"Wait, her name's Elizabeth Borden?" I blinked. Was that a coincidence? I recited in a sing-song voice, "Lizzie Borden took an axe, and gave a Claw forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave the other forty-one."
He blinked, "That's quite good, but I reckon it'd be rather self-defeatin' of me to overly praise somethin' that invites anyone to whack me with an axe, ma'am."
Were there no Lizzie Borden murders in this world? I didn't believe that, but it was possible they had left the popular culture due to time and the Data Krash. Maybe this new Lizzie Borden found a reference somewhere and used it and an axe as the image of her persona.
Not surprisingly, a group of the Claws had murdered her. What was surprising, though, was how much of a mistake that was. There were riots, city-wide, with the up unto now more or less passive joy-toy demographic taking up arms and shooting anyone they thought was oppressing them, but especially the Tyger Claws, which had casualties in the low hundreds.
"It woulda been a lot worse, but Mr Jin had a pretty good relationship with the joytoys around Japantown. After all, the dolls in Clouds are in some ways, the pinnacle of the profession, I guess and they've been well-treated and well-compensated. Anyway, he managed to have a sit down with the main lady of industry that the more militant of the joytoys were coalescin' behind," he said, shrugging, "Things might have gotten straight up out of hand if not for that. I reckon he's in pretty good odour with the bosses right now."
After dinner, I talked with him privately. It turned out he was here to cash in on one of Wakako's DNA adjustment favours. Not for himself, but for someone he was escorting. He handed me a package that contained both the current scans and genome of my "patient" as well as the scans and a genetic sample of who they were expected to be transformed into.
"It'll take me a couple of days to get ready, so just sit on them in whatever safehouse you're in for now," I told Johnny, who nodded. "When I'm ready, I'll give you a drug that will knock them out, and you can bring them by here unconscious. They'll stay sedated for the entire program, and then I'll return them to you the same way."
"I reckon that sounds like a good way to protect your identity, Hasumi-sensei," he said with a grin. He then asked, "After this, I'd like to come back and take you up on that offer for some chrome, before I head back to NC." He shook his head, "Almost got flatlined myself, and it didn't sit too well with me that I had to blast some young lady who was thinkin' she was doing the right thing before she could throw a grenade at me." He shook his head, "If I was faster, better... I'd maybe been able to stop her some other way."
I raised an eyebrow but nodded. I had a few Sandy's in stock. Zetatech branded ones were very easy to acquire here in LA, and I had bought a number from people second-hand and sold some to the Lotus Tong, as well.
I had been trying to get another Type K-02 Kerenzikov from Kang Tao, but to no avail. I needed at least one more, along with a duplicate of all of my other cybernetics, to proceed through to the first stages of Project Synchronicity.
"Sure," I told him with a nod. Johnny may have been a bit of a clown and a bit of an idiot, but I felt that he was actually kind of a good guy, which made him being a committed and lifelong member of the Claws all the more tragic.
After Johnny left, I went into my lab to start crafting the virus, as well as to make sure all of my algae experiments were under wraps. I was done, anyway. The algae was ready to deploy, and I was just waiting to plan an operation with Kiwi.
Although I had wanted to perform tests, perhaps in a saltwater lake or an uninhabited island, the truth was that I couldn't take the personal risk.
It would already be dangerous enough to deploy once. Doing so another time would add another datum that could possibly be correlated to me. I was sure that the Powers That Be wouldn't really care about a saltwater lake or small island being infested with algae temporarily, but it would be noticed by Earth-observing satellites and noted. Then once my algae bloom was deployed for real? They'd definitely look back retrospectively.
I was very confident in its safety and safeguards, though. Plus, I had one method to kill it all on a global scale anyway if it got out of hand. I accepted that it was going to be somewhat damaging to the continental shelf biomes, but not as much as one would think. It would definitely out-compete all other algae within five kilometres of shore, but the life cycle of my algae was unique.
