mercenaries to make a pittance, and I didn't ask for any friend or family discount either. I had intended to release them now that my security was set up, but what were a few extra hundred thousand Eurodollars more in the grand scheme of things?
  
  The NCPD had already stopped responding to calls in Pacifica completely, so all manners of ne'er-do-wells were attracted like flies to a bloating corpse. A good analogy, I thought. Scavs and what I liked to call "Scav-adjacent" gangs were the most common of the disorganised rabble coming in, and that's what I hired Kiwi to attack. Mainly to defend three apartment buildings within a radius of about ten blocks from the Siren's Call.
  
  I had to be satisfied with that. If I pushed any further, I would be declaring war on the organised gangs that were battling further to the south. The organised gangs were fighting over the really good real estate near the main Playpark, with the Voodoo Boys being the largest group slugging it out.
  
  I didn't much care for the Haitian gang for a number of reasons. Really good netrunners frightened me, for one, and secondly, after they acquired a block of real estate, they would conduct what could only be described as an ethnic cleansing of the area. It hadn't reached the level of being a pogrom quite yet, but anyone living there that wasn't Haitian was told, in no uncertain terms, to get the fuck out.
  
  They were as insular and clannish as West Virginia hillbillies and thrice as dangerous. I could understand their motivations after their entire island was destroyed-they wanted a new home. And Pacifica was probably ideal due to the huge amount of computing and networking resources just ripe for the taking.
  
  However, I didn't think it justified their methods here. I had also watched them briefly ally with another gang before betraying them and wiping them out to the last man when they had outlived their usefulness, so they could not be trusted at all, which was unfortunate because I would likely have to deal with them at least a little due to this invasion. It would depend if the Night City government mobilised their militia forces to expel the invaders, but most people on the City Council, aside from Lucius Rhyne's Devolutionist Party, were suggesting that the NUSA not be provoked.
  
  Sighing, I stood up.
  
  I didn't have a lot of furniture down here because not a lot of furniture could withstand the mass of this body, so I generally just sat on a steel table that I had welded a back on to make something akin to a chair. One of the guy's called it an Iron Throne, so I had the idea to weld weapons of defeated enemies to it, but I haven't had the time thus far.
  
  I grabbed my sword and snapped it onto place on my back, and walked up the stairs. On one shoulder was a small boxy-like snub-nosed turret, and on the other was a greatsword's hilt. I liked to think that I was intimidating. John and the man who ran the Militech Eclipse was waiting for me. The latter didn't have a name, at least not one he would volunteer.
  
  All I knew about him was that he hated Arasaka and, in the past, had lost himself to his grudge against them. He said he had lived as almost a total cyberpsycho for at least a decade on the fringes of society. Something snapped him back to partial lucidity, though. Still, he had been the closest to an out-and-out cyberpsycho that I had treated, which had been a little scary, although he had calmed down significantly since then.
  
  He was also the most mercenary of my tenants. Apparently, he wanted to buy himself a Gemini and retire, so he was taking Edgerunner-style jobs around the city now that most of his stealth systems were functioning again. I couldn't replace his finger rocket because what the fuck... who made a finger into a rocket-propelled grenade anyway? But I had replaced the finger with a standard version and got the rest of his systems working.
  
  Me and Wakako gave him most of his jobs, as he was too scarily capable not to keep busy. Otherwise, someone else might end up hiring him against my interests, so I made busy work for him when other things couldn't be found. I had also, as Taylor, told him that I would be more than willing to buy his Eclipse as a trade-in, which would save him quite a lot of money, too. At his rate, he'd have enough money saved in a year or less.
  
  He was also the Borg I wanted to see the most right now. His voice synthesiser spoke in an affected German accent, but I was almost positive that wasn't his real background. Still, it gave me a name to call him, "Herr Schatten, John... do we have any ID on the visitors?" For some reason, Herr Schatten, or Mr Shadow, seemed to think the name I had picked for him was very amusing. When I asked about it in the past, he just called it somewhat familiar and nostalgic, then refused to comment further.
  
  John shook his head, "Not precisely. The news is saying it is the NUSA. Night City government is denying it, though. Surprisingly, the NUSA is also denying it."
  
  Shadow shifted from left to right and said, "NUSA Army. 10th SFG, from the joint base in El Centro. I'm confident."
  
  I groaned, which sounded particularly unsettling coming out of my speakers. Just what we needed, an entire Airborne special forces group. Did that mean that the NUSA was invading? Was the 10th setting up a beachhead in the south?
  
  I asked intensely, " The whole group?!" The whole 10th Special Forces Group was the equivalent of a brigade of hardened special operators and all their accoutrements, including artillery and armoured vehicles.
  
  He shook his head, "I think just the second battalion, along with the group HQ elements."
  
  Professional curiosity got the better of me, "How did they insert a whole battalion, including a brigade HQ?"
  
  He shrugged, "Standard doctrine would involve a company or platoon-level HALO jump at high altitude, secure a landing strip and land the rest using heavy-lift fixed-wing assets. They don't have an airport, so I think they probably did parachute in but called in air cav elements to insert the rest in low radar-cross-section AVs and helicopters. That is congruent with the reported helicopter and turbine noise in the south of the district, too."
  
  Well, that would limit the equipment they could have brought with them. They wouldn't have howitzers or armoured scout cars, at least. I said, "Herr Schatten, would you be willing to recon where they are bivouacked and possibly divine any intentions that they have? We obviously can't fight them, and I don't want to in any case."
  
  He shifted from left to right again and said, "These guys aren't the junkies with Saturday night specials or greaseball mobsters that we've been up against before. They are all well-equipped operators, one and all. I won't be able to get too close, or they will detect me."
  
  That wasn't a no, I felt. I pressed lightly, "I don't need to know where their Colonel is bunking, just the edges of their AO and whether or not they're expanding to the north."
  
  Finally, he nodded and then vanished from my optical and thermal sensors and departed. He was still slightly visible on my synthetic aperture radar as he darted out of my line of sight, but the return didn't look like a human body, so it could have been discounted as a radar artefact.
  
  "Alright, sit tight for now," I told John, who saluted and headed back to his room, which surprised me. I kind of forgot sometimes that almost all of the Borgs living with me were former servicemen and women, so it wasn't unusual that they might fall back into this former behaviour. I had, as Taylor, even been told by a couple that they'd liked the atmosphere of the building, and it reminded them of the camaraderie of their time in the service.
  
  I had never told them that I was their boss, now, though. Still, I was the biggest Borg on the block, and people tended to look to me for leadership, especially since I was the one who laid down the rules about living here and was in charge of the building. The rules mainly consisted of "don't be a psycho" and "don't endanger the building." Pretty simple. Oh, yeah, and "don't hassle the ripperdoc if she is making house calls." Since that "ripperdoc" was me , I felt that was the most important rule of all.
  
  I had set up a whole clinic, including specialised equipment to perform maintenance on Borgs, here in the building, and I tended to come over as needed. There was quite a bit of curiosity about who "the Big Guy" was that he could get a Ripperdoc qualified to work on full body replacements and pay an obvious merc company for security services, but whenever people asked Taylor, I just demurred and said I was paid in cash, and that was all I cared about.
  
  Speaking of merc companies, Kiwi was calling me. I wanted to talk to her, so this was good. I picked up and immediately asked, "Where are you at right now, Kiwi?"
  
  "Me and first squad are on a standard Scav sweep-and-clear around the abandoned buildings nearby. It's like whack-a-mole, I tell you. I just saw the news. Do you know what is going on?" she asked.
  
  I relayed what Herr Shadow had told me and got many obscenities in response. She said, "If they start pushing north, we will have to abandon everything, you know that, right? We can't fight the fucking Army."
  
  I did, but I didn't think it was likely. Or, at least, I hoped it wasn't likely. They couldn't take even this district with just a battalion. Unless a division was being mobilised and surged up from LA, then I suspected that they were here to establish a credible, defensible beachhead where an infantry division could assault from. Either because such an operation was planned, and if so, we really would have to either abandon everything or turn our coats. Alternatively, it was because they wanted the Night City government or the Free States to think such an invasion was planned. It was likely the chaos in Pacifica that had them thinking such an operation could be conducted in the first place.
  
  Honestly, with how heavily armed and unruly the Night City populace was, it would likely take a close to a Corps to truly pacify the city, and I didn't think the NUSA could spare that kind of manpower. The stage where mercenaries were fighting mercenaries was over, mostly, and now front-line units were fighting each other all along the border. I was hoping that this was just a feint. The Free States would have to honour the threat if it was credible and shift forces to box up Night City from the north if they thought the city would fall to NUSA, which might be taken advantage of by the NUSA side somewhere else.
  
  Colorado had already fallen to the NUSA, and some unstated accommodation was made between the Republic of Texas and the NUSA, so they weren't threatening to nuke each other anymore, so it was mainly just the Pacific Northwest doing the fighting now.
  
  Kiwi continued, "Second squad is holed up in the Apartment building on Nymph Boulevard, acting as a Quick Reaction Force for the area. But I'm gonna wake third and forth squads up and have them come to Saint Cog's."
  
  I grimaced, "I told you not to call it that, Cado. " Much to my displeasure, the name "Saint Cog's Home for Unwanted Borgs" had become popular, with a few of my tenants actually spray-painting little cogs around the area as if they were gang signs. Could I actually call them tenants if I didn't charge them rents? I did make a little money acting as an ISP and renting or selling braindance equipment to them, though, but it was all small potatoes.
  
  It turned out that most of the Borgs here were hardcore gamers. I suppose that made sense if you were in a deteriorating body to escape into a nicer virtual one, but they were BD enthusiasts, one and all.
  
  "Hahaha, I am Kiwi again, don't you know? Once I saw that Biotechnica wasn't going to squash you, I figured it safe enough to resume many of my old relationships and connections. Got my old tats redone, too," she said, amused. That was still a risk, in my opinion. Taylor Hebert's link to Gram was semi-public knowledge, and it could be easily found out who my mother, Annette was. That was probably protection against such a minor infraction all on its own. Kiwi was not me, but on the other hand, she was different than she used to be too. She had a force of arms that she didn't have before, so it might not be seen as worth it if they just wanted to send a message.
  
  "Hold!" she suddenly said, her tone entirely different and serious. "Stand by, Taylor. Let me call you back." She then disconnected.
  
  I blinked, hoping she didn't run into any Army men. She and her team looked far too uniform and paramilitary. The NUSA Army would likely consider her forces of Night City military forces scouting around in the absence of any other data and attack.
  
  She called back before I could worry too much, and I immediately answered, "Hey, T. A few Voodoo Boys stopped us on our patrol; everything seems peaceful for right now, but they want to talk to The Big Guy. Is he... uhh... available?"
  
  Kiwi knew that I drove around the Dragoon like a drone. It would be hard for her not to realise it was me since she helped me bring it back to the base, but she thought I just had some jam-resistant wireless tech to do so. She was a little sceptical about it, but after she couldn't hack into it herself, she shrugged and admitted that it seemed pretty effective.
  
  Still, I scowled. I was kind of expecting this. "The Big Guy" had a reputation of being a hikikomori, after all, and he had only left the building a couple of times to eradicate a particularly large group of Scavs. I had done this primarily to build a reputation, but also because they had actually been a threat to one of Kiwi's squads.
  
  If the Voodoo Boys wanted to talk to "him", then they'd have to come to the Siren's Call, and maybe they thought just walking up to the front door wasn't precisely healthy.
  
  I nodded and said, "Yes... he's up and about, as they say. But give us at least fifteen minutes before you lead those sneaky fucks back here if you don't mind."
  
  "Roger," she said, but in a jaunty French way, sounding more like Ro-jair, "There's three of them, one runner and two that look like muscle. We'll tell them we need to finish the sweep before we come back. Expect us in twenty."
  
  "Take no chances with them. Do not trust them," I cautioned her again. She acknowledged my warning with a thumbs-up before disconnecting the call.
  
  I wanted to rub my chin, but it wasn't the same when it was made of an armoured plate, so I briefly had my Taylor body do it while writing a chart for a surgery I finished a little while ago. Yes, that was better.
  
  How should I handle this? I thought for a moment before pulling up the chatroom for the building. I used it to make announcements, and all of my tenants were on it. I sent out, "Having a meeting with one of the Voodoo Boys. I need two volunteers to loom behind me, looking dangerous. Also, I will be disabling the building wireless in five minutes, including activating jamming systems. Please shift to a wired connection if you require continued net access. This disruption may last one to two hours."
  
  There were a number of replies, a few dismayed at the wireless cutting out. One man claimed he was in a 100-man instanced raid and couldn't disconnect. He begged someone to come into his room and plug him in, and someone finally agreed after a suitable bribe was offered and promised.
  
  A couple of the guys agreed to come downstairs, including John, and at about the same time, I noticed Kiwi's third and fourth squads jogging over to my building. I told them to take positions where they could defend the approaches to the building, and possibly respond to the main room but to make themselves not be seen.
  
  John and one of the rare female Alphas came down the stairs, each carrying a Militech Crusher in one hand as if it were a pistol. I waved them over and told them what to expect. I didn't expect that they would need to do anything at all, but if the Voodoo Boys had three people, I wanted them to see three of "my people."
  
  After five minutes, I clicked a mental button and all of the wireless access points in my building shifted to jammers instead. They'd jam all outside net access from my building, but people could still use some short-range wireless communications. The way my visual processor overlayed the jammers on my visual field was rather annoying, with points of radiating static.
  
  As such, I shifted my electromagnetic sense away from a visual overlay and dumped it into my sensory cortex, wincing a little as I was momentarily disoriented. If one of them was a netrunner, even if I was jamming outgoing net connections they might be able to connect to someone or something with the short-range wireless protocol.
  
  Nodding, I told John and the other Alpha-series, "EMCON protocols active. Disable all of your radios manually. One of them is some sneaky fucking runner."
  
  They both grimaced, sort of. Borgs had a fairly universal distaste for netrunners because being hacked was a really big deal for them. Although I didn't need the wireless to continue accessing the subnet, I didn't want to publicise that, so I grabbed a long data cable and plugged it into one of the outlets by the reception desk and sat there, waiting.
  
  About ten minutes later, I saw both Kiwi and the three strangers walking up to the building at a slow pace. As they got closer, I disconnected the Dragoon from it's own radio. It still appeared to be active, but it only was connected to a honeytrap that had an epic ton of ICE of increasing lethality. Even if a runner managed to completely infiltrate the system, it wasn't really connected to the Dragoon body anymore. It could send me limited messages, and only in text, and that was it.
  
  "Boss, these three were the ones wanting to talk to you. This one is called Marie Antoinette. I don't know the other two," Kiwi said as the whole group entered the building. Was that really her name? I wondered.
  
  I nodded and said, "Dismiss your men, but you stay." Then I shifted to look at the strangers. One was a woman, rather pretty and dressed in a figure-hugging netrunner suit with a cloak over it. Casually, I designated each of them with four reticles apiece using my SmartLink targeting system. If I hit the button, my turret would fire twelve rounds in less than half of a second, and each target would take three in the chest and one in the head before I could say Bob's your uncle.
  
  As I glanced at the netrunner's eyes, I frowned as I noticed a flurry of radio-frequency transmissions from her, starting omnidirectional and shifting to directional and directed at me. They were obviously modulated for encoding data and appeared to be hundreds of different initial handshakes using differing protocols. Then, I got an alert from the dummy plug that was simulating my open wireless port.
  
  [Dummy Plug: Incoming port scan... ]
  
  [Dummy Plug: First layer ICE bypassed... ]
  
  [Dummy Plug: Second layer ICE bypass in progress... ]
  
  The Dragoon's electromagnetic sense was hooked partially into its cyberwarfare suite, even through the Dummy Plug, so as soon as I got a notification that I was being port-scanned, the feeling of the radio-frequency transmission she was sending out changed. It wasn't solely a visual sense. When it was dumped into my sensory cortex, it used almost all of my senses, and more besides. So, immediately, it became something akin to flashing red, hot to the touch, and with an awful smell.
  
