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.

---xxxxxx---

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."

---xxxxx---

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.

---xxxxxx---

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.