To really impact Biotechnica's sales quickly, then it had to be vastly superior to its wheat product. So, my algae collected carbon, both from the atmosphere and the ocean and converted it directly into ethanol. There was no need to harvest the algae and then use bioreactors to convert it to a hydrocarbon.
While it was trapped in the algae, it wasn't a flammability hazard either, but it was somewhat toxic to marine life if ingested, plus it could get them drunk, so the algae was designed to be brightly coloured and taste terrible and cause rapid mild but mostly harmless sickness at low dosages .
An enterprising person could collect the algae from the coastal areas and extract the fuel by the simple expedient of crushing it like you were making orange juice. Bam, free fuel. One square kilometre could yield over six hundred litres of fuel a day with the rate the algae grew.
If it wasn't harvested, and not all of it would ever be, even if they had boats trawling the coasts every single day, the algae entered its final life cycle where it converted the ethanol into edible sugars and died, sinking to the bottom of the water. This both would feed numerous animals when they discovered the bounty, but it would also act as a carbon sink.
The entire system was a carbon sink, actually, but if you extracted the ethanol and burned it again, you would, of course, release much of the carbon back into the atmosphere as ethanol burned into carbon dioxide and water. But not all of it, as there was a fair bit of carbon in the structure of the algae itself.
It was also toxin resistant, but this variant didn't yet have the capability to sequester or purify toxins, but it was going to be pulling many, many tons of CO2, CO, methane and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere every year. By the end of the century, the air might be at the level it was at the turn of the millennium. Which still wasn't great, but it was a lot better, and as a first step, it was awesome.
While at the same time providing a sustainable and renewable direct chemical energy source.
It wasn't all because I hated Biotechnica. If people didn't have to grow fuel, then they could start growing food again. The population of the planet had hovered at around two billion for a long time, and the bottleneck was food production. When food competed with energy production that those in power needed for material consumption, the poor always lost out.
I knew doing this was, in some ways, just like squeezing a balloon — the air just gets moved around. Sure, Biotechnica might lose a bit, but that would just mean that other Corps, especially Petrochem and the like, would gain. That was just something I had to accept would happen. I didn't have the capability to change the way the whole world thought; all I could do was just hopefully make it a little better, a little bit at a time.
Hoping for trickle-down prosperity kind of irritated me, but refusing to act just because it would benefit those in power was naive. The world was set up so that everything benefited these people.
Tapping the algae limpet mines, I said, "Soon, my pretties."
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Bodyblow
I had asked Kiwi to plan an operation against the Port of Los Angeles, or rather at least one of the container ships inside the port so that I would have an opportunity to tag along. When she saw the very limpet-mine-looking devices that I would be carrying with me in a backpack, though, she frowned and said, "I don't think I'm down for committing any terrorism-murder or sinking any ships."
I shook my head, "They only look like explosives. They're not. They contain sensors, in addition to a few other things. They won't damage the ships at all or hurt anybody. They're just no reason to reinvent the wheel when I need to affix something surreptitiously to the hull of a ship, but please don't mention or even think too often about them. The project is at the highest confidentiality level."
I was a little nervous because the first cloned body and cloned brain for Project Synchronicity were not ready yet, nor had I finalised the design of the cyberbrain housing, so this would be a real risk for me, but at the same time, I had taken much more significant risks than this in Night City. I had gotten the Haywire comms fairly small, about the size of what I would have recognised in Brockton Bay as a USB dongle, but they still needed fairly frequent maintenance, which wasn't going to work. I felt they needed to go at least six months without me having to tinker with them.
Although the main reason for this project was to protect against death, a secondary reason was to try to start making some waves. I wouldn't mind if one of my bodies was kidnapped and placed into a gilded cage, for example, so long as I had real-time comms with the net and my other bodies. That would be a good opportunity for me to start producing other things that could help the world or people as a whole.