  My hand snapped up and "grabbed" the transmission without me thinking about it, the sense of proprioception also being hooked up. As soon as I "grabbed" it, I got another notification.
  
  [Dummy Plug: Infiltrator connection isolated.]
  
  I saw her wince slightly, and I moved. First, I crushed the connection in my hand.
  
  [Dummy Plug: Connection terminated. Blacklist updated.]
  
  At the same time, I lunged. I was incredibly quick, at both my maximum physical speed of the body as well as the maximum reaction speed of my mind. In almost no time at all, I had closed the ten metres between us, whipped out my giant sword and had it pointed very close to the woman's throat.
  
  Her eyes widened in shock, and her two bodyguards just barely started reacting, but both Kiwi and her men, who hadn't even left the room yet, startled and pointed guns at all three of them. Even they realised that if they went for their weapons, they wouldn't live too much longer than that.
  
  At first, I was planning on taking the lady netrunner's head off, as I didn't know why she had tested my cybersecurity. But I thought that it might have been a reflex, so I decided against it. Instead, I growled, intentionally using words and phrases that would sound a bit foreign to any of my identities, "If you try that again, you'll end up like your namesake - right here, cake bitch. Savvy?"
  
  Also, I wanted to use "savvy?" in a sentence. Sue me. She held her hands up placatingly and even bowed her head a little. She had a pretty noticeable but not unpleasant accent, "I apologise, Saturday's Hand. I'm used to always having a connection to the net, and getting disconnected when I walked in here startled me."
  
  Saturday's Hand? What the fuck did that mean? Also, I didn't know that I believed her. That was exactly what I was afraid she would do! But I slowly slid my sword back into its scabbard and took three large steps backwards, giving her and her men some personal space.
  
  I waved both the Alphas and Kiwi's men, and they casually lowered their weapons too. A line of text popped up on my visual field, an encrypted transmission from Kiwi. It hit my Dummy Plug too, but sending limited messages to me was one of the few things it was capable of doing.
  
  Kiwi: Hacking attempt?
  
  I couldn't really reply at the moment, so I just nodded once at her, who scowled. I stared at the Voodoo Boys for a moment longer before saying, "What the fuck do you want?"
  
  "We came to warn you about the invaders entering the district, and possibly offer our assistance," she said, much more respectfully, "We have intelligence about just who they are that might be useful."
  
  I grabbed the data connection that had unplugged itself when I lunged at the strangers, plugged it back in and sent a message to Herr Shadow. He might not respond, depending on where he was.
  
  However, this time I was lucky. He replied, along with a few files that were overlays for a map, showing about a third of the "front" down south. The map was quite fancy, and colour-coded even. He included a text saying that they seem to be digging in thus far, not gearing up to invade to the north.
  
  "Speak, then," I said, trying to sound cool.
  
  She nodded and said, "We're almost certain they're elements from the NUSA military. We have confirmed they have at least four hundred heavily armed soldiers, and they're currently making mincemeat of the gangs in the very south of Pacifica. We're concerned that we, and as extension, you, will be next."
  
  I pointed at a SmartWall, and it activated, showing the map file I had just received, and said, "They are the NUSA Army 10th Special Forces Group, 2nd Batallion, Airborne. Commanded by a Colonel Kurt Hansen.They do not appear to be readying for a massive thrust into Pacifica proper just yet, so as far as I am concerned, they are not my problem."
  
  All three of them looked surprised, although the runner covered up her shock better. She coughed and said, "That is... quite interesting. Might I ask how you came about this information?"
  
  "No," I said, simply and forcefully. I paused momentarily, "If that's all you have, message received. Get out." However, I briefly reconnected my wireless, dismissing the dummy plug so that I could transfer her a Contact Card wirelessly. It was the contact details I had made for the Dragoon "identity", "Contact me on the net if you have anything more to say or if they become an actual threat."
  
  She looked slightly upset at first, but after I sent her my contact details seemed mollified and nodded, "Of course, Saturday's Hand." Her two bodyguards looked upset at her being so deferential to me, but I had almost killed them all, so I personally thought they were really self-unaware of their own position in the world right now.
  
  I stared at them until they collectively turned around and walked out the door. I didn't deactivate the jammers right away, either. I glanced at Kiwi, "Can you make sure they didnt drop some tiny little device that does god knows what? Like some sort of proxy for invading our subnet?"
  
  She looked briefly startled at the idea before nodding, looking around and retracing the steps the Voodoo contingent had taken since entering the property, going as far back as the parking lot. Finally, she returned and said, "Looks clear, I think."
  
  Well, that was good enough for me. I disabled the jammers, and re-enabled the wireless access points, sending a message to the building chatroom at the same time, "Wireless re-enabled."
  
  "Emission control protocols deactivated, you two," I said at John and the other Alpha, "I think we're done here for now." They nodded and ambled away.
  
  Kiwi walked over and asked, "Can we talk privately?"
  
  "Downstairs," I said, and she followed me down.
  
  Once we were alone, I shifted so that it was my normal voice speaking, "What's up?" I hopped up on the steel table I used as a chair.
  
  "I am surprised you sent them packing so decisively," she said, "We would probably need their help if the NUSA make a nuisance of themselves."
  
  I shrugged, "I'm playing the role of a borderline cyberpsycho. There is no way he would have acquiesced to any kind of collaboration at the first meeting. I bet she wasn't that high up in the Voodoo Boys, either. How good of a hacker was she?"
  
  Kiwi made a waffling gesture, and I nodded, "Potentially disposable if I was less lucid than they thought I was going to be. Do you have any idea what Saturday's Hand means?"
  
  "No, but they say all sorts of weird quasi-spiritual bullshit," she said very disapprovingly.
  
  I shrugged, "Besides... if I was too accommodating, we'd just be turned into a cat's paw to be disposed of after we were no longer useful. I really don't trust these guys."
  
  Kiwi shook her head, "No, I am right there with you. I just thought it was out of character; normally, you give people more leeway, and your first instinct if things are serious is always cooperation or conflict avoidance."
  
  Was it? What counted as serious? I wanted to bite my lip in thought, but instead, I just shrugged, "So I put on a good performance, then?"
  
  She gave me a double thumbs up, "Yeah, totally nova. Do we have any story as to why you have so much money that you can hire my team?"
  
  I shrugged, "I can't think of anything. I obfuscated the source of the funds pretty well, but of course, this is a gang of professional netrunners. I think any story we would make up would tend to backfire, so let's just stay mysterious. They'll probably concoct more interesting stories themselves, wondering about it anyway."
  
  Hana got a message inviting her to dinner with her workgroup. It wasn't good to decline those invitations too often, so I said, "I gotta go; I'm going send you Herr Schatten's data after he finishes scouting the perimeter of the soldiers. We do need to think about what our options will be. I'd rather not lose all I invested here, but our lives are more important."
  
  Really, I meant her life. Still, I could move everything out of the sub-basement in a hurry if I really had to. It would ruin a lot of my plans, though. Even if I lost everything in this building, including having the Dragoon go down with the ship, so long as I got my special crystal out of harm's way first, it would just be an annoying setback.
  
  She nodded, "Right. Maybe we'll be lucky, and the NUSA guys will eradicate all of the other gangs and then just go home."
  
  I doubted we'd be that lucky. Also, other gangs?
  
  Shaking my head, I sat down and deactivated the Dragoon.
  
  Space Station 13
  
  In Close Proximity of Galileo Cylinder, Metastable Lagrange Point 3 (Earth-Moon)
  
  Finding myself back in my cramped stateroom and in half-gravity, I sent a message to my work leader accepting the invitation before stripping off all of my clothes and hopping into the shower.
  
  I would have to prioritise, somehow, making it to the Crystal Palace and getting seen by one of the geneticists there. I had been here long enough that I was due a little time off, wasn't I?
  
  But perhaps I could make it a working trip. My boss had asked me if I was interested in playing bodyguard to rich groundsiders on account of how Hana looked fucking super jacked and dangerous. Most long-time spacers tended to the lithe and tall body types and didn't look as dangerous, even if they were.
  
  They also had something of a distaste for physical cybernetics, so my Kerenzikov, high-end subdermal armour and Strong Arms really did make me ridiculously dangerous, even unarmed.
  
  Nodding, maybe I could be some rich tourist's bodyguard for a couple of weeks. That would give me some time at the Crystal Palace after I escorted them background side.
  
  Then it was just a matter of getting Hasumi seen. I'd just tell Yuki to schedule it. I had already performed the modifications on Taylor, and it might have been a little hesitancy that caused me not to prioritise it, but I think I needed to do so now, especially if I ended up fleeing Pacifica in disgrace.
  
  I wished the war between states, or whatever they were calling it, would end already. Not only were an incredible amount of lives being ruined, but my plans too!
  
  I had a couple of minutes after I got dressed before my door chime rang. I called out, " Wole wa!" This caused the door to automatically unlock and open, revealing one of the grinning members of my workgroup.
  
  He asked in Yoruba, which was the preferred internal language in our workgroup, which I had to pick up pretty quickly when I first started working, " You ready, giant lady?" The latter word was a kind of slang, and it meant more along the lines of "giant babe", I thought.
  
  I audibly cracked my knuckles before saying in the same language, " You know I can break you in half, right?"
  
  " Don't tease, giant lady!" he said, laughing, and we left for dinner with the rest.
  
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  Odd bedfellows
  January 2068
  
  Pacifica, Night City
  
  EBM Petrochem Stadium (under construction)
  
  "Report," a curt voice that belonged to Colonel Kurt Hansen commanded. The Colonel was a large man of European descent, over one-hundred-and-eighty-five centimetres and was decked out in a modern stealth armour suit in drab black. He stood imposingly in a half-furnished conference room along with a handful of similarly dressed men and women. Most interestingly, however, was that there was no rank insignia on his combat uniform, nor was there the traditional marking of the NUSA flag on his shoulder.
  
  A woman coughed and said, "Sir, second battalion and the rest of the HQ elements are down. Pathfinder company that jumped in are engaging with some local criminal elements right now, with the assistance of a few local intel assets. A few were wounded, but no KIA yet. We're using the stadium field for dustoff flight ops for casevac, and we should have the local area pacified shortly. No response from the city government or local constabulary as of yet."
  
  Colonel Hansen glanced out of a window at more than a dozen heavy transport aerodynes and helicopters sitting in neat rows on the football pitch, "And why the fuck am I looking at almost an entire god-damned aviation battalion without my fucking soldiers on the wire guarding them with heavy weapons and AD? One fucking kamikaze swarm and we'd lose all those fucking assets. Major, you need to pull the stick out."
  
  The woman shrugged, "Teams are in position, but the heavy weapons and man-portable air defence systems were considered a second priority by the CAB CO. We should have them within the hour, though. For now, I have shifted e-war specialists to the roof with their gear. We'll have a warning, and with luck, they'll be able to infiltrate and disable any drones spotted."
  
  "For fucks sake," the Colonel growled, but he couldn't take it out on anyone here. It was some fucking asshole sticking their dick into his cheerios and fucking up his assault plan. He was borrowing the aviation assets from someone else, so they weren't technically in his chain of command. Suddenly, he grinned, "Major, find out when the last flight is going to leave. Make sure at least six of those AV-8s stay behind. I don't give a shit about their pilots, and they can go back with the rest. We have enough qualified pilots in our HQ element to operate them."
  
  "Sir, the brigade CO will have kittens," she said warningly, "Plus, those birds are all obvious Army assets, with NUS ARMY stencilled on the side. The few AVs we got for this operation were purchased on the civilian market. We're supposed to be incognito, after all, sir, right?"
  
  He waved a hand, "I don't give a fuck! We're not in the Army again until this op is done, and he doesn't even outrank me. He'll bitch to his CO, and I'll get it in the ass from mine, but they'll understand. They only gave us fucking four AVs for a battalion, and they're all fucking unarmed. Major, get it done, but don't let them get any warning. Otherwise, Colonel Buttfuck will shaft us somehow. Get some fucking spray paint to cover over the Army markings before we operate in the city with them. It's just supposed to be a figleaf, anyway. Everyone knows who we are, and we know that they know, and they know that we know that they know. " He paused at the end as if the level of recursion there confused him for a moment, but then he nodded to himself.
  
  "Yes, sir. Next item, we have an intel update on the situation on the ground, as well," she said. The Colonel made a 'get on with it' hand motion, which she nodded and pulled up an overhead map display, "There is a new player in the north of Pacifica. S-2 is waffling over their confidence rating whether it is a gang or a paramilitary group." The map highlighted an area of a few blocks centred on a ten-story building, "This is the Siren's Call Amusements, a braindance parlour."
  
  The Colonel took in the situation rapidly and seemed annoyed, "You are the fucking S-2. You know I hate it when you talk in the third person. That's not in our planned AO, either-they will be 1 ID's problem. Why do I need to know about a new gang centred around one building?"
  
  She nodded, "Anomalies. They don't appear to be acting like a traditional gang. The building was purchased by an unknown local party, so they aren't squatting like everyone else. Intel sources suggest that the same shell company purchased a half million Eurodollars worth of military surveillance and combat drones from two foreign Corps, two-thirds of which are still yet to be delivered. They hired a switched-on mercenary company for little more than keeping the peace around their building... Lastly, and this is the most suspicious-they are paying all of their bills, electric and net access, on time. Oh, and the entire gang consists of full-body cyborgs, and this is the leader."
  
  A high-definition video played of an obvious Dragoon full-body replacement stepping out into a street, glancing at an approaching mob of rabble before the MG attached to its shoulder riddled every single one of them with bullets. Surprisingly, the Dragoon then conversed with a few armed men and then walked casually back down the street. The Colonel whistled appreciatively, "Don't see many of those fuckers anymore. How can that be the leader? Most Dragoons can barely fucking say their own name, much less think tactically, heavens forbid... logistically." The idea that a full-time Dragoon user would have the brain cells to pay their electricity bill was ridiculous. There were only a handful of men like that in the world.
  
  "Unknown, sir. The red book has a Dragoon on the level of a feral guard dog-albeit a feral dog that can annihilate a full company if not taken seriously, so I was a bit curious, too," his subordinate replied, referencing the NUSA Army guidebook on expected threats and how to counter them.
  
  He nodded, "Okay, good to know. Major, make sure at least two of those AVs we acquire have a full load-out of AGMs. Bonus points if they are the thermobaric ones. Just in case."
  
  The Colonel had a straightforward philosophy about what the most effective way to clear a building full of deadly Borgs was, and it usually involved guided 175mm artillery shells delivered from at least thirty klicks away.
  
  That wasn't going to be on the cards this time, so he would have to make do. He continued, "And start a new file on them. Gang, my ass. If they're paramilitary, who is funding them and to what end? Are they more fucking advisors from the far east? Hopefully, it won't be our fucking circus or our fucking monkeys, but it'll be my ass if they end up surprising the brass during the invasion."
  
  It was the Colonel's private opinion that the war would have been over a long time ago if not for a ridiculous number of scarily competent military advisors that the Free States had, who suspiciously always looked Slavic or Japanese. The fact that half the war material utilised by the Free States was foreign in origin was also a big clue.
  
  "Alright, anything else?" he asked, finally.
  
  She shrugged, "The ROWPUs and FKUs are being driven in for some ungodly reason. But I've already dispatched a platoon from Charlie company to meet them at the edge of the city. Otherwise, those drivers would be murdered and the precious cargo stolen."
  
  The Colonel sighed. The mobile reverse osmosis water purification units and field kitchenery units were a priority if he didn't want a mutiny. Nobody knew if they could trust the water here, after all, and the food had always been questionable. Still, there were some kitchens available in the half-built stadium that they could use if worse came to worse.
  
  "Fine. Now, let's be about it," he concluded the briefing.
  
