We were meeting at one of the Lotus Tong's few clubs in the back during the day. I was dressed in a Dr Hasumi equivalent of a corpo outfit, which was a skirt-suit in a striking red colour, which I personally didn't care too much for. I brought Kiwi and one of her team, who I had bought nice outfits for the other day. I was trying to give the impression that they were a company SecTeam, at least a part-time one.
I ground my teeth together and said in Mandarin, " With all due respect, if someone says they're going to burn my clinic to the ground, I am allowed to believe them and take appropriate actions. Hypothetically, I mean." I said hypothetically because the leader of this small fifty-person gang had just vanished without a trace, and nobody could prove that I had anything to do with it.
The Lotus Tong lieutenant's smile was forced. Apparently, what I also didn't precisely understand was the street criminal corollary to face where I was supposed to allow people a certain amount of posturing for their "boys."
This man was the Lotus Tong Red Pole or leader of their enforcers. He was, generally speaking, the only one in their organisation I dealt with at all, except the one time that I had to pay my respects to the Mountain Master .
The Lotus Tong were very street-oriented, even more so than the Tyger Claws were, so there was very little overlap as far as anyone that had the sophistication to be an interlocutor with me, so it fell on this man, Chang Jung, to do so. He was a rather intellectual sort and fell into the role of liaison with some of the legitimate private businesses in Chinatown, despite his responsibilities as one of the Tong's military commanders.
They didn't have very many Tong-owned legitimate businesses, nor did they have very many classy forms of income. They robbed, they sold drugs, they extorted people, and that was about it. Still, they were one of the least offensive gangs in the city, even with all that.
I was glad that Sarah hadn't actually been forming a brand new bloodthirsty elvish poser gang as I had thought. Although, that would have been kind of funny to see, especially if someone would then form a Dwarvish or Orcish gang in response.
We talked a bit more, but the fundamental thing was I wasn't in any trouble, and in fact, the new head of the small gang was a bit pleased with me as he had been looking to move on up in the first place. The deputy, now head of this gang, was also looking to be absorbed by the Lotus, from what I could tell.
Then he'd shift from the leader of a small-time gang to the Captain in a large one. I could see the benefits, but I had the sudden feeling from the affable but cunning eyes of the Lotus Tong Red Pole that I had been taken advantage of somehow.
The cyber-surgical residents had a meeting with their attendings every day where the attendings would relay information they received and divvy out pre-planned surgeries. Although surgeries could and often did pop up as emergencies, the truth was that most emergency cybernetics implantations could be put off for a day or two and were, once, a patient was stabilised. Those that couldn't wait would be handled on the rule of first-come-first-served by whoever was providing the consult to the Emergency Department unless the patient was important enough to warrant special treatment.
"Okay, mostly everything is pretty normal today. We have the usual number of livers, hearts and spines. One cyberdeck implantation and I'll take that with Dr Tanner," my attending said, glancing at one of my peers. I was already considered one of the senior residents, despite this being my first year. It was solely by my very high level of competence. A normal surgical residency in this world was four to five years long, but I would probably be done in a year and a half at most.
I was especially known for how well I handled neurosurgeries, so I was a little surprised I wouldn't be assisting with the cyberdeck installation or even doing it myself. I had two such surgeries where I was the first surgeon under my belt, and they both went well.
My attending, Dr Berg, turned his gaze to me in sympathy, "We also have a special."
That got everyone's interest. A special meant a special project; it was usually something along the lines of implanting an experimental piece of hardware for a research project, a very important person as a patient, or something else very out of the ordinary. We all quite liked them, because usually, they paid a lot more. Although we were on a salary, it was somewhat minimal, and surgeons, even residents, were mainly compensated for the surgery performed. This caused some surgeons to hyper-specialise in only one particular surgery, which they could knock out maybe five to ten procedures a day.
