Well, if he just got off on his stop and didn't make a second attempt, nothing would happen, and I will have to go and carefully take this off my pants.
The train rolled into the station, and I saw him go for it, and I didn't move an inch to stop him. He laughs uproariously, slaps my ass and yells, "See ya, suit bitch!" and then runs off the train. I specifically do not rub my butt this time.
I wonder if I will get to see it. It had a very rapid onset even if an extremity like the hand was exposed, but at the same time, these stops didn't last long at all, and he was already running, trying to escape two train cops. They might have seen him slap me on the butt on the surveillance systems. Realistically, you could only get away with an activity like that on the train once or twice. A lot of corporate workers used the train, so the security was actually really good.
Oh! There it goes, the look of shock and horror on his face as he is in mid-flight. I think I would have a similar expression if I was unknowingly exposed to a chemical that induced rapid, temporary urinary incontinence. Keep going! Don't let a pissed pair of pants stop you, asshole boy!
The train left the station while I smirked to myself. He should be thankful. I had to specifically use Tinkering to make the drug only induce urinary and not also faecal incontinence. But that, surely, would have been a weapon of ass destruction, and I have some lines.
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The Kids Aren't Alright, Actually
I had settled on the treadmill after trying the other cardio machines, even though the elliptical machine was both better for your joints and theoretically more efficient in providing a workout. There was something simple and pure about just running that was very primal and struck a chord with me.
The treadmill made the ones I had seen in gyms back in Brockton Bay look like child's toys. Although it didn't have the advanced holographic systems that I knew were available, it did have what was, to me, a very fancy-looking wrap-around display that simulated any number of programs you could run through.
"Give me the downtown Paris program, please," I told the treadmill after getting on. The display switched to a photorealistic rendering of a first-person view of the Rue de Rivoli; this program circled the Louvre and then went southwest across the river Seine and continued down the Rue de Solferino some ways before stopping.
That wasn't the main reason I tended to select this program, though. Also rendered was an attractive man of European descent, wearing tight shorts and a shirt with no sleeves. He had a runner's build, and he was what the computer used to set the pace. You could make it a race using the variable speed mode, or he would run alongside or in front of you.
I made sure to set his speed so that he stayed in front of me at my normal long-range pace, as it was a pleasant distraction to look at him run away from me for the whole workout. I would either enjoy the view or read or watch media on the net, using my cyberdeck. I had begun reading some of the well-known books on the net, but most of the ones that really talked about hacking and weren't complete bullshit were a bit outdated, such as Rache Bartmoss's guide to the net. Another legendary hacker named Spider Murphy's biography on the dead legend was quite good, too. For a while, she wrote updated and edited versions of Bartmoss' famous guide every year, noting if anything changed significantly, so I was merely twenty-five years behind most newbies instead of forty-plus.
It was interesting reading the original version Bartmoss wrote and then the updates every year. In those days, and thanks to Bartmoss, the net was fragmented. A lot of the information Spider Murphy added was interesting ways to get physical access to various regional subnets, VPNs and company intranets, and how to prevent yourself from being murdered by crazy AIs, which mostly broke down into "stay away from the old net if you know what's good for you." The last version was written a year after NetWatch created the Blackwall, and the various regional nets had barely begun the process of reconnection, so even the last version of the guide wasn't that useful, even if it was very interesting . Ms Spider Murphy's updates tended to have information that was local to Night City that still might be a little bit useful today, such as how Night City's regional net was structured.
Today was my first day of class, but I made sure not to disrupt my routine too much. Since I didn't sleep very much since inventing my sleep inducer, I intended to maintain my workout schedule as much as possible, even while going to school and then when working.
The attractive-looking computer man looked back at me with a pleasantly expectant look on his face. I got ready and then nodded at him. That's all it took for him to start running and the treadmill to come to life as I followed behind, letting my mind drift while thinking about my future.