I had good feelings about my algae, for example, but it was merely a first attempt. I was pretty sure it would do a lot more good than harm, but I wasn't entirely sure about how well it would help the environment, despite my projections. It would definitely take carbon out of the air and deposit it as edible sugars in the ocean and in the cellular structure of the algae, with the idea that the carbon in the air would be temporarily "sequestered" as a large increase in biomass that lived and stayed in the ocean, but I wasn't sure if it would work like I thought it would work over many, many fish-generations.
Biomass was biodegradable into carbon gasses after the organisms died, after all, but I still felt that increasing the total amount of biomass in the oceans would be somewhat effective, so long as the ecosystems weren't knocked totally off balance.
I wasn't an expert on anything but biology and technology that interfaced with it. I was smart, and I could make inferences, but they were fundamentally the guesses of a gifted hobbyist in every part of science that didn't touch on biology or genetics. If I could get one of my bodies in place as a prized researcher in a large Corporation, then I could have dozens of research assistants helping me with my "hobby projects", which the Corp would be more than happy to let me research to keep me happy, so long as I produced enough money elsewhere.
If they baulked at releasing my hobby projects or did so but charged too much for them, I could easily leak the research publically through my other bodies. As a prized researcher, I had no doubt that they would have me under constant monitoring by their counter-intelligence division, so they would never suspect me of the leaks. It would likely give them indigestion, trying to find spies or hacks in their systems that never existed.
However, there was a very good chance that once kidnapped... err, recruited, I wouldn't be able to tinker with my own implants for months. They wouldn't want to give me a chance to either create something to escape or kill myself with. In fact, I expected in that situation, my implants would be examined fairly closely and dangerous ones like my monowire or maybe even my cyberdeck removed.
So the Haywire comms had to both get smaller and more reliable. Smaller so that I could put them in a place that looked either harmless or critical, something that they wouldn't yank out of my body. I was close to this stage already in terms of the size of the current generation devices, but I still had more to go. I was six generations passed the first device I had implanted into my chest, which still worked but was now occasionally dropping packets during communications with its twin due to not being able to maintain in its current installation.
The next version, or perhaps the one just after that, would be small enough that I could incorporate it into a cyberbrain system which was going to be the basis for the synchronisation hardware.
However, they also had to get more reliable so that they could go months without maintenance, as otherwise, that body would be disconnected from the network and might diverge over time before it could reconnect.
I had already decided that if this happened, we would treat each other as sisters and allies, not enemies. I wasn't so prideful that I couldn't accept someone with the same skills as I had, especially when they would think almost exactly like I did. I would prefer that not to happen, but it wouldn't bother me that much if it did. If necessary, we could carve out territories, or something, so as to avoid stepping on each other's toes.
"So, what is your target, anyway?" I asked Kiwi. I hadn't sat in on her internal briefing to her team, as all I cared about was that she had to steal something that would be noticed and that it had to include something that I would hypothetically want. However, now I kind of thought that had been a mistake, especially since we were sort of operating as a team.
"The MR Kazuliski — maru is carrying a mixed cargo, but our target is a load of specialised industrial nanomachines," I frowned, as I wouldn't be interested in that, "plus several thousand kilograms of medical-grade nanites from Europe." Ah, I would want that.
She nodded, noticing my expression, "We have a buyer for the industrial nanomachines already, so it works out." He rubbed her hands together, "So, let me discuss the plan. It will start with infiltrating the port of Los Angeles, which, as you know, is a high-security area..."
The Port of Los Angeles was a sprawling, huge area, and that was ultimately why it was so easy to sneak in. Unfortunately for them, it was way oversized for the amount of traffic the port received and was built and expanded in the middle of the last century. This was when the population of the world was in excess of three times its current level, as well as when there was not an Artificially Intelligent self-replicating minefield that roamed the Pacific Ocean. Whoever thought that was a good idea should have been shot. Hopefully, they had been.
As such, the level of traffic the port received was less than ten per cent of what it had received during its peak. The unused sections were lawless, one of Los Angeles' no-go zones, but they had easy access to the piers and the harbour, which we could use to infiltrate the MR Kazuliski-maru before it got underway.
