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 freely. 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; we'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 with 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!

---xxxxxx---

"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 in 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?"