There was one surgeon that came to the hospital to use our OR that specialised only in Midnight Lady accessories, and he drove a ridiculously expensive luxury car with the vanity license plate "THEPDOC." What the P stood for was, in my opinion, as obvious as it was crude. I didn't consider these sorts of surgeons actual doctors, though; they were just technicians that had, through rote memorisation, mastered one or two procedures. Still, some were quite rich.
"Sakura, you're going to be taking this. Sorry, it's a multi-day shit show. It's an experimental neural implant from our friends in Cupertino. I'm sending you the deets over intraoffice mail," he said. Ah, that explained why he wasn't doing it himself. Zetatech, the technology company based in Cupertino, California was a big investor in the Cedar-Sinai Medical Centre, so they pretty much got whatever they wanted when they wanted it, and without paying the extra money for extra compensation to us mere spear carriers.
Dr Berg, who was still one of my part-time locums at my clinic, also knew I was more, compared to the others, wealthy and that I didn't really care so much about making as much as possible while a resident, but what I wanted was interesting and varied surgeries. Plus, I was probably the only one of the residents that could handle a complicated neural surgery if it was something novel. All of them could follow the steps to put in a normal operating system, or optics, of course, but if I didn't take it, he would have to, and that would mean he would lose out on a lot of money, and I would lose out on an exciting surgery, so I heartily approved of his win-win decision.
Although, I honestly didn't like him calling me by my first name. It was a bit too familiar. I frowned. Or rather, I felt that Dr Hasumi wouldn't like it. If I was Taylor, I would have preferred it, though. Sometimes it was annoying to keep track of those sorts of things. I nodded at him, and he continued, "You can pick anyone but Tanner or Chang as your assistant, though." I glanced around, and people were quickly trying to avoid making eye contact with me. They didn't want to lose money for several days or a week.
I felt that the one who would mind the least was, "Dr Iverson," I said. The tall dark-complexioned man smiled ruefully and nodded. I liked him. He had an agreeable, serene temperament and hadn't asked me out on a date like most of the male residents under Dr Berg. Even one of the female doctors even asked me out, too! That was a little outside my expectations, but I guessed lurid office romances when you were a medical resident were a rite-of-passage of this profession, but I definitely wasn't interested in any of that.
Plus, romance with co-workers didn't seem like a good idea to me. However, my memories from NC-Taylor seemed to suggest that this was incorrect, though if you ever worked for a large Corporation. Romance outside of the Corporate family would be heavily scrutinised and distrusted by your peers and bosses, depending on your job.
After the meeting broke up, I told Dr Iverson that I would review everything privately first and we should sync up before lunch to plan our next steps. The files sent by Dr Berg included an already-scheduled consult in a couple of hours, except it wasn't with the patient; it was with the Zetatech rep. I sighed; it was going to be one of those, was it? I would refuse this surgery if the patient didn't want to do it or if Zetatech wanted me to conceal the risk or consequences in proceeding forward. Hopefully, that wouldn't be the case.
As a lowly resident, I didn't have an office, but there were communal private ones, more little cubbies, that anyone could borrow, and I sat in one as I pulled up my recent e-mails.
There was a new e-mail from someone I didn't recognise, sent to everyone who worked in the Emergency Department, even rarely like myself. It was a demand, although it read more like a plea, for people in the overnight shift to please stop using the physical therapy room to have sex. I snorted and deleted the message.
The data packet from Dr Berg was encrypted at the highest level that we used at this hospital, which caused me to raise my eyebrows. I glanced around the little cubby I was in, frowning. Where was the stupid thing?
Ah, it was in the back of the drawer. I pulled out a small box and used my implants to pair with the device after I dusted it off. These things were pretty old, and there were a lot of ways you could bypass a physical biometric like a handprint, but it was only used when combining your system login credentials, so I'd rate the security as "so-so." A DNA taster would be far better, but that would also be a lot more expensive to roll out for thousands of employees.
