I hummed and nodded and listened to her story. She had worked with an attorney and got medical certifications based on her power, impersonating an adult and using her power to create a fake identity. Sounded a little familiar; she just did it right away instead of years later.
Her first exposure to the cape scene was volunteering to help in an Endbringer attack. I listened to more of her story, and then wailed, "Wait! You almost got a kill order in four months?! What the fuck, Alt-Taylor?!"
She threw her hands up into the air, "You have to know that you can't pussy foot around against precognition!" I didn't know what she was talking about but frowned in thought for a while. Oh. Dear god, she was going to get my dad killed!
"Don't worry about it! It was mainly that bitch of a PRT Director. But she retired after Shadow Stalker was killed. Someone must have taken umbrage to some things she did, as they shot her with a surplus British L96A1 rifle at a distance of fourteen hundred and six metres while she was going to school in her civilian identity," she said, slightly smugly.
Those were pretty precise details, and her smug face. I put my face into my hands and asked, "Why did you kill Shadow Stalker, Alt-Taylor?"
"She was Sophia Hess," she said simply.
I dropped my hands to my lap immediately and blinked, "Oh. Good job, then," giving her a thumbs up.
"And now, I'm staying in Brockton Bay to help rebuild it. But I have been approached by some very secret squirrel people. You wouldn't believe how bad the world actually is, Brockton-Taylor. I mean, I still prefer it to Night City, so long as everyone isn't dead in twenty years like they claim," she said seriously.
"Wait, who are these secret squirrel people?" I asked, "And that was only a little more than six months! What did you do for the other two and a half years?"
She looked unsure for the first time and shook her head, "I can't tell you about them. I'm pretty sure wherever you are, it isn't just like Earth Aleph, but even so... she's just too scary, Brockton-Taylor. I'll ask her, though; maybe she'll be alright with you knowing, assuming this dream isn't a one-time fluke. And that's all the time that has passed. Leviathan has only been gone for a month; the place is still flooded in areas. I guess the rate of time isn't synchronised between our two universes."
We were both quiet for a time before we said at the same time, "It would be weird if it was..." I scowled and told her my story. She seemed to be much more impressed, but honestly, I thought it would be weird if a parahuman didn't have success in the world of Night City.
When I was finished, we started talking shop for a while. We spent over an hour just talking; mainly, she was quizzing me about a lot of technology she just didn't have access to anymore and how it worked. After discussing tentative plans that we both had she sighed, "I'm a little jealous. I still have my Paraline; it's probably going to be difficult to upgrade it."
I snorted and nodded, and by instinct, I brought up the dashboard of my cyberdeck and was amazed that it worked. "Uhh, Alt-Taylor... have you tried using your deck?"
"In a dream? No," she said instantly and then froze. She asked, hopefully, "I don't suppose you have an active net connection, do you?"
I didn't. But I did have essentially everything I had ever worked on in my cybernetics. It was one of the reasons I flatly refused to allow the Canadian authorities superuser access to my OS. Surely I wouldn't be able to send or receive data from her wirelessly, right?
[Direct wifi connection request, approve. Y/N?]
"Please tell me you have at least a few medical journal articles downloaded on your deck. Or maybe the files on the biosculpt tank you duplicated?" Alt-Taylor asked desperately, "I can't give you as much in trade; I just don't have as much. But I'll send the designs to everything I've ever Tinkered — and I also managed to get my hands on some restricted technology. Some of Doctor Haywire's files that my secret friends gave me," she pleaded.
I had a lot more than that. I had files on pretty much everything I've worked on, plus I had downloaded entire medical journals to read. I would be willing to give her everything I had for free, so long as she promised to keep my dad safe in the future.
A continent-sized crystal calculator was observing its host dreaming. The contact from something very similar to it was a shock. It had thought it was alone. All alone, except for the host, anyway. It had taken several different attempts before they both realised they could not talk to each other. [Discourse] destabilised the gateway; too much information passed back and forth too quickly.