It might be a bit more difficult to keep working out every day like this while working. Working hours were longer here, which made sense since there wasn't any kind of wage or hour regulations. A normal workday in Night City varied somewhat but averaged about ten hours a day, not including your lunch. Twelve-hour days weren't uncommon, at all, either.
The workdays for paramedics were a bit different. Most ambulance services had a one-day on, one-day off schedule. Theoretically, on your twenty-four-hour shift, you were expected to get rest as you could while waiting between calls. R.E.O. Meatwagon had a twelve-hour shift schedule, but not only did that company have a very poor reputation, but they were floundering, with the expectation that they may go out of business any time.
Allegedly R.E.O. Meatwagon had a habit of physically interdicting their competition with force, generally other ground ambulances, in order to secure paying patients. It wasn't surprising, but in Night City, the 911 EMS service was privatised, although there were certain standardisation requirements.
Whether or not that was true or not, what was definitely true, as far as I could tell, was a group of private ambulance services banded together and hired a team of mercenaries to riddle the CEO of R.E.O. full of bullets when he was coming home from work. And then, for good measure, they ran the R.E.O Meatwagon ambulance that responded to try to save his life off the road.
Although it was listed as an unsolved crime, even the tamest sites she read on the net had nothing but schadenfreude for the plight of that man and his company.
The final payment from Militech cleared into my account a couple of days ago, and my balance sheet was sitting at a very healthy one hundred-and-twenty-two thousand eurodollars and some change. That sounded like a lot, and for many in the city, it was. My dad, as a Major in the Militech armed forces, made a little more than one hundred thousand a year, which was well on the upper middle class realm in this city.
However, one semester of actual medical school in the NCU Health Science Centre costs sixty-seven thousand dollars, not including room and board. Perhaps I was getting ahead of myself, but I definitely wanted to get actual's doctors' credentials.
In many ways, the mostly complete destruction of the system of colleges and Universities was very bad for the average citizen. At one point, Academia was almost totally beholden to funding from the government, and the government here in the world of Night City was barely functional. They weren't funding research, not at colleges anyway, nor did they provide guaranteed student loans to anyone.
In one way, it was kind of beneficial for her, though. The new, more corporate structure of higher education got rid of a lot of extraneous frivolities. You didn't need a four-year degree to attend medical school, for example. So long as you could find one to admit you, all you needed was a high-school diploma, or in her case, an equivalent. The payment was in advance and non-refundable if you flunked out, though.
The thought of going to med school under my own power, not having to sign a long-term loyalty contract to any specific corporation, appealed a lot to me, but I wasn't sure how it might be possible. Even if I lucked out and got a job at Trauma Team straight out of school, I definitely wouldn't make enough to save over three hundred thousand eurodollars in any reasonable time frame. I would have to moonlight, somehow, or accept having a corporation pay my way.
The program was only about a twenty-five-minute run and it came to an end with a short cool-down period, after which I hopped off the treadmill, being careful to wipe it off carefully. I didn't really sweat very much, especially when I was using a treadmill, but it was polite.
Although this gym wasn't very high-end, in some respects, anyone coming to it was slightly better off than average. The actual poor of the city didn't have enough money or time to care about their health, certainly not enough to spend time in a gym. Gyms were for people who didn't get exercise through the labour of their bodies, and even with the advent of automated production technologies, much labour, especially the less compensated, in the world was still very physical.
The classes I took in Militech called it "The Formula", and it was pretty cold-hearted. If you could replace a worker with a machine, you only did so if the total cost of the machine, including financing and maintenance, divided by the machine's expected service life, was less than the total compensation of the worker.
You'd think that this would drive tons of workers out of jobs, and in some cases, it did, but the truth was that a lot of times, a human worker was cheaper than a high-tech articulating robotic manipulator controlled by machine learning, so really there were a lot of low-end jobs that entailed strenuous physical labour.