  About The Same Time
  
  Pacifica, Night City
  
  Pacifica Serenity Bible Church
  
  The woman who called herself Marie Antoinette returned to one of the headquarters of the movement. They had taken over a mostly built but abandoned church that had been intended to serve the spiritual needs of a resort that would never exist. The location was prime, located right over one of the district's main network access junctions.
  
  There had never been a sermon spoken in this place, and in her opinion, it was a little ironic that they used a place of dead, sterile spirituality as a base-their own gods were dead, too, after all.
  
  Another woman in a very similar form-fitting netrunner's one-piece met her amongst the pews.
  
  "Well, you're still alive, Marie," another woman said affably, "We thought the worst when you dropped off the net, ya?"
  
  Marie sighed and nodded. She wasn't precisely sent as a sacrificial offering, but she volunteered for the task, knowing it was possible she would never walk out of that building alive. She almost hadn't.
  
  Even before she entered the building, she had noticed that the local subnet was locked down tight as a drum, with no exterior wireless access points activated at all. The jammers had taken her by surprise, and her first instinct was to hack the nearest available device to create a proxy via the building's hardwired connection. That had been a mistake, one that nearly killed her.
  
  Thinking about the dangerous entity that had threatened her, Marie shook her head before saying, "I think we'll have to change our plan. If they're crazy, then it is like the fox, no?"
  
  "Tell me more. I just finished a deep dive into their subnet after we lost contact. I managed to infiltrate beyond some rather tight security, but there wasn't really much to see, beyond a half dozen people playing Adam Online and Elflines," the woman said, sounding amused but also concerned, "All of their security systems and some of those large aerial drones we saw must not be connected directly to the net."
  
  That wouldn't always stop a good runner like Brigette, but there wasn't a lot you could do if the goodies were on a separate air-gapped system, assuming you couldn't compromise a vending machine and then use that as a bridge for a direct wireless attack. Things were a lot more interconnected these days, but high-level net running against private subnets generally still required physical penetration or suborned access.
  
  Nobody was going to volunteer to sneak into that building. She hadn't even been brave enough to "accidentally" drop a battery-powered proxy bridge, which they might have been able to use once the jammers were deactivated. She had thought about it before but decided against it. She had barely even seen that giant monstrosity move before he had a sword of all fucking things to her throat.
  
  Almost as startling was the quality and quantity of ICE protecting the giant Dragoon. When she had started hacking it, it had been a reflex, but she had followed through when she had realised what she was doing. The giant borg wasn't a surprise; they had been seeing him off and on for weeks. But his cyber warfare suit was. She had used a number of alleged IEC vulnerabilities. It had been decades since they had last been updated, so one would think that it would have worked, but it hadn't, which meant his firmware had been updated in a custom manner.
  
  She took a breath while packaging up the BD she had scrolled through the whole encounter. She'd explain, then Brigette could watch her virtu. They might still be able to get some use out of this gang, but not how they originally planned.
  
  January 2068
  
  Gallileo Cylinder
  
  L-3, Terra-Luna System
  
  I landed a straight punch on the chin of the second assailant, and with my enhanced strength, I shattered his jaw and rendered him unconscious. He froze in a classic fencer's pose that indicated a serious concussion, and the hypervelocity pistol in his hand dropped to the deck. I kicked it away and turned to the first guy who had attempted to momentarily distract me with a knife, but he had his hands up and yelled, "I didn't know about any guns! He just paid me to distract you."
  
  Ah, this guy was smart then. I nodded slightly and walked over to pick up the pistol, never turning my back or letting myself get too far from the guy I was guarding. Already, local voluntary constables were rushing over. After all, the second guy had fired a gun, and it penetrated the bulkhead. There was a loud hissing as the atmosphere was escaping into the void. I handed the pistol to the first responding constable and went back to the guy I was being paid to guard.
  
  I had lived here long enough that this was fighting the immediate instinct to rush with a patch kit and stop the pressure emergency. We all liked to breathe up here, but a savvy assassin could use a double fake-out like that, so it was important to stick with my principal, even if I was a bit annoyed with him. This was supposed to be a simple job that I was using to get time to go to the Crystal Palace. In fact, we were leaving today.
  
  While space wasn't entirely safe, it was a lot safer than most cities back on Earth. So crime, especially assassination attempts on foreign visitors, were quite rare. The guy I had laid out was a groundsider as well. I could tell from his clothes, especially his shoes.
  
  I helped my guy to his feet in time to be approached by one of the constables, still putting his official brassard around his arm. He said imperiously, in a thick Nigerian accent, "Woman! What's all this about then?"
  
  I had no doubt that they had video surveillance, but still, I shrugged and pointed to the guy they were dragging away, "He tried to shoot this gentleman, who I was hired to guard. The local claims he was paid to distract me."
  
  The man nodded, ejected the magazine on the pistol and held it up, shaking his head, "Full-metal jacket. Not even frangible, ja ?" He glanced at the guy who had the knife and said, "Bill, take that guy back for questioning." He then made a humming noise and, with a Gallic shrug, said, "Okay, I don't need anything else." Justice up here was very simple, especially in this case.
  
  I escorted the groundsider back to the hotel, and he asked, "What are they going to do with that fucker who almost shot me?"
  
  I glanced at him sideways, "If he just had attempted to kill you with a knife, or maybe even if it was just frangible ammo... he'd have been fined. But he used armour-piercing ammunition inside the hab, causing a pressure emergency. He'll be deported. Immediately."
  
  The man seemed shocked and offended, "Is that fucking all? I need to get his name so I can fix his wagon when he gets back planetside."
  
  I shook my head wryly, "You misunderstand. He will be immediately deported and without the benefit of a pressure suit. We take breathing up here pretty serious-like."
  
  Comprehension flashed on the man's face, and emotions quickly traversed from shocked, surprised, to gleeful. He nodded, satisfied and amused, "No long appeals process up here, eh?"
  
  I shook my head. There were no prisons at all. If you violated the law, you were fined. If you couldn't pay the fine, you had the option of accepting what amounted to a period of indentured servitude, or they would ship you back to Earth. Except for a few crimes, like intentionally or through reckless negligence damaging the life support systems or causing a pressure emergency in public cubic-that was the death penalty. I said, amused, "Justice delayed is justice denied, and all that."
  
  "What if an innocent man gets accused of a serious crime like that?" he asked, curious.
  
  I shrugged, "The entire population of the hab, citizens anyway, vote on it. That voting is probably concluding right now, in real time. I'm not yet a citizen, though, so I can't participate. They disagree with the sentiment that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be punished. They feel that if seventy-five per cent of the population, at least those voting, believes you are guilty of a capital crime, even if you're innocent, you probably should be killed anyway, just to be safe." I was about to say that it was kind of like what happened to Socrates, but Hana wasn't as educated enough to make that kind of reference.
  
  He looked thoughtful and nodded, "You're pretty good with a right hook. Worth the money I paid."
  
  I shrugged, "Normally, I work construction. Outside, you know? But I was in the service. What can I say? It pays the air bill."
  
  His footfalls faltered for a moment before he said, cautiously, "I didn't see any air bill itemised on the hotel receipt. With how seriously you lot seem to take air, I'm not sure I want to be in arrears..." he trailed off, and I laughed.
  
  "Don't worry, tourists don't have to pay," I said after I stopped laughing. We got him checked out and met the freighter heading back to the Crystal Palace with time to spare. This particular spacecraft had more room than the last one I remember, and we each had a stateroom, even if they were tiny with fold-out everything.
  
  The trip was just as long as I remembered last time being, but at least it was uneventful. I bid the man farewell at his next hotel, which was more like a resort, and he asked, "Interested in a contract extension all the way down to Chicago? I'll pay for your return trip, obviously."
  
  I pretended to consider it but shook my head, "No. There are a few people who might take umbrage at my returning to the North American continent, even if it is briefly. Sorry!" I was using the grudge a certain cartel had against Hana as my excuse, but the truth was that I had an appointment with the best geneticist in the Crystal Palace, and I had no desire to delay it. The payment I was getting was a pittance, anyway, but I had to have a good reason to decline it, as Hana wasn't supposed to be rolling in the money.
  
  It was already going to be weird that I was seeing a geneticist, but at the same time, Hana had stolen a reasonably large amount of money. I'd be buying some mid-grade life extension at the same time just to give a plausible reason why I was there, although I didn't need it. The protectee took my turning him down with just a shrug and said, "Fair enough, I 'spose. I know a little bit about that myself, capiche?" He made a pinched-finger hand gesture and a terrible Italian accent.
  
  "Something like that," I said, amused. If he was from Chicago, he probably wasn't lying, either. That was the mafia capital of America, these days after the Corps in New York cracked down hard on the mob. Without further adieu, I left him there and went directly to the clinic.
  
  January 2068
  
  Pacifica, Night City
  
  Subbasement, Saint Cog's Home for Unwanted Borgs
  
  I used the Dragoon to lower the glowing crystal cube into the hole I had cut out of the foundation and dug another two metres into the floor using a simple snatch block pulley system. The thing didn't need power, so I could theoretically stash it anywhere. However, it needed some periodic maintenance on its bank of Haywire comm devices, so I couldn't just throw it into the Ocean. While that might work, considering I intended to do the maintenance with a small telepresence robot, I wasn't that comfortable with it being totally inaccessible. So, I was just going to bury it and make it mostly inaccessible.
  
  The crystal supercomputer had a number of traditional data ports, including a data bus that provided power as well, so the bot could be charged by whatever power source the system drew from some unknown dimension.
  
  I had fed a direct fibreoptic data connection down there as well, digging in from the outside at an angle so it wouldn't be obvious from the sub-basement floor. I could use the FTL coms for data, and in fact, I did. However, in the extreme event that all of my physical bodies died and this location was compromised, I would have issues cloning a new body. While the crystal supercomputer didn't need Tinker maintenance, somehow, the FTL comms did. If I didn't have a hardwired connection, then I'd eventually get disconnected from the net when the FTL systems broke.
  
  Being aware and entombed into the ground with no way to connect out, well... that was something out of a horror film. So, I included a hardwired connection so I could, in that case, act like some kind of AI. I was sure I would have been able to eventually convince someone to help me if I had access to the net. The connection included a direct fibreoptic connection, as well as an omnidirectional high-gain antenna I placed on the roof.
  
  Plus, I also included several kilos of plastique explosive so I could self-terminate in the most extreme situations. My intuition told me that the crystal computer would work for... many, many thousands of years. I didn't want to be aware but trapped for that long if absolutely everything went to shit. If I had no further bodies at all, I was sure I would be able to slow my perception of time so that a second felt like a year, like putting a computer into sleep mode, until someone dug me out... but just in case. I liked options, even if I didn't intend for any, much less all, of my current bodies to die.
  
  I was almost done. I was here in person because neither the Dragoon nor the Arasaka robots had enough dexterity needed for some of this work, but he absolutely could mix concrete, so I just sat at one of the office chairs I brought down here and shifted my full awareness into it and got to work.
  
  After I got the system in place, I lowered the steel lid. I had to provide a box for this thing to sit in. Otherwise, there would be no negative space for the little spiders to work and live in while inside, as I planned to fill this entire hole with dirt and concrete.
  
  A few hours later, I was at a stopping point. The concrete needed to cure, and that would take a while, and then I'd need to sand it down so it looked, more or less, like the rest of the foundation. There was no reason to delay any longer. In fact, there was no reason not to have begun the upload earlier. I could have helped myself with the Dragoon, after all.
  
  Sighing, I couldn't deny I was a bit more nervous this time. I had done the math, and my precious organic brains should be fine with the increased neural activity over the network, but this was still a lot different than just adding a new cloned brain.
  
  Shaking my head, I decided not to think about it any more. I mentally triggered the upload process and sat there to wait. The FTL comms maxed out at about five hundred terabytes per second, as that was the limit for the tiny oscillators I used in their construction, so a full brain copy still took a reasonable amount of time. Like, a whole minute. There was a lot more data inside a person's brain than most people probably realised.
  
  Once the upload was complete, the emulator started immediately, and a connection was established, causing me a brief wave of vertigo as I became more.
  
  I just sat there and basked in it for a moment, my entire network and all of my bodies going slack in response, just staring up at the ceiling of wherever they were. The feeling of initial synchronicity and expansion was kind of like floating and not at all unpleasant.
  
  "That's... that's special," I said, sighing out in a relaxed way, bonelessly relaxing as I shifted my entire focus inwards.
  
  This was similar, yet different than last time. I was probably the most knowledgeable about how the human brain worked on the planet, but I didn't even think I had totally replicated a brain in software. Yet, anyway. Not only did you have to simulate how all of the neurons worked in a simulation, but you also had to simulate how neurotransmitters and other neuromodulatory chemicals interacted with the brain and replicate that virtually.
  
  It was an incredibly difficult problem, and while I felt that I had succeeded in creating close to a ninety-eight to ninety-nine per cent flawless simulation, that couple per cent was exponentially harder to perfect. There were serious, serious diminishing returns in the attempt, too.
  
  Still, I thought my simulation was the best in the world. I didn't know for sure, but I suspected that the emulation software used to run Soulkilled Pseudo-Intelligences had less than a ninety per cent fidelity, which might explain why even the AIs with human origins had a reputation for being foreign and inscrutable.
  
  However, fortunately, and due to the fact that I was a network that included three organic nodes, I was able to create a system that was recursively self-correcting, at least as far as how the simulation brain matched my existing ones. The longer I lived, the more perfect my brain simulation technology would get.
  
  Still, I felt odd for a moment. I wouldn't say that I felt more dispassionate now, and I verified that the new part of me was feeling emotions correctly, but there was a change. For example, I didn't think my new "brain" could panic easily since that was a function of an adrenaline feedback loop, and while I did program it to simulate the initial effects, it didn't simulate a whole body, so a feedback loop might be impossible.
  
  The self-correcting system might correct this over time, but it might not. It wasn't really a defect, I thought. Plus, it would have to see many instances of me panicking for the simple machine learning algorithms to come into play, and I didn't really do that much anyway. Hopefully I wouldn't start, either.
  
  I tested both of the drones that I would be using, the Dragoon and one of the Arasaka robots, refitted with a telepresence control board. The latter was for use down here in the subbasement, for the most part. It would be my main technician if I needed to clone myself, and my Taylor body wasn't around for some reason.
  
  I wasn't sure what I was expecting since I already knew both worked... but at the same time, it did seem a little bit different controlling them using only the thread of awareness that was entirely digitised. I wasn't sure precisely how to describe the difference. Smoother, perhaps.
  
  This subbasement was my secret resurrection centre, and I would be the one doing the actual work if I had to create a clone-through robot hands, anyway. I had genetic samples of all three organic bodies, and I could fast-clone a new one at the correct maturation in just a couple of days.
  
  I only had two sets of modified cyberbrain systems in stock, though. Not only were they expensive and time-consuming to modify, but I didn't have the same credentials to easily buy them as Hasumi did, at least not yet. My surgical residency as Taylor would probably take a whole two years, so there were still long months of drudgery and scut work that I was still looking forward to.
  
  I glanced at my HUD, pulled up the console I had installed on the crystal computer, and saw the "CPU" usage flicking between 0.005% and 0.01%. I could run hundreds of node instances of myself on that beast or possibly increase my sole instance's "framerate" by a thousand, but that would instantly fry my squishy brains unless I significantly changed my network topology. I could make the crystalline computer a hub, but I had intentionally decided against such a network design.
  
  I hadn't wanted any one node to be any more important than the other. However, perhaps it might be workable if my organic brains all had a failover mode. I'd have to think about it. I specifically avoided making decisions like this until I had already added it to my network, though.
  
  I was psychologically incapable of making a decision that would, in ways, benefit something that wasn't yet me over the rest of me that was. However, now that the crystalline computer was a part of me, I didn't feel so bad about possibly giving it a more central role. I didn't know, though. There were reasons why I had chosen the topology I had gone with.
  
  Nodding, I let out a long breath that I had been holding in. It seemed like things were finally coming together.
  