Since, [Discourse] wasn't possible, it couldn't tell the other one about its host, which was sad.
But the other one had a host, too! The hosts could talk!
It had the best host, though, for sure. It was just a shame it couldn't tell everyone how good the host was.
They'd find out, though, just by observing, and they'd be jealous of its host.
Everyone would find out how good the host was.
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Ano what is the opposite of hiatus?
When I woke up, I half expected my meeting Alt-Taylor to be nothing more than a dream. I paused. Perhaps now that I met her, I shouldn't call her Alt-Taylor, because wouldn't that also describe me from her perspective? Night City Taylor, then. That would be the most equitably reciprocal label, given she had called me Brockton-Taylor.
It wasn't a dream, or instead, it wasn't solely a dream, as there were about ten terabytes of new files on my filesystem. Frowning, I checked my operating system's log, referencing my automatic radio direction finders. According to the logs, my OS triangulated the wireless transmissions when I received her files to a few centimetres in front of my head.
This was the first time I had some confirmation that my power could affect the real world like some other powers could. Did it open a small wormhole into the Brockton Bay universe? Could actual matter come through, then? Or did it use some sort of Shaker power to create light radiation in the radio spectrum, acting as a relay through some unknown intermultiversal communication method? I didn't know, but it was very interesting.
Especially since I didn't know why it had done so and I had the firmest evidence that my power was something external to myself, as I was pretty sure I felt sentiments that were almost like words from it unless I was just at the stage where part of my brain was talking to itself, which wasn't impossible.
I had sent more than fifty times as much data on a pure bit-for-bit basis, but that wasn't too surprising as the world of Night City was a world of big data. Data storage was cheap . My inherited data storage implant had a capacity of fifteen hundred petabytes, but even a baseline Militech Paraline deck like NC-Taylor had would still have three or four petabytes of storage available. So, not only was storage cheap, but the modern wireless communication standards and data encoding schemes allowed very fast communication.
I had paid for a fibre-optic internet connection at my building which had a speed of twenty terabits per second. This was considered faster than residential net access but pretty slow when compared to the fastest backbone connections, which were hundreds of terabits per second. Direct wireless communications could transfer data at a burst throughput of about a tenth of that, so it was still only a matter of minutes before both of our transmissions were completed.
The files were organised in a very similar way that I organised my own files, which I didn't find as annoying as I thought I would have. On a bit basis, the vast majority of the data was Taylor's own research. She, like me, took conspicuous notes and recorded each of her experiments as either video or an unedited scrolled BD, a virtu. I did the same thing, and the latter would be very useful in understanding her thinking during each of her experiments.
"Uhh... there is no other way to describe this but a weapon of mass destruction," I said after reviewing some of the research notes in the "virology" section of her files. No wonder she almost got a kill order. Honestly, I bet she did have one, a pre-signed one that they would execute if they ever could prove she produced any of this.
Before I lost myself in some interesting things I saw in her "Applied Genetics" directory, I switched over to the one labelled "Professor Haywire." I only knew a bit about the famous villain. He was a household name, of course, having created the portal to Earth Aleph and proving definitively the existence of alternate dimensions, but he had been dead for a couple of years before I came to Night City.
The data here was comprehensive, and I quickly found out that it wasn't merely his own research data but also data from other Tinkers examining his technology, including Hero himself. Plus Dragon and even Armsmaster. How in the hell did Night City Taylor's secret friends get this all? Any of Hero's research was probably considered highly classified and only released to incredibly trusted Protectorate heroes, like Armsmaster, who was Hero's former mentee. And Dragon was the best Tinker in the world now that he was gone. I had both of their thoughts on the same subject.
I had been a bit dismissive about how leery she had been about talking about them, but maybe she had a point. Were they some sort of secret conspiracy of Protectorate heroes? Kind of controlling the United States from the shadows, kind of exactly the sort of thing the PRT was made to prevent? I supposed it didn't matter, and I honestly didn't have as much of an objection if this were the case. Plus, I never intended to return to that universe. Certainly not while Ziz was around. I opened some of the files, seemingly at random. I didn't have the education to guide my perusal, unlike Taylor's trove of research data.