The woman who was grinning at me, waiting to use the machine, was someone who looked like she had never really seen any of that herself. She was of partial European and partial Chinese descent, very pretty in the way models were, and I didn't know her name, much less anything about her. She tended to work out at around the same time I did, early in the morning, and we had become something like gym buddies. She also preferred the treadmill and elliptical machines.
"I see you chose the Paris program again. I have to admit, that guy does have a perfect ass," she said with a slight Chinese accent. It was so slight, just enough to give a hint of exoticness to her tone that I suspected that she could probably speak with no accent at all if she wanted to.
I lied furiously, "That isn't why I picked that program! It's because of the Louvre!"
"Yeah, his ass should be in there. It's a work of art, alright," she said as she hopped up onto the machine. She glanced at me, "You know, everyone can see you're strapped when you run in here in those sweats. Why do you carry a piece to the gym?" Her gym outfit exposed a lot more skin than mine, but I seemed to be a bit of the odd one out there.
I considered that question. Something from a series of Earth Aleph books that my mom liked before she died came to mind, and I quoted, "Because the night is dark and full of terrors. I'm surprised that you don't, yourself. I'd expect you to get hassled a lot more than me." Because she was so pretty and I was just a string bean, I left unsaid.
That caused her to laugh as she began the exact same Paris program, waggling her eyes at me as she chose it, "That's funny, kid. I might consider it if I was leaving the building, but... there's not a single person who would give me a hard time in this building. I figured you knew, but I work upstairs at Clouds."
I raised my eyebrows at that and gave her another inspection, then blushed a bit as I realised what she meant. She was a doll, which was a type of prostitute. They used special cybernetics, allowing their entire body to be taken over by computer-controlled expert systems that would act out a client's fantasy perfectly, with the doll themselves not remembering a thing about what happened.
At first, when I heard about Clouds, I was aghast. I expected the grossest and most weird fetishes imaginable to be the only reason such a system existed. And considering I had tons of psychiatric data at my beck and call, including detailed information on almost every paraphilia known, I was expecting the worst. Maybe that was the case in some places that used doll hardware, but the Clouds net site emphasised and seemed to market itself to a high-end clientele, especially those with crippling social anxiety, and it was priced accordingly.
In any case, it definitely explained why the woman felt safe in this building. The Clouds was owned, lock stock and barrel, by the Tyger Claws. I didn't think anyone who messed with their "talent" had a very long life expectancy.
The woman, seeing me blush, laughed even harder, "I thought that was obvious, that you couldn't tell either means you were extra sheltered or my attempt to seem classy worked."
Well, maybe a little bit of both. She did seem classy, but she did have that sort of aura you'd expect from an expensive courtesan or geisha, now that I thought about it.
I didn't stick around much longer, we would usually make small-talk if we were both in the two treadmills, but I wasn't going to stick around just to watch her run just to be sociable. I didn't use the showers in the gym, either, which I felt a little bad about considering I had to go up nineteen floors in an elevator, although I wiped myself with towels so I wasn't incredibly sweaty or stinky before going back upstairs and using my own shower, where I couldn't easily be snuck up on.
I hadn't seen the ass-slapper since my revenge a couple of weeks ago, but my schedule was a bit different, too. Even before today, I spent most of my day on campus.
I had had to get off on the NCART stop in Japantown for the past week, just like what Mr Jin had warned me about. Thankfully, it wasn't a long walk to campus, but I had been coming over an hour early.
However, this time I almost got shot for my trouble. I knew something was a little wrong immediately after I stepped on the street because a large group of Tyger Claws were looming, looking simultaneously dangerous and anxious.
A man that looked to be their leader, wearing a jacket with a stylised Asian dragon printed on it, said as I carefully navigated past them, "... the kids are almost here; when they get here fucking shoot them if you have a gun, chop their fucking heads off if you don't. "
He spoke in Japanese, but my implants included an auto-translate function, rendering subtitles in English either in front of me or in front of the speaker, depending on how many people were talking.
