Being forced to buy legitimate hardware would put us into the red, but if I had to, I could buy or finance a number of tanks. I would just quietly sell my bootleg copies to less scrupulous clinics for half or two-thirds off MSRP to recoup some of the costs.
"Thank you for seeing me, Dr Hasumi," he said with a smile, which I reciprocated politely.
I nodded, "Of course. Meditech is one of our largest suppliers of nanomachines, which are of the highest quality." That was true, too. Although, I wasted a lot less than most clinics. Since Meditech not only made the tanks but produced the nanies, they didn't have a huge incentive to make their products very efficient. After all, everyone knew that it was better to have a reoccurring revenue stream than simply sell something once.
As such, many of the nanites were, by default, wasted when a patient left a tank. I created a proprietary filtering system which filtered out and then reflashed neutral programming on most of the nanites that were in a tank when it drained, which caused our nanite usage to drop by over eighty per cent. I had also begun reselling some nanomachines to some of the other less-legal clinics in Chinatown at cost, more or less, just so that our order numbers with Meditech didn't precipitously fall, which might have been noticed.
He smiled, "We really appreciate that. The Cherry Blossom clinic is our most valued client in this neighbourhood." It was probably their only client in this neighbourhood, so this was like telling your only child they were your favourite. None of the other clinics in Chinatown was legit, but that might mean they did value me even more, hoping my four blocks of relative civilisation might rub off on the rest of the neighbourhood.
He paused and then continued, "However, I'm here on business of a more personal nature." I blinked at him. Was he coming on to me? I glanced at his body briefly, somewhat dismissive. He wasn't exactly my type, and this was a bit sudden. Proper romance should be taken slow, and definitely didn't include making an appointment.
However, then he continued, saying simply, "We'd like to buy out any intellectual property interest you have in the Magical Fairy haircode."
Huh? I sat there, still. I thought, 'Enhanced memory, don't fail me now.'
Oh... the magical elf hair mode for that girl a couple of months ago. Meditech was the manufacturer of the techhair we installed in her, and I did program that custom module. I had the same techhair, myself, too. It was a good product.
I eyed him suspiciously. Although, I was immensely gratified that this wasn't about our pirate equipment in the back. But I needed clarification. I was almost one hundred per cent sure that Meditech had some clause in the techhair EULA that gave them some sort of perpetual, non-revocable license to any software mods created. It was pretty standard, "What's this about? I remember I made a custom mod for a client a couple of months ago, but..."
He blinked and then nodded. "Ah, you don't know. I guess you don't really follow popular teen culture? And you look so young." I smiled perfunctorily at the compliment before he continued, "Your client is a moderately famous net celebrity. She streams a show most evenings with a viewer count of over five thousand people watching even on a slow day. It's a general variety show, with her reactions to videos and monologues about current events and the like. Sometimes she plays games or watches shows or BDs. She's considered a Europhile show, although she does sometimes consume retro Japanese culture as well."
Was Sarah a Media? I had thought she was a trust fund kid. That was one way to pay for University! How interesting, especially since I had very heavily changed her facial features. That must have been the reason why she was so adamant that no change could affect her voice, though. Had to keep at least one thing recognisable; otherwise, your audience might think a switcheroo happened.
I pinched my glabella and said softly, "That must be why our clinic has done over a dozen elf-type exotics a month lately. I was about to rename the clinic to Rivendell." They all had mentioned being referred to by Sarah, to the point where I had given her a small percentage as a referral fee for the business. I just thought that she was building up an elvish LARP group or terrorist cell.
He looked confused for a moment before recognition reached his face and said appreciatively, "Wow, Dr Hasumi, that's a deep cut. Have you read The Lord of the Rings? "
The novels by Tolkien existed in all three dimensions I was aware of. Earth Aleph, Bet and this world. But the film was only adapted on Aleph. I had expected an adaptation here and was really interested in watching it to see the differences, but it never existed. I nodded, some of my real personality coming to the surface instead of the mask of Dr Hasumi, "Of course, Tolkien is awesome." I had to stop myself from saying, 'My mom was an English professor, after all.'