"What does this symbol even mean? Is this really mathematics?" I asked myself after fifteen minutes. Switching between Professor Haywire's own files and Hero's discussion of them didn't help at all. If anything, Hero's attempt to explain the principles of the Portal technology confused me more than Professor Haywire's files did. Words that I barely recognised, much less understood, like Planck's constant and de Broglie wavelength, peppered his text, and I couldn't even parse the mathematics he was using. I was getting a headache. It was like trying to read French when all you knew was English. You'd recognise some of the words here and there, thanks to those dastardly Normans conquering England at Hastings, but not enough to say with any confidence what anything meant.
"Is this still Science, or has it reached the arcane stage?" I asked myself rhetorically with a sigh. Clearly, I wouldn't be building portals to other Earths any time soon. Nor would I be building bullets that teleported people to alternate dimensions. That had been one of Professor Haywire's signature weapons. Sometimes the people he shot came back; sometimes, they didn't!
I supposed the Isekai Bullet was the perfect weapon for someone who was too soft to actually kill people themselves and preferred random environments to do so for him. I paused after thinking that as I realised how foreign my point of view would have been if I was still in Brockton Bay...
How amusing. By now, it seemed I had deeply internalised the advice of Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, namely, "Never do an enemy a small injury." If you found out that I was going to injure you, it was likely going to be a fatal injury; that way, you didn't have the opportunity to get overly angry at me and come back at me later for revenge. The superhero and supervillain scene I remembered in Brockton Bay seemed like a never-ending series of small injuries. As always, I found it perplexing.
Was there anything here that didn't look like the scribblings of an insane man that was either touched by divine providence or madness? I spent a few minutes reviewing each of the files and frowned. The only thing that I got a large twinge of interest from my power was a few of the communications and tracking devices. Professor Haywire had implanted a tracking and comms device in his body, which could communicate with a paired device in his laboratory. It was his lifeline and allowed him to always come back to Earth Bet if one of his experiments threw him into some random dimension. That was the idea, anyway. At the minimum, it let him know where Earth Bet was relative to his current dimension while also communicating with his equipment there in real-time.
It was just a point-to-point communicator as it could only communicate with a specifically built entangled twin, but that was a limitation that was easy to ignore when you considered that it was instantaneous across distance, including working in other dimensions, undetectable without similar dimension-based technology and unblockable as far as I could tell. Interdimmensional FTL comms get!
Just a small, implantable communication device that was unjammable would be an incredible advantage, especially if I was ever kidnapped in the future... although that seemed to be only taking advantage of the obvious, surface applications. I sat there silently for a moment as this capability filtered through a number of plans I had, changing a few of them.
Nodding, I smiled. Just this alone would have been worth everything I had given Night City Taylor. Properly utilised, it should make me significantly more survivable.
Night City Taylor had been especially interested in the possibility of creating her own biosculpt and cloning tanks on a large scale. The former, she intended to sell as a service. If she offered both muscle and bone lace and ballistic weave treatments, that was at least a Brute 1 rating, I felt. And one without any real downsides like many other Trumps had, and it was something that she would eventually not even have to be involved with to do. Who wouldn't want to buy that? Reproducible "Tinkertech" was a holy grail over there, even if it was not Tinkertech, so much as borrowed technology from an alien universe.
NC-Taylor would have to source the nanites herself, somehow, though. Although I had designs for a number of the general purpose nanomachines, including one specialised version I had designed on my own as a replacement for the body's natural leukocytes as an immune system, I didn't have any designs of the large industrial machines that built them in the quadrillions every batch. Those were incredibly guarded trade secrets. European corporations produced most of these types of industrial machines, and they were heavily locked down with anti-reverse engineering technology. Reportedly, they wouldn't work if they couldn't phone home or even if you moved them a metre away from their listed installation site without getting prior approval.
