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.

---xxxxxx---

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.

---xxxxxx---

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.

---xxxxxx---

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."