This man's presence started to make a little bit more sense, "I'm surprised you're here in person to sever any ownership interest I have. It sounds like my client is kind of small-time."
He shrugged, "That is the case. But you see, you were the first person to make an active, animated mod for any techhair. We liked that idea very much and are going to be shipping several dozen DLCs for all models of techhair that support this technology. Honestly, I have no idea why we didn't think of this before ourselves; it is kind of an own-goal."
Ah. Although I was sure they did have a solid legal ground to claim a perpetual license to what I created for their hair, I suspected this was to prevent me from selling the same thing to other companies that manufacture techhair. It would be a Meditech exclusive... for a couple of months. But a couple of months was long enough to secure a lot of profit.
The idea of refusing was untenable, as not only did I not want their scrutiny on my clinic, but they could drown me in litigation or just drop a bomb on me. But that didn't mean I needed to bend over completely. I could negotiate a price, and they'd be happy to pay it so long as it was less than what it would cost to crush me.
"Alright, let's talk price, then," I said with a cunning lilt to my tone, steepling my fingers together in anticipation.
"Performing surgery on yourself sure is easy if you have a Kumo-kun," I said happily while watching my robotic assistant use trauma nanoglue to close the surgical site incision on my upper chest near my shoulder.
He seemed to take this as a compliment as he made a gentle humming noise out of his speakers. He could understand English, sort of, but he couldn't really talk.
Kumo-kun's hum caused Mrs Pegpig to coo curiously. She often followed me into my lab, although I didn't know why because it was an entirely closed-off environment and didn't have any windows outside, which she liked. She seemed to like watching me work, though.
I had just installed the third prototype of the Haywire-based FTL entangled comms unit in my chest. Unfortunately, this version was a little bit too big for installation directly in my operating system as a miniature expansion card as planned, but Haywire's versions were only a few times larger than a grain of rice, so I was hoping I could reduce the size over time.
My version used a lot more power too. Professor Haywire's were powered by some sort of bullshit involving the collapsing quantum waveform of a human's bioelectricity. It sounded like bullshit technobabble to me, no matter how many times I looked at it. My power helped absolutely not at all with it, so I figured it was some Tinkertech that was totally beyond my specialisation, so mine used miniature graphene-based supercapacitors-the best I could find. However, there was a lot of current draw during transmission, such that I would have to charge them every other day if I used the system a lot.
I knew that this was a failure on my part. The comms shouldn't be wasting so much energy. The theory, at least what I could understand of it, suggested that it should only require negligible energy to transmit in the first place. I wasn't there yet, but with every prototype I built, I learned just a little bit more about how they were supposed to work, and I finally felt this prototype was sufficient to install in my body. Just that they did work was already an incredible accomplishment.
I rebooted my operating system. This not only caused my vision to go black briefly, but my Kerenzikov cut out for a couple of seconds which was almost intolerable. Being slow was terrible . As soon as everything rebooted, I immediately disabled all wireless transmissions and activated the custom communications module.
The twin to my module was installed in my computing cluster a few metres from me in the corner, which would act as a router to both my local clinic subnet and the net as a whole. I tried accessing a random cat video online and grinned as it worked.
This was awesome. Just this very initial application would allow me to have uninterruptible, unjammable communications with my clinic and, through it, the rest of the net while also emitting nothing on any spectrum. If I ever started doing Edgerunner jobs again, I could browse social media while running on heightened EMCON status with my stealth field engaged.
I could also never be completely isolated again unless they took this implant out. I tried to make it look like anything but a comms module, too, and my next versions would be smaller and smaller until I could hide it as an ambiguous and extraneous circuit inside my operating system, hopefully.
And that was before Project Synchronicity, which needed very small versions of this implanted device and was still in the planning stages. That was going to be the game-changer.