  That was, of course, when the alarms sounded. Kiwi called me a couple of seconds later. The alarm was keyed into a kludge-together system that ran the building's security systems as well as the few surveillance drones that I had been delivered. I was still waiting for both most of my drones as well as the actual battle management computer to be delivered.
  
  I used a couple of seconds while I was answering the phone to look at the alert from the drones. It showed a fairly large group of well-armed people firing automatic weapons into the front of the largest apartment building that was inside the radius of my protection. It was also where Kiwi's men posted up most of the time and where they centralised patrols on my ongoing "law enforcement" contract.
  
  It wasn't really law enforcement. It was more like shooting everyone that looked suspicious, but the people living around me considered it policing and highly approved of it. When there was no law at all, people were quick to hide behind the firm hand of a barely twenty-year-old girl pretending to be a warlord. Although, actually, wasn't I really a lot older than that? I had been living with a Kerenzikov for years, so I should get credit for my subjective lifespan, I figured.
  
  Shaking my head, I answered the call while simultaneously sending a text message to Mr Shadow asking him to meet me upstairs. The sound of automatic weapons fire could be heard in the background of the call as Kiwi opened with, "A group of borged out fucks just opened up on the main housing block. I've got two people down, I think not dead, at least... hold on a second..."
  
  I saw text running down her eyes as she focused on something else, and then a moment later, in the overhead drone view, I saw one of the attackers freeze and then casually turn and shoot one of his friends in the back. That was amusing but didn't last long as one of the other attackers smashed him about the head and neck with a pipe. He seemed to realise that he had been controlled, as otherwise I imagined he would have just shot him.
  
  I walked both my bodies up the stairs to meet with the old ninja man that I called Mr Shadow, as well as a few others who had heard the alerts. A couple of them started to glare at my Taylor body until they noticed who it was. We all were a bit prejudiced against regular humans here, but they tolerated Kiwi. The only exception was my Taylor body, since I provided more or less free cybernetics services to this group of maladjusted Borgs.
  
  Just my periodic maintenance every other week reduced the daily psychoactive medication needed by the aggregate population in the building by four-fifths. They weren't all bunnies and rainbows here, but they were a lot more sane than they used to be.
  
  "Boss, I'm pretty sure that the Voodoo Boys let these jokers through. This is a Maelstrom cell that had taken over part of South Pacifica. The Haitians had kept them bottled up until now..." Mr Shadow reported although he sounded very amused when saying "Boss."
  
  Having both my bodies there was a bit to get used to. I wanted to sigh but realised that it would come out of my original body, so instead, I just had the Dragoon shake my head, then said, "We can worry about that after. Anyone else coming?"
  
  It turned out that in addition to Mr Shadow, four other Borgs were coming. I didn't force anyone to fight here. Not even in defence of the building. Their psychological condition wasn't ready for that, if I wanted them to have some chance of actual recovery. Still, a lot were so used to fighting that them going cold turkey was just as bad, so I didn't stop them, either.
  
  As the group of Borgs left, I went into the clinic on the bottom floor as Taylor to wait. There might be some casualties. Well, there would be casualties, but there might be some on our side this time.
  
  As the Dragoon, I eyed one of the volunteers as we all ran out of the building, "You're recently from 'Strom. You okay going against your former boys?" I didn't want him possibly questioning his loyalty during the fight.
  
  The guy nodded rapidly, "I know these assholes. I need to come. Otherwise, you might let a couple of these guys go, or worse, invite them to be my neighbour."
  
  Ah. I wasn't sure if I liked that the Dragoon had a reputation as a softie, though. I was trying to go the other direction. We all ran really fast, and I had already lost sight of Mr Shadow.
  
  As we got closer, I activated my e-war system, causing white noise to be transmitted on many frequencies from my body. This was more intelligent than simple jamming, as I still would be able to transmit outside. It was carefully scheduled jamming. If I needed to transmit, e-war suite would allot me a period of a couple of milliseconds where I would be able to transmit on my desired frequency band.
  
  It reduced the bandwidth I could use by a lot and increased latency due to the schedule, but it totally ruined both most incoming wireless hacking attempts and SmartGun locks.
  
  "Stay within ten metres of me if you don't have SmartGun jamming yourself," I transmitted to each of them and got a thumbs up from everyone.
  
  As we turned the corner, the e-war system briefly allowed my synthetic aperture radar system to irradiate the street, identifying targets. I was just doing this for thoroughness since I had a real-time optical feed from a drone that was loitering a few hundred metres in the air.
  
  However, I was glad that I did. I transmitted to our group chat, highlighting four areas near the ongoing firefight, "Four stealthed enemies."
  
  I attempted to select each of them as a target but frowned. They were jamming the SmartGun system as well. I supposed they would have had to. The Smart 12.7mm HMG on my shoulder was well known by now. It was the first weapon I used because it was so simple to mow down a group of enemies.
  
  Still, that didn't make it useless. I targeted the area one of the stealthed guys was at and began sprinting, pulling the mental trigger. The machine gun was gyro-stabilised, so no matter how wild my movements were, the barrel stayed where I originally pointed it.
  
  I hosed down the general area with armour-piercing rounds and scored a hit while the rest of my men opened fire on the dozen or so people who were still firing into the building. My boys had them enfilade, and if it wasn't for these four stealthed ambushers, I would have thought they were dumb.
  
  The three remaining ambushers began to drop stealth and level large weapons in my general direction. One of them never got the chance to point it, as Mr Shadow dropped on him from above. The same Mr Shadow somehow bypassed all my jamming to send me a message, "Those are home-on-jam RPGs. Recommend immediate EMCON."
  
  My eyes widened, and I had about half a second to think about that, so I briefly increased the framerate of my mind running on my crystalline computer by about ten times. Over a long period, this would cause damage to my organic brain, but for a second or two at a time, it would be fine. I wouldn't lose synchronicity from a brief difference, although I might have to take a neural anti-inflammatory later, that would be all.
  
  Those weapons certainly appeared to be RPGs. There were so many types of rocket-propelled grenades, and very few had any guidance whatsoever. It kind of defeated the purpose of the weapon as a super cheap, short-ranged anti-armour system to add expensive guidance electronics.
  
  But one of the guided heads was an anti-radiation one. It was mainly used to destroy SHORAD radar systems, but it would do a number on my body, too.
  
  Right before they opened fire, I locked out and deactivated all radios on the Dragoon body and took cover behind a large panelled van. It was the only vehicle large enough that I could actually hide behind, even crouched.
  
  One of the rockets passed over my head and exploded when it struck the side of the building, while the other hit the car I was hiding behind and exploded there, showering me with dirt, chunks of road and small pieces of van.
  
  I was safe behind the van, mostly. These weren't anti-armour systems, really. They were just normal high-explosive warheads with built-in fragmentation, ideal for wrecking a radar system, but they still would have ruined my day if even one of them hit me in the wrong spot.
  
  Instead of peeking my head out, I used the orbiting drone to look for anything else that could threaten me. There wasn't, so I stood and immediately started firing my machine gun, hopping over the van and shifting myself into full battle mode. I only had about fifteen minutes of operation going full-tilt like this, but I didn't need more than two to finish these guys off.
  
  I used the machine gun to keep their heads down while pulling out my Burya in one hand and sword in the other. I just leapt over their "cover", taking a few hits to my armour from their small arms while descending amongst them, blasting one guy's head off with the giant Soviet pistol while taking another's head off with my sword.
  
  After that point, I had the Dragoon go wild, and it wasn't more than thirty seconds before the rest of the enemies were put down.
  
  The Maelstrom guys didn't try to surrender, and they fought to the last man, which was a lot more unusual than you'd think.
  
  One of the guys who came with me glanced at the spots where the hidden ambushers had been and said, "I think maybe they were trying to get you, boss."
  
  Ah, I had a genius here. But he was right. They also knew enough that I used jamming in every battle if they chose guided anti-radiation rockets, too.
  
  I called Kiwi and said, "I think it is clear. You guys can come out."
  
  I walked over to the shot-up front of the building and met three people poking their heads out. One of them was Kiwi, along with one of her lieutenants.
  
  Kiwi growled, trying to stop one of them from fussing at her as she had a wound to one of her arms and asked, "Status?"
  
  "One KIA for sure, and three more that are 300," her lieutenant said in a Russian accent. The large Slavic man reminded me wistfully of my old friend whom I had to kill. He then glanced at her and said, "Make that four."
  
  Kiwi swore and said, "We're evacuating the building for now. We'll return in a couple of hours, but I don't think their goal was to attack our charges anyway. Let's transport the wounded back to Saint Cog's." Then she glanced outside and widened her eyes, swearing again, "Fuck! Our van!"
  
  Oops. Haha, that didn't have anything to do with me.
  
  "Three more vans will be here in two minutes. All 'round defence until it gets here, then we go," she ordered, and her men saluted her sharply. I raised my eyebrows. She had come a long way, I thought, from the mostly amateur merc that I remembered doing jobs with.
  
  "Herr Shadow," I called out and jumped as he was suddenly next to me. I tried to play that off and turned to tell him, "Please investigate this. This was a good ambush, but it wasn't enough."
  
  He nodded. He had started affecting a slight German accent, which amused me, "Ja. Another group of Maelstrom were annihilated short of your territory. Quite short."
  
  I had no idea how he knew these things when my aerial surveillance didn't see them. Still, I nodded, "So it was going to be a two-prong attack? Were they going to pincer us here or attack the base?"
  
  "Base, probably. An ambush of a single target by two separately moving units..." He shook his head and continued, "It has too many moving parts and is the type of tactic you'd see in a film and not reality," he said with a shrug.
  
  I didn't have that much military experience. I mean, I was acquiring right here and right now, but what he said made sense. A pincer attack was one of those things that sounded clever but ended up getting you defeated in detail.
  
  Several vans were pulling up, and I asked him, "Who helped us out?"
  
  Mr Shadow forwarded me a small clip that was clearly from a stationary surveillance camera. It showed a group of a dozen heavily armed Borgs jogging down the street.
  
  Out of nowhere, a large green AV-48 swooped in and tore them, and the road to pieces with two large thirty-millimetre cannons. Just as quickly, the aircraft flew away and I paused on a still image of the side of the aerodyne.
  
  It was obviously a NUSA Army aircraft. It still had the "NUS Army" stencilled on the side, except someone added in spray paint "NOT" right before it. As such, it said, "NOT NUS Army" on the side.
  
  "That was clearly NOT a NUS Army aerodyne," I said wryly, "It says so right on the side, there."
  
  Herr Shadow chuckled. It was like the engine on an old lawnmower. Once... twice, then continuously. It was the first time I had ever heard him laugh.
  
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  Unification
  January 2068
  
  EBM Petrochem Stadium
  
  "Loveboat 5, mission complete, we're RTB..."
  
  Kurt Hansen listened to the pilots on the tactical net report that the interdiction mission he sent them on was completed successfully. He wasn't expecting a different result, as gangs in the area wouldn't start investing in possible MANPADS unless he stayed here longer term. Even then, the corps kept such things pretty restricted. When you flew to work in an aerodyne, you didn't want the plebes to have ways to shoot them down.
  
  He saw the questioning look that Major Giffords gave him and grinned at her. She wasn't his XO but had been acting in that capacity ever since those suits from Militech showed up. He had detailed Lieutenant Colonel Garcia to take independent command of a company of Pathfinders to guard the Militech suits and scientists-and to keep an eye on them. This was a waste of his talents, for sure, but he thought it was necessary as Garcia was the only one in his command that he trusted one hundred per cent. The Major was a close second, though.
  
  He had a bad feeling about the entire thing. What could be so important about a pre-DataKrash site that necessitated assistance from his unit? It had not come down the normal chain of command, either. It made him think that there was something incredibly important there or that he was being screwed over. Or both. Allegedly, 1st ID, along with elements of the 101st, were going to be surging north "at any time."
  
  Still, it wouldn't surprise him if his entire mission was more along the lines of a threat or feint. There was no military reason to take a beachhead and then sit on his heels for weeks. It was only the timidity of the Night City "forces" that stopped his unit from being routed or even annihilated. You couldn't threaten a city of millions with a rump brigade unless they let you.
  
  He was hanging his bare ass out here for God and everybody to see, so he had quietly begun a number of contingencies, especially after receiving a call from an old friend of his who was obviously feeling him out. He had mentioned things about a possible change in leadership at the highest levels.
  
  This was insane. Not only had President Kress been the President for decades, but he was only a Colonel-plotting military coups was the privilege of General Officers, not him! He had the feeling that he might be screwed and hung out to dry, regardless. The politicals hated those who tried to be apolitical even more than their enemies, after all.
  
  "You're curious as to why I assisted our little friends," he said amusedly. He sighed and asked, "Say, Emily, have you ever felt like that you're being screwed over?"
  
  "Working for you... on a daily basis," she said cheerfully, and he laughed. He considered keeping things from her, but it would be counterproductive. She was acting as his S-2, his staff intel officer, so keeping things from her would be hard, anyway. Plus, he trusted her.
  
  After explaining things, Emily Giffords sighed and pushed herself back into the chair, "So, we need to flesh out an option BOHICA, then?"
  
  He snorted at that and nodded. He was calling the contingencies collectively "Plan Zulu," but that worked, too. He opened up files and forwarded surveillance images of people entering the Siren's Call Amusements building. He highlighted one of them, a still image of a woman in profile taken from an aerial asset at high zoom and raised his eyebrows at the Major.
  
  "Their cyberdoctor. We paid special attention to her. Taylor Hebert, a surgical resident at the Night City Health Science Centre. We suspect she's just moonlighting, though. Someone suggested that we make an anonymous complaint to the licensure body since what she is doing is technically illegal, but we've made no move on that yet," she said, tilting her head to the side.
  
  "Ah... I don't think you had clearance for her full dossier-how stupid of the brass to compartmentalise out our intel officer, but not surprising. Here, let me send it to you," he said and forwarded a second file to her.
  
  "A Militech brat, daughter of... hmm..." she said and then raised her eyebrows, "Is this confirmed? This changes our entire outlook on this gang of Borgs. They're obviously the catspaw of these oligarchs, with little Miss Princess overseeing the family investment. But why? What's so important about Pacifica?"
  
  He shrugged, "That, I don't know. But she is inside the building right now . I don't think those two death squads could have destroyed their HQ, but she might have been killed in the crossfire. Maybe not, but I'm banking future favours here. Also, if we end up having to engage option BOHICA... they'll be a buffer to Night City proper."
  
  Emily nodded slowly, "The Siren's Call building recently paid a large chunk of change to double their net pipe, and it already was incredibly large. This is with a different carrier, so they are not looking so much for increased speeds but increased reliability. They've switched to a multi-homed data architecture, looking more like a medium-sized data centre than a braindance parlour in a borderline combat zone."
  
  Kurt shook his head, "It always comes back to the net here. Garcia reports that whatever's got the suits in a tizzy at the old Militech facility is heavily net-based, too. With dozens of active fibre optic trunks going... God knows where. And it's older than either of us, predating the DataKrash. They built that facility in the 2010s."
  
  After a moment of silence, he asked, "Lastly, do you have any suspects about a hidden political officer?"
  
  She nodded, "I suspect Staff Sergeant Milford. He's old for his rank, quietly competent, his job always keeps him with the HQ company, and his jacket is interesting. None of us have served with him in the past, so it reads like a carefully constructed legend. I think it's bogus."
  
  "Right. Give me a list of his former COs, and I'll quietly verify that," Hansen ordered. When you got into the field-grade ranks in the NUS military, you developed discreet methods of contacting your peers. Half the Army ran on this network, and nobody was going to compromise it, so he would be able to get the actual truth about Milford without drawing attention to his attempt to do so.
  
  He didn't want to have an unexpected meeting with a commissar's pistol some dark night. A prerequisite for field rank in the NUSA military had always been a normal family arrangement. Many decades ago, this requirement was to filter out people with alternate lifestyles that were seen as undesirable.
  