After I paired with the device, I placed my palm on the scanner plate of the device and held it there until it lit up green. Instantly, the cubby's door behind me locked with a mechanical thud sound, while at the same time, a local wireless jammer activated. In theory, this meant that I couldn't leave nor contact outside parties while I reviewed this confidential file. In truth, the security was mostly theatre. While I couldn't transfer the file from the company's intranet, only view it, I could take screenshots of each page or even scroll my own BD of me reviewing it. In fact, that sounded like a good idea.
After the files were decrypted and pulled up on my screen, I sat there in my allegedly secure cubby and reviewed them. My patient... wait, patients were a pair of identical twins. Brothers that were in their mid-twenties. I skimmed their medical records before switching to look at the proposed procedure.
"Neural oscillation synchronisers?" I asked rhetorically, testing the words. I frowned and then quietly read the attached whitepaper that Zetatech had included; although it was excessively long, it had large parts of it that were redacted. Reading between the lines in the whitepaper, I deduced that these were a for a military project, with the idea that an entire squad of soldiers could be synchronised together as, in effect, a gestalt. Such a squad would offer unparalleled combat effectiveness, teamwork, and coordination. It would be a true force multiplier for elite small-unit forces. According to the white paper, anyway.
That was an absolutely terrible idea, and it was no wonder there was page after page of redacted text that was probably talking about how they had driven some people insane attempting it anyway. Rather than totally cancelling the project, though, they decided that they were just perhaps a little too ambitious with testing at first, and now they were testing with volunteer monozygotic twin sets in an attempt to reduce the variables. Would they move to triplets and quintuplets next?
The paper had redacted most of the discussion about the technical aspects and the theory about how the system functioned, but it had to leave enough data for a surgeon to know how to install it, so it was pretty easy for me to infer the broad strokes, especially since I was working on similar research myself.
This system was designed to create a new personality based on all of the inputs into the network and on the fly too. The intelligence of one of the members could be combined with the fearlessness of another, while the inventiveness of a third would be used as well. Negative traits such as cowardliness, flightiness or disobedience from an individual could be bypassed by and not included in the networked gestalt.
The base tech was somewhat similar to Project Synchronicity but completely different in execution. There was a continuous brain link but no linked memories, short or long-term, so if a synchronisation discontinuity occurred and one member dropped from the network, they might find themselves rather disoriented for some time.
I didn't think it sounded very promising from a military perspective considering the link used jammable short-range high-bandwidth radio-frequency links to create the ad-hoc mesh network, but perhaps they had some sort of jam-resistant link technology that wasn't included in this research model.
I frowned. Was this too much of a coincidence? No, it was impossible. I hadn't gotten beyond the design stage for Project Synchronicity. Nothing was built. I firmly believed that if I was so compromised that people were reading my private files that existed only in my implants, I would not be sitting here right now. The working instantaneous communication system would be enough to kill or sequester me. Or both.
Plus, it wasn't like this sort of research was unique . It had been tried back before the DataKrash. It failed terribly back then, too, but it did become the basis for some ad-hoc mesh network design in low-level robots, some of which were still used today.
Yeah, this wasn't even that weird as the research went on this world. It was just quite a coincidence that it was fairly similar to my own plans. This neural oscillation synchroniser system took n number of individuals and produced one distinct output entity, at least while they were all connected anyway.
Project Synchronicity would take one unique individual and create n number of duplicates which were all linked in every way in real-time. One of the individuals in the network would only diverge if it were disconnected for a long period of time. So it was basically the exact opposite.
So long as I had a single stream of consciousness, even if it were over multiple bodies, then even if one of the bodies was destroyed, while it would diminish me temporarily, it would not kill me, even if the destroyed body was my original ( *gulp* .) That was the somewhat scary idea that I had been turning over and over in my head since I realised the possibilities of the Haywire comm, anyway.
It was a superior form of "immortality" than simply having a backup clone, as I would become a distributed attack surface. Want to kill me? That would require killing all of the members of the network before any single node could clone a replacement body and add it to the network.