Speaking of revolutionary change, I glanced over at my workbench. Sat in the middle was something that looked almost exactly like a magnetically adhesive naval limpet mine. Three of them, in fact, stacked on top of each other like legos.
It wasn't surprising that the delivery system was done before the actual thing to be delivered, considering the genome of the current generation algae hardly resembled algae anymore. It was getting more and more complicated, but it was necessary. Both for the complicated organic chemistry the bacteria would do, as well as for safety, robustness and genetic safeguards to prevent tampering.
I'd have to conduct tests somewhere with a special variant that was designed to experience apoptosis after a while to verify that the safeguards I had included worked. Otherwise, I risked releasing something that could spread across the entire ocean and destroy most of the shallow water ocean biome in a few years, which would cascade to the entire ocean. The sun was pretty necessary, after all, and this alga was designed to reproduce aggressively and would block out the sun almost completely.
I was almost one hundred per cent sure my version would only grow within approximately five kilometres from shore, but I wouldn't proceed with the plan until I was certain. It was kind of funny that the first thing I would do to change the world for the better was mainly coming to fruition out of spite, but that was just the kind of girl I was.
Sighing, I made a decision I had been putting off for a while. It turned out that I had over fifty unpublished chapters of Dr Hasumi's novel, as she had continued to write it during her durance vile amongst the Maelstrom gang. Quite commendable, to be honest, and she didn't even write spitefully and kill off all of her characters, either.
I had finished the novel months ago, but now I logged into the site she published the work on using her credentials.
I mentally typed, " Sorry for the long time since my last update, but I was kidnapped and held against my will by human traffickers for the past year or so. But as an apology, here is a double release today! Enjoy! ^_^" I then posted the next two chapters.
Dr Hasumi posted two to three times a week historically, so I had a few months to start writing new chapters. It would be something to do, and besides, I was invested in this story now. A mod on the site had added a HIATUS tag to the story, which I carefully deleted.
Less than a second after I posted the first update, FantasticDragon replied, "first www".
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Lizzie Borden took an axe
The biggest issue I had in staying in character as Dr Hasumi had been, lately, dealing with matters of face . I had reached what I considered a détente with the Lotus Tong. They finally agreed that I didn't have to pay them the five per cent cut as long as I did not publicise it. So long as I publicly pretended to still be paying their fees and privately continued to provide some "Ripperdoc" style work for them, they'd call it square.
They'd lose face, though, as the hegemons of Chinatown if it became public knowledge that I wasn't paying protection fees like most everyone else was. It didn't really matter that they weren't, actually, the unopposed hegemons, either.
In many ways, they were treating me like a small gang in my own right. If not a gang, then at least someone they didn't think it was profitable to needlessly antagonise. When my edge of Chinatown settled down, the smaller gangs in the area started operating more. I hadn't really targeted them, mainly just the unorganised anarchistic elements.
In Night City, they'd have been called Scavs, but that word was a little passé in Hollywood, and instead, they were called wreckers here. I presumed like in the old Soviet etymology of the word.
This was kind of amusing because despite being sourced from a Russian word, most of the wreckers weren't Slavic immigrants like they were in Night City, but just a normal distribution of the demographics of Los Angeles County as a whole. Made me curious why Night City was different that way. Of course, it might just be because Night City had a larger immigrant population to begin with. After all, they didn't follow any of the NUSA immigration laws or most of any of the others, either.
In the past ten years, a number of federal agencies created offices in Night City, but invariably, they suffered some kind of freak fire or similar natural disaster in their offices, and it got to the point that no landlord would rent to them at all, despite how many threats they made.
In any case, once the area around my clinic became more stable, gangs started attempting to move in, and now I was dealing with the Lotus Tong, who was acting as a mediator between one of these groups and me after some unpleasantness occurred. My issue with face was such that I couldn't even say the things I wanted to say to the other party, so it wasn't a meeting where we sat down and hashed things out so much as each of us meeting in private with the Lotus Tong, who operated as a go-between.