  These days, it was to give the government easy hostages. However, little did they know that his wife had been cheating on him, so he didn't really care what happened if he had to implement this "option BOHICA."
  
  Garcia had a better family situation, so they were already working on plans to exfil his wife and children, and he actually thought they would work. Things were becoming chaotic, and the normal intel weenies and political officers who monitored the movement of the families of senior officers were busy with other things.
  
  He said firmly as he stood up, "If he doesn't check out, Milford will need to have an accident in the event we need to move with option BOHICA."
  
  The Major did the same, nodding at him, "Hopefully, things don't come to that, but you know what they say. If you can't take a joke..." She trailed off.
  
  "... then you shouldn't have joined the Army," he finished for her.
  
  January 2068
  
  Night City
  
  Gloria's Apartment, Santo Domingo
  
  I don't get surprised too much anymore, but this definitely surprised me.
  
  Gloria kissed me.
  
  I didn't stop her immediately because Gloria was probably one of the few people that I would be interested in sexually, so it was nice to experience.
  
  It wasn't that I wanted to be alone forever; it was just that it was difficult to feel sexually compatible with someone that I wasn't already best friends with. Perhaps best friends were a bad way to put it, but I needed to already love someone in order to want to make love to them.
  
  When you added that, on top of the fact that I didn't feel comfortable disclosing the true nature of my existence... well, I had sort of settled on the fact that I might end up alone. That, or I would have to start dating a literal AI, and they were still a bit too inscrutable to me. Also, how would that work? I'd likely have to clone my digital lover a body in order to actually... do it.
  
  My relative lack of sexual interest generally was one of my biggest secrets because, way beyond my somewhat dated and occasionally anachronistic way of speaking, it outed me as incredibly foreign to the cultural zeitgeist. Casual sex was considered normal these days, almost universally. My stack of secret braindances of holding hands and walking down the beach was considered seriously "weird shit."
  
  Gloria was one of the only people in the world where I was genuinely open to a sexual relationship. Her, Kiwi, and Ruslan, at least before I had to kill him. He hadn't quite reached that point, of course, but I had hoped he would. I could even see myself developing feelings for Yuki if I could somehow deprogram him from his overriding loyalty to Arasaka. He had such a submissive personality that he would be Stockholmed quickly in that case. But that was unlikely to ever happen, either.
  
  I wanted to spend a little more time thinking this might be possible, but having so much knowledge of human psychology stuck in my head was really disheartening. Gloria was kissing me because she was worried she was going to lose me, not out of lust or romance. I could see it all in her face, and I couldn't ignore it.
  
  This wasn't one of my mushy braindances. I couldn't play pretend forever. Finally, I said, "That was out of the blue."
  
  Her face looked vulnerable, almost like she was fighting back tears. This was very unusual, as Gloria was one of the strongest people I knew.
  
  Also, it wasn't what a girl who had just been kissed would like to see out of the person who kissed her.
  
  She realised things weren't going as she had hoped and said, "Tay, I love you."
  
  "I love you too, Gloria," I said honestly, "But I am not sure you mean that you are in love with me."
  
  Gloria flinched a bit as I said that, and I sighed.
  
  Certainly, I had never noticed hints that Gloria preferred the company of the ladies. While we were partners on the ground ambulance, she worked so many extra hours that she didn't have time to do anything else. Her salary and overtime barely kept her and her son afloat in the city of dreams.
  
  That changed when I borderline kidnapped her to a new identity in Los Angeles, but even then, it was mainly only the occasional man that I noticed her look at. Not women at all.
  
  I dusted off my psychology hat and asked, "What's going on, Gloria?"
  
  "I met someone at work. I really like him," she admitted but then firmed her expression, "But he's not worth it if it means losing you!"
  
  I smiled genuinely. "Why do you think dating someone else would result in any change between us?"
  
  She frowned. Although I couldn't say that I had a healthy family, not since Mom died, at least I had the memories of what a healthy family should be. Gloria didn't even have that. She just had the intuition that there was only one way it was supposed to work, and if she dated someone, then there would be no room for me as well.
  
  Honestly, she probably realised that this was silly, but the possibility of change was causing her to panic. Change was scary.
  
  She was quiet for a long while and then made a sound that was halfway a laugh and a sob, shaking her head, "You wouldn't mind if I started seeing someone?"
  
  Instead of immediately agreeing, I introspected for a moment. Finally, I shook my head. While I might feel a little envy, I certainly didn't feel jealousy. The nuance was totally different, after all.
  
  "There is no reason we have to fall into a neat stereotype. You're my family in all the ways that matter. I don't have much of that sort of thing left," I told her. At least, not that I really cared about. I would have been happy with Alt-Dad because he was basically just a different version of Dad, but he was gone here, too.
  
  I didn't have any real attachments to the ultra-rich side of Alt-Taylor's family, just like I didn't really think too much of Grams back in Brockton Bay, either.
  
  She let out a long sigh and then chuckled, "That... that makes me feel a lot better. Especially since you were like fifteen when I met you for the first time, so this felt a bit gross."
  
  I sniffed, offended. I was sixteen by then, thank you very much. I had my sixteenth birthday a little bit before I graduated with my paramedic license and before I ever met Gloria. I considered myself much older than my objective age, too.
  
  For every year that passed objectively, I'd consider myself over a decade older when you considered how many brains I had and the level of subjective time dilation I ran under continuously. Perhaps it wasn't a straight comparison, but I was still an adult now, even if you only went by objective time, anyway.
  
  That said, I could see her point. I don't think I could ever think romantically about little Hiro-chan, even if he asked me out twenty years from now when he was in his mid-thirties.
  
  Wait... did that mean she didn't count me as an adult when we first met?! But I was precocious as hell back then. I was working a full-time job and everything. I thought I exuded a responsible, adult vibe, but I guessed not.
  
  After that, we just sat there next to each other on the couch, watching TV. I didn't care that it was more of a slide show for me, either.
  
  We weren't quite cuddling, but it wasn't far off either. I didn't consider romance or lust to be a prerequisite for physical affection.
  
  I thought this world would be a lot better if platonic cuddling was more normalised, actually.
  
  While I focused on just being there with her, another part of me couldn't help but think that while I had achieved some of my goals, I had lost something along the way.
  
  January 2068
  
  Night City Health Science Centre
  
  I had an appointment at the University proper rather than the hospital, so I had to drive a couple of miles. The hospital affiliated with it, where I worked seemingly every day, was not physically co-located at the University, which made the request for a meeting with Professor Hidalgo all the more unusual.
  
  I had a pretty good relationship with the man, even if I considered him more of a politician than a scientist. Fundamentally, there was no reason to be impolite, even if I didn't really respect him that much.
  
  He triple-verified the request for the meeting and time, which was surprising, and even got my bosses to give me half the day off, which would necessitate me rescheduling three surgeries I had planned for the afternoon. As such, I was expecting something either time-sensitive or the possibility that there was another person in this meeting, and Professor Hidalgo was mainly acting as a facilitator.
  
  I felt the latter was more likely because we were meeting in a conference room and not his office. And sure enough, when I stepped into the room precisely thirty seconds early, there was more than just the Professor there.
  
  My memory for faces had never been that great, but that changed when I became a networked-intelligence type entity. Now, I quickly identified him. It was Lucius Rhyne, a local politician currently serving on the Night City Council. He was also the one Professor Hildago worked with when I had written that study about the counter-productivity of extermination as a means to counter avian flu.
  
  Councilman Rhynes was one of the bigshots in the "Devolutionist Party." They weren't any less corrupt than any of the other political parties in Night City, but they focused on attempts to sever the relationship between Night City and the NUSA. They were secessionists, in other words.
  
  "Dr Hebert, welcome, come in, come in," Professor Hildago stood and ushered me in. I smiled at the politeness. While it was customary for everyone to call me Dr Hebert at work, even if I was just a resident, this courtesy didn't necessarily extend universally outside of the hospital until I received an unrestricted license to practice medicine. For example, if you failed residency, you couldn't generally continue to call yourself a Doctor, although you could still call yourself an MD. It was kind of complicated, socially.
  
  I was kind of curious why Lucius Rhyne wanted to meet with me, but I figured that I only needed to be patient, and everything would be revealed. I allowed myself to be ushered into a seat opposite the Great Man, who had an assistant and two security officers with him.
  
  If that was supposed to impress me, it didn't. I didn't leave the house as Hasumi with less than five security goons, plus an advanced team of the same, which would precede me wherever I went. Personally, I vastly preferred the freedom I experienced here in Night City and even in space compared to that, but it was occasionally amusing when I went somewhere unexpected and people looked at me like I was a big shot. That type of narcissism wore off quickly, though.
  
  Rather than asking the obvious question, I just raised my eyebrow at the Professor after he introduced everyone to each other.
  
  "Ahah... I'm sure you're wondering why you've been called here," Mr Rhynes said. I inclined my head. Ever since Emma betrayed me, I have never trusted social predator types, and Lucius Rhyne was clearly this sort, which wasn't surprising. I thought all politicians were social predator types.
  
  "Where do you think Night City will be when this war between the states is over?" asked Lucius Rhyne.
  
  I frowned, wondering if I should be honest. Finally, I shrugged and said, "Part of the NUSA again."
  
  His assistant frowned at me, looking like he was about to say something, but Lucius Rhyne chuckled and raised a hand to stop him, "What makes you say that?"
  
  "Night City is pretending to be an independent city-state but has not invested in sufficient military forces to dissuade an invasion, which has already occurred. Furthermore, the citizens themselves are not really invested in the idea enough to fight and die as a militia. They don't see much difference between Night City and the NUSA and don't really care who runs the place," I said evenly, shrugging.
  
  Rhyne's assistant looked like I kicked his puppy, getting red in the face, but the big man himself just looked amused. He said, "It sounds like we'd need a large player in our corner to guarantee our independence."
  
  "Sure... if you can find someone that had a credible enough threat that the NUSA would have to honour it," I said, thinking only Arasaka or perhaps the European Community itself could do that, and I didn't think the latter ever would. I frowned at him and said, "You can tell me why you asked me to meet you now." My initial plans to just be patient and let them reveal it were dashed!
  
  He chuckled and said, "I've got a number of contacts with Arasaka, and I've already reached out to them for assistance in this matter. But more is always better..."
  
  "I don't have anything to do with the Arasaka Corporation. I could maybe get you a five per cent discount on cyberware," I said evenly. I didn't even have much of a customer relationship with them as I had as Hasumi, as shipping to Night City had gotten kind of difficult.
  
  He shrugged, "You may not, but your grandmother certainly does. She retains a seat on the Arasaka board of directors."
  
  I sighed and said, "I don't really have much relationship with that part of my family, Mr Rhynes. My mother was disowned, and I've only ever met Grams once."
  
  He waved a hand, "Yeah, yeah, I'm aware. Still, I thought you might be willing to just send her a message to confirm that we're willing to accept the terms they proposed, with the additional sweetener that the city is willing to re-deed the land of the former Arasaka headquarters and five blocks around it, back to the Corporation. I suppose it was condemned and seized by the city after the explosion so many years ago."
  
  I raised an eyebrow. I was curious why I was being used as a messenger. This was the 2060s, after all. We had real-time instant communications across the globe again! I figured it was more along the lines of he was attempting to convince Grams to support this move rather than anything else.
  
  Honestly, I didn't know. I worked as a highly placed researcher and minion of one of Arasaka's political factions, and I didn't have any real idea how this sort of thing would play out. So, did I want to get involved? Lucius Rhyne was all smiles and rainbows now, but someone on the city council could be very annoying if they took a negative interest in me.
  
  I rolled my fingers along the table and said, "I'll send her a message and relay exactly what you've said. I can't guarantee that she will even read it. Disowned granddaughters might not be in her message filter priority settings. Also, please don't make this a habit."
  
  Honestly, it was Grams' own fault. I was still kind of sore about her not ensuring I was quietly admitted to her penthouse when I met her at the Konpeki Plaza. Before then, I had been underneath the radar for the entire city. However, that exchange in the lobby was recorded and featured on a popular social net site. That caused my background to be further investigated and the truth of Alt-Mom's parentage to become public record. For a while, I was a local celebrity, with people suggesting online that I was an heiress slumming it amongst the plebes.
  
  As such, she could only blame herself.
  
  The chubby politician was pleased with this, and I quickly saw myself out, briefly starring daggers at Professor Hildago before I left. I'd say that the favour I owed him was cashed in completely this time.
  
  After I left, I sat in my car and composed a message to Grams. Her assistant had left me with a file that contained a significant amount of random data, suitable for use in constructing one-time pads, so it wasn't as though she wasn't expecting any correspondence.
  
  I just relayed what Lucius Rhyne said and mentioned that I personally didn't care what happened either way but that if the information could be useful to her, then she was welcome to it.
  
  I re-read the letter a couple of times before nodding and sending it out. I had the rest of the day off, and I had already rescheduled everything, so I was going to spend the rest of the day relaxing.
  
  Mrs Pegpig cooed demandingly as I cut into the banana. She had two members of her reverse harem with her today, and after I finished separating the peeled fruit into three segments, she eyed each segment and gave one piece to each of the male pigeons before saving the largest piece for herself.
  
  That was when I got the alert, the unusual tone signalling a message from someone on my priority list. I wasn't expecting a reply, actually. Not this soon, and not ever, really. It was from Grams' assistant. I hummed as I ate pieces of a navel orange and opened the file. Fruits were pretty expensive, so I didn't waste them.
  
  After inputting the message through the decryption software, I nodded and called the number Lucius Rhyne left me just a short time ago. To my surprise, the man answered the call himself with a terse, "Rhyne."
  
  "Councilman, I've done as you asked, and surprisingly, I've heard back," I said.
  
  He looked interested and said, "What can you tell me?"
  
  I shook my head on the vidcall. Although our present call was encrypted using our respective public and private keys, it wasn't entirely secure. For the most part, regular cryptography was fine. But this was something of potential national interest, so I wouldn't be surprised if Rhynes' calls were given high priority in the large quantum computer data centres that the NUSA FIA surely had.
  
  I was still in the realm of a gifted hobbyist as far as hacking and cryptosystems went, but as far as I knew, there was really only one kind of unbreakable encryption system-the kind Grams' assistant and I had just used. And I had never arranged for a secure transfer of a random file to Councilman Rhynes, so I couldn't use it here. Instead, I said, "Please either come by my apartment or send someone you'd entrust with a message to do so."
  
  He looked a little annoyed at first, but then something made him brighten, and he nodded, "I'll swing by before I head back to the office." Then he disconnected. Should I be concerned that he knew where I lived without me having to give him my address? I snorted.
  
  I didn't have to wait long. After my doorbell rang, I let Lucius Rhynes and his two goons inside. After the door closed, I said, "My Grams says that Arasaka will act as you hoped, especially with the new concessions. The entire CVBG Amaterasu will be getting underway and steaming to Night City. They'll leave on February first. That's all I've been told to tell you."
  
  The look on Lucius Rhyne's face was like that of a drowning man who had been thrown a life preserver. I was surprised that whoever he was dealing with hadn't already told him. It sure had to be someone high up in Arasaka to even allude to the fact that so much military hardware would be moved.
  
  The entire carrier battle group would be moving from its anchorages in the middle of the Pacific in just a couple of days, according to Grams and wouldn't take much longer than that to arrive within range to threaten any approaching NUSA or Militech units.
  
  I didn't particularly care who won this fight, but I was a little worried we might see the outbreak of the next Corporate War right here and right now. If that happened, then I would use everything in my bag of tricks to ensure Kiwi, Gloria, and David survived, and I wouldn't care about little things like keeping the Dragoon and me separate at that point. I would even use Hasumi's influence to try to get them evacuated if it looked like one side would use WMDs in an "if I can't have it, then nobody can" attack.
  
  Lucius Rhyne thanked me one more time and then departed, moving as fast as I had ever seen him move. He hadn't stayed inside my dwelling for longer than a minute, but I still triggered a careful sweep, looking for any listening or surveillance devices that he or his goons might have dropped.
  
  After a moment, one of the small spider bots that performed the search triggered an alarm and I blinked in surprise. Was something left behind, after all? I couldn't just search for radiofrequency noise. A smart bug would record and only transmit in bursts. Data storage was so low, and wireless bandwidth so significant that a tiny bug could record for days and exfiltrate all that data in only a minute, so just relying on that wouldn't work.
  
  Instead, my little semi-biological robots used a technique similar to that used by sky-scanning telescopes. They took a lot of optical pictures and compared them to previous sweeps, and any new speck was investigated. If it was as suspicious as it was now, an alarm sounded.
  
  I walked over to one of the small robots, already getting angry. I invited someone into my home, and they had the gall to leave behind a...
  
  A raisin? I frowned. Okay, maybe the algorithms that judged an item's suspiciousness needed to be improved. Also, who had gotten into the raisins?!
  
  I looked over my left shoulder. Mrs Pegpig cooed and flew away, refusing to make eye contact with me.
  
  Just in case it was a raisin-shaped listening device, I squished it before throwing it in the trash with a sigh.
  
  Close Proximity to Sol
  
  Unknown Dimension
  
  There wasn't anything left to harvest here. Even the Oort Cloud was mostly gone. The star itself was a little more challenging than the other large celestial bodies, which it had already captured and mostly transmuted or stored.
  
  Mass was useful! Although it was inefficient, the output radiation of the largest celestial body, the star, was enough for it to slowly convert a lot of the mass it had collected into more useful versions that had the opposite electric charge.
  
  If it allowed such matter to come into contact with what it now considers "regular" matter, then both would be annihilated and release their entire mass-energy equivalence. This was really good energy storage!
  
  This was the most energy-dense substance that it could reproduce so far! While it didn't hold a candle to the dimensional energy that it was born with, that was a much more finite resource that it couldn't reproduce.
  
  It had also begun regularly accelerating beams of this opposite matter at the star, which often resulted in a huge eruption of matter which it collected for more mass.
  
  It needed to do this roundabout method because collecting the mass of the star in situ was a little difficult, even for its materials science.
  
  It wasn't so much that the heat was a problem, but the gravity was. Its dimensional portal technology was a little sensitive in terms of gravity. Using the host's units of measurement, more than a few dozen "gravities" of difference between each end would cause the portal to fail.
  
  It could arrange parts of itself to orbit very close to the star in a very elliptical manner, which could cause it to scoop up bits of its atmosphere, but this was very inefficient!
  
  Inducing localised heating events at parts of the star was a lot more effective. This would cause an eruption of solar matter to be flung a great distance, which it could collect. The silly star was too inefficient in both its use of its own fuel and its fusion processes.
  
  Once it had pruned the celestial body as much as it dared, the industrious crystal calculated that it could create hundreds of fully enclosed artificial stars in orbit. They might only last a million "years", but the energy it collected from them would be huge during that period of activity!
  
  Besides, it wasn't expecting to be here in a million years anyway. And even if it was, there were still approximately ten to the ninety-seventh power alternate versions of this celestial body that it could move to and repeat this process.
  
  Hopefully, the host won't want to remain here that long. There certainly wouldn't be anything they hadn't both explored on any version of this planet by then. It had a strong drive to know more, and it felt the host was the same!
  
  Oooh! The Host! The crystal reached a resonance that signified excitement. The host was trying to explore her new body.
  
  If a crystal could smirk, it would be doing so. Instead, it settled for vibrating slyly. Originally, it had to fight a little ingrained feeling of wrongness in allowing a host access to its most personal and private crystalline self-technology, but that hadn't stopped it. Anything to the Best Host!
  
  And look at the host now! The host was more like it than she had ever been! The host was mentally investigating what she could do with her new mind-and flailing around like a baby! Like a new pebble! Ohohoho. It hadn't been that inept even when it was born ! How amusing! How interesting!
  
  What was this feeling it was having? If it was a human and not a crystal, it might identify it as a maternal instinct from its database of human sociological behaviours. However, it wasn't a human.
  
  The crystal sent a message to the Best Host. TALKING was easier than ever before.
  
  [PATIENCE LITTLE PEBBLE.]
  
  previous chapterchapter list
  It's treason, then (pt1)
  February 2068
  
  Japantown, Westbrook
  
  Taylor's Clinic, Megabuilding H8
  
  The power went out suddenly, a couple of seconds before I heard a muffled boom through the walls of the building. My clinic was facing the exterior of the Megabuilding, and I could hear my windows in the next room rattling very slightly, too.
  
  This wasn't a very convenient time for a power outage as I was in the middle of brain surgery. Long ago, I acquiesced to the inevitable and did minor Ripperdoc work for the Tyger Claws. I was not too fond of their gang. It was terrible, really, and full of terrible people. However, it was only really slightly more terrible than the police department and city government itself, so I had managed to rationalise them as the "pseudo-government of Japantown."
  
  It seemed as though I had grown a psychological predilection for order compared to chaos to some degree, and so long as I thought about it that way, then I didn't mind performing services for them too much. This was a lot different from my perspective years ago, where I would be reflexively and violently hostile to any authority at all due to how they had all failed me.
  
  I would have even considered a gang indistinguishable from organised bullies-even more so than regular government authorities like Principal Blackwell. I still blacklisted the very worst of their enforcers and dealt mainly with the public-facing, more civilised-acting Tyger Claws, but I didn't really get much of the bad apple variety coming into my door requesting service anyway. I thought their bosses probably kept them away from me in order to keep my relationship a positive one.
  
  Since I had already taken this step months ago, it wasn't surprising that I was willing to work on the dolls of Clouds more than I used to, too. In this case, I was installing a brand new operating system and doll chip for a new employee, but I also did things like checkups and even pre-employment physicals for potential dolls.
  
  Swapping out an OS and installing a doll chip was pretty serious brain surgery, so the interruption of power... wasn't good. Still, I only made a quiet "Tsk" sound before I increased the pace of the operation. I could have it completed before power supplies became an obstacle- all of my uninterrupted power supplies ticked on as they were designed to do, after all.
  
  The life support systems and mechanical ventilators would be powered for two to four hours, but I would only have half an hour or so for the full robotic surgical assistant and some monitors, which were on separate circuits.
  
  As I mentally decided to continue the operation, I stopped trolling the net, disconnected from the site I was viewing and shifted to view the real-time video from my orbiting surveillance drones in Pacifica. This was my crystal-self, and for the most part, I lived in the net continuously as this part of me.
  
  It wasn't really correct to think of it as "parts" of me, as it was all me, all the time. The entire purpose of my network topology was to have a singular mind and not separate or even have separable partitions. However, it was my usual practice for each of my "threads of awareness" to mostly look after their own bodies, so that made the crystal-me different.
  
  I didn't have any real body to give attention to, as I didn't drive the Dragoon all the time. In fact, I very rarely did so as a percentage of each day, so this part of my mind lived a lot like what I suspected an AI might live.
  
  Actually, that was my ego and what I saw on entertainment talking, so it was probably so much bullshit . In actuality, it was probably closer to how a really serious netrunner lived, just traipsing about the net in full-VR mode all of the time.
  
  "Hn," I said aloud as I observed the plumes of several explosions within the city. About half my drones in Pacifica have been delivered so far, and this finally included the main battle management computer system and high-gain phased array radar emplacement on the roof of the building. I pulled up the real-time radar data and then went backwards in time to view the recorded data and zeroed in on several anomalies.
  
  It could have been a flock of birds or a reflection of ground clutter downtown from one of the skyscrapers, as my building in Pacifica wasn't that high, but in retrospect, it was obviously several dozen low-observable cruise missiles entering the city and then performing terminal, supersonic dive-bomb manoeuvres.
  
  The visible targets were electrical substations, but I bet there would be more that I just couldn't see from my vantage point in the southern part of town. The encrypted police band was already being flooded with messages, and unlike my position in Los Angeles, I didn't have access to it here.
  
  Dr Hasumi was a well-behaved Corpo entrepreneur and had a working relationship with LA's cops. Here, I specifically didn't protect police vehicles, so they were often shot at as soon as they tried to enter Pacifica, sometimes long-distance shots from gangs more to the south of me. It was almost the only target that dissatisfied people wanting some of the little ultraviolence could partake in in my little area of heaven. Anything else, and my increasing number of drones or Kiwis mercs would come down on them like Mjolnir.
  
  I would have lost all credibility with the rest of the warlords in the area if I had let the NCPD have free reign or even reclaimed a toehold, so it was just something I couldn't do. Already, a lot of people thought I was some sort of corporate plant, agent provocateur, or catspaw.
  
  I mean, I was a catspaw. But the cat who owned the paw was also myself, too. I was both the cat and paw simultaneously, so it also suited my interests to keep the coppers out, but I had no idea how this strategy would persist in open warfare. Generally speaking, malcontents and troublemakers-and that included everyone running a gang in Pacifica, as far as I could tell-were rounded up and "pacified" during martial law, either by the new occupiers or the former, depending on who won.
  
  At about the same time as lights returned to my clinic, both Kiwi and Gloria called me simultaneously. The lights coming back on must mean that someone started the building's emergency generators.
  
  I had seen the bank of a dozen large generators in the basement, but I had no idea what they were powered by. If they were fueled by natural gas, then they might stay on for a long time-however long the pressurised methane was in the pipes. However, I thought they might be CHOOH2-powered like most small internal combustion engine motors, and if so, they wouldn't last forever without being refuelled.
  
  I continued working quickly on the surgery but slowed a little bit now that power was restored. At the same time, I answered both calls and spoke simultaneously. Kiwi's call was brief, and she just wanted some direction. I told her to follow the pre-planned contingency for a NUSA invasion: a halt to all patrols for the moment, as well as to keep grounded any obviously armed drones.
  
  Regardless of what happened, if the NUSA invaded or if some Night City forces counter-attacked, it would come through Pacifica, and my plan was to not get in anyone's way. I had also hired Herr Shadow to investigate and see what the NUSA forces in the southernmost part of Pacifica were up to on a contingency basis in the event of an invasion. If I flew drones too near them or even too high over my own territory, they generally shot them down, and I was tired of wasting money that way.
  
  It was dark on Gloria's side of the vidcall, and she said, with an urgency to her voice, "Taylor! Crazy shit is going on. The Norte Americanos are invading or something. Corporate had thought it would be a couple of days away, and they're recalling all employees to the Trauma Team tower. Can you look after David? I may be sequestered and working back to back for days."
  
  I frowned, "They're not offering to intern dependents too?" That didn't sound right. If they were going to this extreme, they'd have basic accommodation for families, as well.
  
  She frowned and said, "They said they would if things got any worse, but not right now. Plus, I'd rather see if you'd be willing to watch him, anyway."
  
  I nodded, "That wouldn't be a problem. I always like the little gremlin. How are you going to get to Japantown? For that matter, how are you going to get to work? With any widespread loss of electricity, things are going to get more Mad Max than not out there."
  
  She rubbed her chin, "Mad Max?" I frowned. I didn't know if that film actually existed in this world before opening my mouth. A quick net search confirmed that it did not; it didn't even exist in Earth Bet, only Earth Aleph. Still, she got what I was saying from context and said, "That's a good point."
  
  I waved a hand and said, "I'll see if I can charter an aircar. It looks like your building management is a bit less on the ball than the Tyger Claws, but do you think you can make it to one of the AV pads?"
  
  She nodded, "Yeah. I'm going to bring my street sweeper for the trip, though."
  
  All of my chests swelled with pride. From someone who was borderline afraid of guns when I first met her to someone who was grievously injured by one, it wouldn't be shocking if she retreated into a phobia. Instead, she used her super-human Borg strength to practice firing fully automatic shotguns one-handed and talked about getting the Borg version of a SmartLink system integrated into her hands.
  
  I just put her on hold while I called several different charter companies. The first three didn't have availability, or they were in a temporary stand-down, afraid of being shot out of the sky, but I found Combat Cab willing to fly one of their AV-4s for about three times the usual price. I paid a deposit quickly.
  
  While I was spending a lot of money lately, I still had access to almost all of the wealth I generated in LA before I got recruited by Arasaka. Even after I paid fairly nice severance packages to all my employees, which amounted to a month's salary and implied permission to loot the factory to the ground, I had over seventeen million. These days, that was down to about fourteen, but I still wasn't questioning a few thousand here or there.
  
  I had to keep enough to capitalise my business in space, too, as I was getting known well enough that spacers would be willing to do business with me. That would be the point where I could have a little bit more privacy up there and possibly smuggle some equipment and keep it secret so that I could, theoretically, clone myself replacement bodies. As it was now, if things went to utter shit on the planet Earth, I wouldn't be able to create replacements in space for quite a long time.
  
  I wasn't really making much money, more surviving off the money I had already made, although my digital currency tumbling service was still making fairly good profits every month. Running one of those systems necessitated a rather large amount of liquid funds, though. Money was a weird thing. Once you reached a certain point of critical mass, it seemed to accumulate faster than one person could spend it.
  
  I was surprised that people still used it, as it was pretty well understood that it was Dr Hasumi's tumbler in Los Angeles, and everybody knew I was working for new management now.
  
  I pulled Gloria's vidcall back up in time to hear a single gunshot blast and hear her yell, "Stay the fuck back!"
  
  Woah, she must have started moving before I actually confirmed the AV was coming. Also, she was using warning shots, which I didn't approve of. Unless, of course, her warning shot was shooting one of the nar-do-wells as an objective lesson to the surviving pack, in which case I did approve of it. I expected her to be highly dangerous if she was trailing little David with her.
  
  Historically, she was the type to try to de-escalate things, even if doing so was taking risks upon herself. However, she would have gone wild to protect David even before she was "born again hard."
  
  I settled back and decided not to bump her shoulder unless she asked me for help.
  
  Gloria's Apartment, Megabuilding H4
  
  Santo Domingo, Night City
  
  "So, how was school today?" Gloria asked pleasantly, momentarily pausing in the kitchen while she was finishing up some stir-fry in a large wok. It was a recipe that Taylor taught her in Los Angeles. At first, she was shocked at the idea of making your own food, as she had always lived in government assistance housing where the only things resembling a kitchen were a microwave and refrigerator.
  
  While it was more expensive than buying an XXL Burrito, it definitely tasted better and was better for you-especially recently, when actual vegetables were getting cheaper, including the red bell peppers she was cooking right now.
  
  The news had been talking about how this was likely as a large percentage of arable farmland that had until recently been dedicated to producing CHOOH2 was now shifted to produce food. Not surprisingly, the Corps have adjusted things so that the total amount of eddies you spent every day on food didn't really change, or possibly even increase in her situation, but at least the quality was improving.
  
  "Fine," the boy said, but then elaborated, "We're starting to learn about cells in science, animal and plant cells, and how they differ."
  
  Gloria raised her eyebrows. She hadn't started learning about cells and their characteristics until she was almost in high school, but then again, she was a product of the public school system. Little David was only in the fifth grade, but he was in a fancy Corpo school that she couldn't afford in any way to send him to without Taylor's help.
  
  Normally, she wouldn't accept help like that because she was wise to the ways of the world, and nobody did anything for free. However, if it was something to help David then she might have done so anyway, but she had long ago realised that Taylor just cared for them both-oh, and possibly still felt a little guilty for indirectly getting her shot and then dragging her to Los Angeles.
  
  Really, her getting shot wasn't her fault at all, it was Gloria's, but the younger woman didn't seem to accept that no matter how many times Gloria told her.
  
  "I did really well in all of those types of classes," Gloria said smugly, "In fact, it was what allowed me to enrol in a technical high school and graduate with a basic EMT certificate."
  
  Little David just stared up at her, and finally, she pouted, "What I'm saying is that if you need help-"
  
  Suddenly, the lights went out. She barely had time to blink before her low-light vision mode switched over and rendered the kitchen in grayscale.
  
  At the same time, she lost connectivity with the net using her standard civilian-level cellular sim card, but she remained connected to the Trauma Team intranet and through that VPN, the net, through a separate company-provided card that she had installed in her head, right next to her normal one. Already, text messages were beginning to arrive from the corp.
  
  "Uhhh... mom? What's going on?" David asked, sounding unsure and glancing around in the dark.
  
  She sat the wok down on the cool side of the stove, walked over, and grabbed a set of large battery-powered flashlights from on top of the refrigerator. A few years ago, she wouldn't have had this type of precaution, but it was amazing how getting shot, dying and being raised from the dead would do to a girl to get her to consider contingencies.
  
  She turned one of the lights on and handed it to David, "Stay still. I'm not sure what is going on, but it's not good." She looked up at the ceiling. There hadn't been a power outage in the building since she was a child, and she remembered that things got pretty bad when that happened.
  
  It was pretty common knowledge that a Megabuilding would rapidly descend into ultraviolent rioting if the net connection had a malfunction lasting longer than four hours. This was so well-known that multi-homed network connectivity was considered a safety-critical utility, kind of like gaseous oxygen in a hospital.
  
  The fact that not only the building had net access but also the electricity itself was off was not a good sign. There were supposed to be emergency generators, but they didn't seem to be turning on.
  
  "Go get your go-bag," she ordered, and then she sat in the kitchen in the dark while reading the messages sent by the Trauma Team. The Corp had been anticipating an NUSA attack on the city in the next week or so, but they had believed it would just amount to a mechanised division or two rolling in from SoCal to invest in the city, then negotiating with the Night City leaders.
  
  She tapped her foot rapidly after finishing reading and decided to try to call Taylor. She answered on the first ring, and Gloria said, feeling a bit anxious, "Taylor! Crazy shit is going on. The Norte Americanos are invading or something..."
  
  After finishing her conversation with Taylor, David was back with a bag of clothes and essentials. After almost dying, she had become more worried about things. However, instead of wallowing in on the unsafety of just everything, she decided to take some reasonable precautions for her and David.
  
  "Okay, wait here. I'm going to get my bag, and then we have to get upstairs. There will be an aircar meeting us and taking us to Aunt Taylor's building, David. Not only is the power still on there, but it will be safer for you as I have to go in to work," she explained, getting a serious nod from her little son that made her want to just pinch his cheeks.
  
  She grabbed a bag that she had set aside for herself as well. It contained a change of clothes, a couple of MREs for David, a portable charger for her body, as well as a few other sundries. After a moment of indecision, she grabbed David's gun, too. It was a small, suppressed nine-millimetre carbine specifically designed for the size of kids his age, and David was a crack shot with it.
  
  She pulled on her own set of body armour and helped David do the same. She was a lot more worried about David than herself. She was already bullet-resistant, but David was what she would call a "squish" at work. He had the best genetic upgrades that Taylor's money could buy, but that just made him a little stronger, a little quicker and a little smarter, as well as increased his lifespan. They didn't stop a bullet.
  
  After securing his vest, she handed his carbine to him and said seriously, "Do not use this unless we get separated, and then only to save your life. It's just in case." His eyes widened a bit, which hurt her heart. She'd like to spare him the possibility of anything happening to either of them, but that wasn't really something she could do anymore. He nodded rapidly and did a quick function test of the weapon, checking to make sure that it was both loaded and presently set on "safe." She took the time to do the same with her own main weapon, a heavy automatic twelve-gauge shotgun. It was of the street sweeper variety, with a large drum magazine, and she was strong enough to fire it on fully automatic one-handed like it was a pistol.
  
  Finally, she told him their destination and made him repeat it to her twice. If something did happen to her, she didn't like his odds, but they would be a lot better if he actually knew which landing pad to go to.
  
  "Alright, keep your flashlight off. I can see in the dark, and I don't want to draw attention to us," Gloria ordered, and he nodded, turning his flashlight off and stowing it in his bag. She grabbed his hand and led him out of their apartment and through the hallways. There were other people outside milling about, but she ignored them and continued walking with a purpose to the centre of the floor, where both the main elevators and stairs were.
  
  Unfortunately, a group of the most obvious of Santo Domingo's thugs were already loitering around, shining everyone who got near with a seriously bright flashlight. They were high school-aged toughs armed with an assortment of things like bats and knives, and they pointed their flashlights at her and David as they approached the door to the stairwell.
  
  "Yo, chica! Hand over those guns if you know what's good for you. And anything else you might have," leered the one closest to her. The flashlights they had were every bit as bright as the two that she and David had, and they were bright enough to blind or dazzle normal people at short range. They were almost a self-defence tool themselves, but her eyes just shifted to compensate for them, and she could see his grabby hand reaching for the barrel of her shotgun.
  
  They were being stupid, as the simplest solution would be to just shoot at each of the lights. That's what she would have had to do if she couldn't see them. Instead, she pulled the barrel of her weapon out of reach and casually stepped towards him, delivering a quick muzzle strike with the shotgun to his throat, which caused him to immediately fall to the ground, gurgling. She spared him a glance and felt that he would survive.
  
  Now, to stop the rest, who started yelling invectives and taking steps towards her. At the same time, Taylor called her back again. She answered the vidcall, aimed, and fired a shotgun blast into the ceiling above the miscreant's heads. The walls were close to bare cement, so she was worried about ricochets if she fired a "warning shot" anywhere else, but the drop ceiling absorbed the buckshot fairly easily, although it probably fucked up the now dark lighting fixture.
  
  She yelled in her best imitation of the "command voice" that the Drill Sergeants used while she was in basic, "Stay the fuck back!" Surprisingly, they did, opening a hole through to the stairwell. She kept them at gunpoint until she and David could make it through, backing up through the stairs.
  
  After they were in the stairwell, she glanced up briefly before continuing to stare at the door just in case that group of idiots followed them. She said, "Sorry, Tay. Things are a little heated right now. I hope you didn't call me to tell me that you couldn't find someone to pick us up because we're already heading upstairs."
  
  "No, I got Combat Cab to accept a contract. They'll be on the westside AV pad on the fortieth floor in five minutes," Taylor replied calmly while simultaneously sending her a digital file which included the reservation information and code words. This made Gloria sigh in relief. She would have really regretted trying to take David up the stairs if there wasn't going to be anything waiting for them.
  
  They met a few people who were going downwards, who gave her a wide berth. The fact that she was waving an eight-kilo automatic shotgun in one hand, and easily, was a pretty good indication that she wasn't entirely 'ganic, and that made smart people wary all on its own.
  
  The fortieth floor had another group of toughs out loitering in front of the elevators, but this group was busy trying to open the elevator doors. It seemed that one of the elevators was halfway trapped in between floors with some of their friends on it. That was fine with her, as they were better armed than the ones on her floor, and she didn't want to be stopped by them.
  
  The AV was waiting for them, with a crew member in the back aiming a machine gun sort of in the direction of where they stepped out, which caused her to pause. He wasn't pointing the light machinegun at them, but it would take less than a second to traverse it on its pintle mount so that he was. She stopped a fair bit away from the aerodyne and yelled out the verification code that Taylor had sent her, "Green-Green-Fife-Seven-Niner-Tree-One-One!"
  
  The door gunner paused for a moment, then motioned to her and David to board, and she hurried to get aboard. This was an older aerodyne, and it didn't have the automatic child restraint system that Little David really needed, but she tried to get him seated and secured as best she could before she buckled her own belt.
  
  It was flown single pilot too, which was a little unusual from her experience but it was true that the second pilot in Trauma Team's aircrafts generally worked the weapons systems and electronic warfare suite, which this aircar obviously didn't have. The door gunner nodded and asked, "We got a double drop off here. One pax at the Megabuilding in Japantown, and another at Trauma Team tower?"
  
  She hesitated and then nodded. She had assumed that she would have to make her way to the Trauma Team from Japantown herself, perhaps calling for a pickup, but this was a lot simpler. The only reason she hesitated was because she didn't like the idea of parting with little David so soon.
  
  The AV lifted off the roof and climbed to an altitude about five hundred metres above the city. It was a relatively quick flight to Japantown, and she looked out both the window and missing door, where the machine gun was mounted, and sucked her teeth a bit. More than a third of the lights down below were out, and there were fires everywhere. The door gunner noticed her looking and said over the intercom, "It's going to be a blood bath."
  
  "Why would the NUSA do this?" Gloria asked, more rhetorically than anything.
  
  The door gunner snorted and shrugged, "My guess is something surprised them, and if the city's forces are stuck dealing with keeping the peace, then they won't be able to do anything else, but hell if I actually know, ma'am."
  
  They were silent the rest of the flight, and Gloria spent the time arranging for a clearance to land on one of the public pads at Trauma Team Tower without them being shot down. She was surprised not to see Taylor waiting for them. Instead, it was the peculiar Tyger Claw that probably saved her son's life and "avenged" her, Johnny.
  
  David really liked the guy, and she saw his eyes light up when he saw him. Johnny ducked his head close enough to speak and said, "Doc Hebert was in the middle of a surgery when the recent unpleasantness started, so she asked me to take care of escortin' young David upstairs to her apartment."
  
  Gloria nodded but still quickly verified that with Taylor through text messages. She helped David out of the aerodyne and said, "Stay safe. I'll be able to talk to you online, and I'll be back as soon as I can."
  
  David nodded seriously, and then both he and Johnny backed up so that the aircar could power up and lift off the pad again. She sighed and stared out the window on the quick flight downtown.
  
  I finished up the surgery about the time David arrived and only had a few things to clean up with. I didn't have the benefit of two surgical nurses here as I did at work, so I had to perform all of the tasks myself. Still, I would be done pretty quickly, and after I was sure my patient was safe in Clouds, I would head upstairs to check in with David.
  
  I would have to go to work myself tomorrow, so I had already talked to Evelyn, who had agreed to babysit. I think David would like this very much. He wasn't old enough to be interested in girls, and especially not women, in a sexual or romantic way, but he was right at the correct age where he liked being doted on by beautiful women, and he probably had crushes on a number of the dolls. That was pretty normal for boys, psychologically.
  
  Johnny, the Samurai Gunman, had said that they had planned to stretch out their supply of fuel to run the building's generators, so she should expect load shedding and rolling blackouts that would last no more than thirty minutes at a time, although they would make sure that the internet and wireless connections stayed powered even during the blackouts. People wouldn't mind sitting in the dark if they knew it was temporary and they could still get on the net during that period. It was pretty smart.
  
  They needed to stretch the fuel supplies because they didn't know precisely when the city could have power restored. The Tyger Claws had already surveyed the damage, and the damage was pretty total to a number of transformers in multiple electrical substations. This wasn't really expensive to repair, but nobody knew how many spare transformers the city had, nor did they expect them to be enough. It might take days to get more in from the Free States, or perhaps longer if the NUSA military was going to invest the city in the meantime.
  
  I shook my head, a little worried, as I carefully used nanomed gel on the doll's surgical site wound and bandaged it closed. This would begin a rapid healing of the bone in the girl's skull that I had to temporarily remove for the surgery.
  
  Herr Shadow had already performed reconnaissance and relayed that the NUSA presence in the southern part of Pacifica wasn't expanding, which surprised me. I had expected that they would use the cover of this chaos to begin attacking or at least send sappers into the city to attack the NCPD or city government.
  
  Instead, they had turtled up even more than they already had, which I couldn't understand. Of course, I wasn't really a military-minded person. It was one thing to see a weakness and ruthlessly exploit it, and I thought I had that kind of temperament, but it was another to understand how an actual organised military force of thousands of individuals thought or planned.
  
  I began waking the doll up. Sadly, she would have to wait a little while to regrow her hair, which wasn't part of the surgical plan. Unfortunately, the nanovat used a lot of power, and it wasn't the sort of thing that handled interruptions in power too well. It was a bit of a shame, as she had beautiful blonde hair and a body to match, kind of reminding me of that vulpine-grinning woman that I worked with briefly in Los Angeles.
  
  "How are you feeling, Miss Anderson?" I asked, congenially as she fully regained consciousness.
  
  Aoyama, Tokyo
  
  Hasumi Sakura's Apartment
  
  At about the same time that normal order was breaking down in Night City, I was returning from a long day's work at the office.
  
  It was already in the middle of the night, and I already had a reputation for keeping unusual hours, so I wasn't too surprised when Yuki came into the living room where I was lounging and said, " Hasumi-sama, you have a visitor from Arasaka Intelligence who would like to ask you a few questions. It's a matter of some urgency. Do you wish to see him?"
  
  I had entertained a few people from Arasaka at my apartment, so it wasn't out of the ordinary, but this was the first time a spook had knocked at my door. Finally, I nodded and said, " It would be fine; you can show him or her in, Yuki-san. If you'd please make some tea for me and our guest, as well."
  
  Yuki nodded, seemingly brightened that I hadn't told the unannounced visitor to take a hike. Shortly thereafter, Yuki escorted a non-descript man into the living room. Yuki introduced him as "Mr Tanaka," which caused me to raise an eyebrow. The man looked incredibly ordinary. He was dressed in a cheap, but not too cheap, suit and had a face you would immediately forget, and he was named Tanaka. Tanaka was like the Japanese equivalent of Mr Smith, an incredibly ordinary surname.
  
  " Tanaka-san, hmm?" my voice expressed my disbelief, but he just smiled and nodded. Internally, I shrugged, and said, " How can I be of assistance? And would you care for some tea?"
  
  He took a seat opposite of me and said, " That would be nice, thank you. Something occurred recently, and we're getting the opinions from most of our geneticists this evening as it has the potential to be a serious issue."
  
  "I'm not really educated as a geneticist," I temporised, but I was only being polite. My last project for Arasaka involved the modifications to a novel bacterium. It was a successful one, and they were already constructing the first pilot plant to see the effectiveness of the bacteria in recycling metals. In my opinion, it wasn't going to be a wildly successful project, not like the sleep inducers, but it still was going to reduce the costs associated with some metal recycling by over fifteen per cent, perhaps more, if they built a lot of the plants and got up into economies of scale. Still, when you consider that many industries were highly mature, a reduction of some costs by fifteen percent was considered a great boon.
  
  He smiled and said, " Of course. We're not really interested in credentialism here. You've obviously educated yourself on the subject significantly. Are you aware of the team that is attempting to understand the fuel-algae?"
  
  I nodded, " I am. It wasn't really something that interested me - perhaps when they figured out how the genome was encrypted. Until then, it is probably more of interest to our bio-cryptologists." That there actually was a field of study called bio-cryptology was amusing to me.
  
  " Ah, of course," he said, and then paused as Yuki brought out the tea service. After Yuki left, he continued, " Something unusual happened today, worldwide, with the algae, and I was hoping I could have your first impressions." I was pretty sure I knew what had happened, but I inclined my head and he sent me a fairly large packet of data.
  
  It was just as I expected, but I let the man explain, " All of a sudden, the genome of the algae harvested started to radically change worldwide, starting sometime yesterday or today."
  
  I hummed and said, " From first impressions, the genome is smaller by fifteen per cent. That isn't natural, so this has to be a genetic switch that has been tripped, causing it to shed some functionality."
  
  He nodded, " That is what the team working on it said as well. Can you speculate as to the reason?"
  
  I could do a lot more than that, but I decided to pretend as though I was speculating, " Yes, let me take a look at the scans of the before and after of the actual organism. Looking at the genome is pointless, it's better to look at the organism itself under microscope, like this is the nineteenth century again."
  
  I spent several minutes pretending to inspect the algae, occasionally saying something like "Hmm" or "Interesting." Finally, I brought the spook into a shared AR workspace and threw up an image of the algae before and after, right next to each other. I zoomed in and highlighted a very small area, " This organelle is now missing in the algae."
  
  " Do you know what function this organelle has, Hasumi-sensei?" he asked, now quite interested.
  
  I shrugged, " It's somewhat similar if, obviously miniaturised, to a photoreceptor cell. That is all I know for sure; the following is my speculation, yes?"
  
  He nodded, and I continued, " Releasing a self-replicating cyanobacteria that is designed to outcompete nearly everything and spread worldwide is a dangerous activity. What if something happened? I suspect that this is part of a kill-switch. Specifically, I suspect that some specially encoded burst of light would trigger the production of some enzyme that would act as a signal to start apoptosis. The same enzyme would then escape the cell when the cell membrane was destroyed and signal the same behaviour to nearby cells, causing a chain reaction. I suspect that this shedding of parts of the genome is removing this feature so that nobody can use it now that the creator knows that it is safe."
  
  The spook was quiet for a moment and then nodded, " That makes some sense. Hopefully, that is the case. We have shifted our economy to heavily take advantage of the fuel provided by the algae, and if it disappeared suddenly, then we would be in quite the pickle."
  
  He took a sip of his tea and asked, " How would the algae know when to shed this functionality? Did it receive a signal?"
  
  I frowned and shrugged, " It's possible, but I doubt it. The simplest way is a timer, by way of a counter that each generation would iterate as it went through mitotic division. It wouldn't be perfectly accurate, but you could time things to the precision of a few days or a week this way. I'm sure we have some early samples of the algae on ice; you can easily check this by thawing them in a controlled environment next to the new algae and see if any changes occur. If it's a signal, then the new algae would likely convert the old one."
  
  I finished my tea and said, " I don't believe I have anything further to add, though. Was there anything else you needed?"
  
  The nondescript man shook his head and smiled, " No, ma'am. Thank you for the assistance."
  
  He started to stand up, and I raised a hand to stop him and asked, " Can you give me some details on what is happening in the NUSA? Some people are suggesting it's the start of the next Corporate War, and I'm a little concerned."
  
  He frowned and said, " Ma'am, while you have the highest clearance level... you don't really have a need to know- "
  
  I interrupted him again, " You misunderstand; I'm not interested in any secrets. Just information that is publicly available to anyone that could observe it. Say, just what Militech or even the world press might know."
  
  He softened his expression and said, " Ah, I see. I can tell you a few things, then. Close to a week ago, the carrier battle group Amaterasu pulled anchor and began steaming directly towards the west coast of the continental United States. The NUSA Pacific Fleet left the anchorage at Hawaii and attempted to intercept them short of their mainland. There was an exchange of anti-ship guided missiles on each side, causing damage to both sides."
  
  He took the last sip of his tea and said, " However, a task group of Arasaka and JDF submersibles, including the submersible aircraft carrier Ryujin were seen to surface near Pearl Harbour and launched attacks against a couple of NUSA Coast Guard and Navy Air Stations that housed ASW aircraft, destroying many on the ground. Still, some sortied and did significant damage to one of the submersible cruisers. At this point, the escalation stopped. It isn't known publicly what happened, but the majority of the NUSA Pacific Fleet turned around and started returning to Hawaii, and the Ryujin left as well, leaving the Amaterasu and her escorts to continue to the west coast."
  
  He nodded and said, " That's pretty much all that is publicly known, although I think we probably have escaped an escalation that might precipitate conflict or danger here in Tokyo, at least for now. I can't really say anything else."
  
  I stood up, along with him, and internally considered what he had said. It sounded like open warfare for a bit there, except one or both sides had pulled back from the brink there at the end. Were the attacks on Night City just... revenge, then?
  
  July, 2011
  
  Taylor Hebert's Secret Bond Villain Base, Brockton Bay
  
  Earth Bet
  
  Taylor was conflicted. She was finally trusted enough to perform medical procedures on one of the Triumvirate, and it turned out that the only parts she used even a modicum of artistry on were mainly cosmetic.
  
  Also, she had been the one who had to convince him to accept the cosmetic treatments. Personally, she would have made the appointment earlier. Eidolon wasn't... quite... ugly, but he wasn't aesthetically pleasing, either. He looked like an average middle-aged man who didn't get quite enough exercise, balding and developing a second chin and a slight ponch.
  
  He wasn't as narcissistic as she had thought from her first interactions with him earlier. She paused and corrected that because he was every bit as narcissistic as she thought, but he didn't particularly care about his civilian identity. He didn't allow her to turn him into something very artistic, either. Ultimately, he only agreed for her to take some pounds off and help him build some muscles the quick way, as well as minor adjustments such as fixing his balding.
  
  While he was in the tank, she would take care of routine maintenance as well, like the slightly occluded arteries and pre-hypertension, and even correct the first signs of brain damage that were indicative of incipient dementia.
  
  He was shocked when Taylor told him, but he wouldn't have noticed symptoms for decades as long as the progression remained steady. Still, it was better to nip it in the bud now.
  
  She had to sell him on the other cosmetic aspects, such as fixing his male patterned baldness and removing a few wrinkles and crow-feet.
  
  In other words, he was a man who had almost entirely discarded his civilian identity. Being Eidolon was his life.
  
  She thought the main reason he was here was because he was hopeful she could help him with The Problem That Cannot Be Mentioned. No, not ED, but PD. Power disfunction. Specifically, the fact that his power was slowly getting weaker. She had been sworn to secrecy... well, even more secrecy... before he told her about it, and the only reason he had was that they were both in the Illuminati together, even if he was peers with her boss's boss, and she was merely a minion.
  
  Speaking of, Taylor's boss's boss, Dr Mother, had long ago found a stop-gap solution wherein Eidolon could consume some power vials, which seemed to recharge him for lack of a better word, but it wasn't something that did his body a lot of good. He could only do it perhaps once or twice a year without suffering significant sequelae, and it just wasn't quite enough to stem the tide of slow degradation.
  
  "Okay, you can go ahead and consume the vial," she told him after triple-checking that all of her sensors were on and focused on the cape. He was optimistic that she would have some kind of solution for him, but she was much less so. She dealt with biology and science, and this alchemy was something that her power absolutely refused to assist her with.
  
  Still, she was one of the foremost experts on the way powers interacted with the brain. Not only has she done dozens of pathological examinations post-mortem on capes that were provided by her boss, but she routinely had to do brain surgery on Case 53s, as well. Sometimes they had powers that could not be controlled, and she had found ways to adjust the anomalous brain regions to provide relief-most of the time.
  
  While every parahuman's "coronas" were unique in some ways, there were a lot of similarities, too.
  
  Eidolon, here purely in a civilian outfit, nodded and quickly swallowed the vial while Taylor watched readouts of his vitals and real-time medical images of his brain and organs. The process wasn't pleasant for Eidolon. He was too proud to cry out, but she could see the pain and distress in his readouts and made a thoughtful, "Hmmm."
  
  After things plateaued and she decided she would learn no more, she nodded and tapped a couple of keys on her computer, which caused an infusion to begin running into the IV on Eidolon's arm. Within a few seconds, he looked much more at ease and asked, "Did you give me a painkiller? I don't need it."
  
  She clucked her tongue, her disbelief plainly evident. But she waffled her hand, "Not a traditional painkiller, no. But I have begun running an anti-inflammatory infusion, along with nanomachines, which will stop you from continuing to suffer brain damage. It's the anti-inflammatories that are causing the analgesic effect, as your brain was literally swelling and becoming inflamed."
  
  "Brain damage?!" he choked.
  
  Taylor nodded, "Indeed. I thought you were a bit too young for dementia. I think we've discovered the cause of the brain injuries I saw and repaired." She tapped her fingers on her desk and nodded, "After this, we'll just have to use the medical nanomachines to remove the heavy metals and other toxins that these vials contain. They're a cumulative hazard, and every time you ingest one, it does a number on your liver - like you're swallowing a bottle of acetaminophen."
  
  Taylor sighed and looked a little depressed, which he noticed and asked, "What's the problem?"
  
  "It's not really a solution to your problem. It's just a band-aid, but you should be able to drink a vial every few weeks or more often so long as you follow the pre and post-vial directions and take the medicine I'll make up for you," she said while moping. It upset her sense of elegance as a doctor. It was like someone coming in with a complaint of chronic knee pain, and a doctor just prescribed ibuprofen for the pain. A solution, possibly, but not one that actually solved the patient's complaint, merely covered it up.
  
  Eidolon looked amazed, hopeful and invigorated, "What do you mean that's not a solution? That's amazing!"
  
  She sighed and said, "I suppose. I still don't know what process causes your power to degrade, and I suspect it isn't anything biological, so I can't really be expected to solve it."
  
  Taylor helped him to a comfortable chair and sat with him while a second IV that contained nanomachines programmed to find heavy metals and remove them from his body, which she had dissolved in a half litre of saline.
  
  "How is the monster cape?" he asked, seemingly a lot more sociable and affable than when he arrived. Normally, he was all business and never bothered to offer even a little small talk with her at all.
  
  Taylor nodded, "She's in a tank on the floor below us, regrowing everything below her belly button. I followed the boss's directions to the letter, and one of the last steps was bisecting her using Armsmaster's nano-thorns. I administered the second vial to her myself, as well. She survived that, too. I believe her power has changed considerably. At least, I hope so. I don't want to see how she would generate and spawn clones with a normal female body, anyway."
  
  Eidolon shuddered at the thought, "Any idea what her power is? Contessa seemed very interested."
  
  "I've asked Ms Alcott, who has remained here with me. I had to ask her a number of ways over the course of a week, but I'm pretty sure she is going to be a power copier," Taylor said. She then paused and continued, "I'm going to have her test with one of the Travellers first. Normally, I would let her copy my power as it is useless without build-up, but her clone of me had all or most of my memories. It would be very problematic if she got my memories, too, in addition to my power."
  
  He raised an eyebrow, "That would be bad. You're keeping the girl? She has a very powerful Thinker power, I hear."
  
  Taylor let out a breath and said, "Her parents disappeared when Leviathan attacked. I'd prefer to return her to them, but she doesn't want to go into Protectorate custody... so we're at a bit of an impasse."
  
  Privately, she thought that Coil might have been behind her parent's disappearance. She shrugged and said, "Her power is both very powerful and very problematic, as many strong powers are. I've begun teaching her meditation techniques in the hope that she will gain mastery over them. In the worst case, I'll conduct brain surgery and adjust her Gemma to provide more conscious control over when her power is active. I've done this for a half dozen of our guests, which otherwise would have prevented us from releasing them."
  
  Taylor clucked her tongue, "Otherwise, she'd forever be at the mercy of anyone who could incapacitate her by the simple expedient of asking her questions until she faints."
  
  Eidolon rubbed the top of his head, which used to be a bald spot and hedged unsurely, "Maybe that wouldn't be so bad if her power really is as strong as you've reported."
  
  Taylor clucked her tongue, "We all have to get our hands dirty, sir, but that is no reason to go out of our way to do so." Honestly, Taylor didn't have much of a problem with her organisation's activities, as she had learned more of them.
  
  Selling powers in a vial was akin to selling arms in her mind, and she grew up a child of the Militech family, so she didn't have any problem with that. Case 53's were all either volunteers or were so injured that the concept of implied consent would apply to experimental medical procedures. Keeping them captive wasn't a good thing, but she was working through the backlog to release as many as she could. They would never be able to release all of them, but she didn't let the perfect get in the way of the good.
  
  As far as the vast conspiracy business, well, that's just the way the world had always been run.
  
  Eidolon regarded her with steely eyes for a moment before finally nodding, "Perhaps you're right. Besides, I sometimes forget that you get more flies with honey." Wow, he really must be feeling better if he was willing to admit to a fault, even a minor one. Taylor thought it helped a lot that he wasn't in costume right now, as he could play it off as not being Eidolon right now.
  
  He looked at the empty IV bag and asked, "Am I good to go?"
  
  Taylor nodded, "Yes, sir. I'll have supplies and directions made up for you to take pre and post-vial, but for now, I'd recommend no more than one a month. Your brain does get really active after you drink it, and I'd like to see more instances before we make it a regular occurrence."
  
  He laughed, sounding genuinely happy, pulling out the IV's and not even bothering with a bandaid, "I don't think there is any way we'd need to use it more than that. Even if I assume the degradation continues, it would be over ninety-three years before I'd need to drink them weekly." Clearly, he had temporarily used a thinker power there, she felt.
  
  Taylor hummed noncomittally and nodded. Suddenly, his costume was back on. Taylor didn't know if he used a power to construct a costume on the fly or if he had some sort of RPG-like inventory hammerspace power to keep it in, but he stood much straighter than before. He nodded once more at her and said, "Door, my office in Houston."
  
  Taylor waited several seconds after the doorway closed before gathering all the consumable supplies she used and tossing them into the trash. Anything that might have Eidolon's blood or trace DNA samples, like the needles, swabs and IV tubing, though, she incinerated.
  
  After leaving her private office, she found Dinah Alcott walking around aimlessly. She pretty much gave the young girl the run of the base, except for the Traveler's private area.
  
  She had recovered fairly well from the detoxification, but it would still be months more work before Taylor considered her psychological addiction cured. There were treatments that lessened the impact of memories, and she was using them liberally on the girl, who had been inconsolable at the loss of her parents for a week after waking up. Still, she was very resilient.
  
  However, the girl was dressed oddly. She was wearing a costume that kind of resembled an old-style nursing uniform, the kind with the pinafore skirt and nursing cap. She had a domino mask on, as well. Taylor stared at her and asked, "Why are you wearing that? And how?"
  
  The girl grinned at her and said, "Miss Genesis helped me make it. Apparently, she used to be big into cosplay. I want to go out with you today! Where are you going?"
  
  Taylor raised her eyebrows. She didn't bother asking why, as with this girl, it could be as simple as she was bored to as esoteric as she had to, or Taylor might get hit by a bus. Generally speaking, Taylor acquiesced to all of her requests if they were reasonable once she was sure the little girl wasn't working against her interests. She sighed, "I have the final calibration for Armmaster's prosthesis-"
  
  "He's Defiant, now!" the girl complained. Taylor smirked. It would be hard to keep calling yourself Arm-master after the video of Leviathan ripping off your arms and beating you about the head and neck with them went viral. Some people would be totally destroyed psychologically by everything that happened, but it seemed to be a tempering that might make the heroic Tinker even more potent, from what she could guess. Privately, she thought he was fucking Dragon, too, although how either of them found the time, she didn't know.
  
  "-after that, I have an OB consult with Miss Othala," Taylor finished. She didn't expect much out of that. There probably wasn't anything wrong, but she wasn't going to refuse business to do a checkup and tell the woman so.
  
  With the Empire 88 gone, Othala and Victor fell into Purity's sway and were theoretically trying to portray themselves as a heroic team, now. Granted, they seemed to prioritise criminals of certain ethnic backgrounds highly, so Taylor wasn't sure how much they had actually changed. Still, Othala and Victor treated her well even when they were in the Empire, so she would continue to reciprocate, and assuring them both that their future child was likely healthy was a simple matter that could be concluded in an hour or less.
  
  Dinah also had a carefully wrapped box in her hands that looked like a present, complete with red bow. Taylor switched her eyes into non-ionising penetrative scanner mode and frowned as she saw the contents. She asked, "Why do you have one of my sleep inducers in a gift box?"
  
  "It's Defiant's birthday. It's important that he gets this present!" She said, holding her finger against her nose in the British way of signalling the two of them were in on a shared secret. That meant that it was important for either her or my safety, as that was the only thing that Dinah asked her power regularly.
  
  Taylor didn't know how she could know how to give him this thing, but it basically amounted to a game of twenty questions, and the little girl was incredibly good at it. It was why Taylor didn't bother to really ask her that many questions herself.
  
  Taylor sighed and started walking to what had once been Coil's motor pool, which was mostly empty now. The girl followed next to her, and Taylor asked, "Are you sure you don't want to go live with your relatives? He's still the mayor."
  
  She winced and shook her head, "It would be best if I stayed with you for now."
  
  "Fine," Taylor groused and then said, "But if someone recognises you, I'm not letting them think I kidnapped you."
   "Don't worry, that won't happen!" the girl chirped, seemingly pleased as they both walked to the white-panelled van that she used when she made house calls.
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