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Skitterdoc 2077


Автор:
Опубликован:
09.07.2024 — 09.07.2024
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1
Аннотация:
Кроссовер Worm и вселенной Киберпанка. Действие происходит в Найтсити. MC - Альтернативная Тейлор (стриггерила с альтернативной силой, сила Костепилочки), но она прожила свою жизнь согласно канону, затем ее перебросили во вселенную Киберпанка, и она должна выжить. Медицинский (био)тинкер Тейлор в мире киберпанка. Не могу читать через переводчик на оригинальном сайте - https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14155507/1/Skitterdoc-2077. Так что, выкладываю здесь, чтобы спокойно читать. Текст не мой, права не мои, выкладываю без разрешения автора. Ссылка на произведение выше.
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I frowned and glanced at the refrigerator again before grabbing some more chicken. Gloria probably wouldn't be here in time to eat dinner, but it was better to eat some leftovers than a Burrito XXL. Plus, Kiwi might or might not show up.

Chicken piccata was a pretty simple dish to make, and I was serving the boy fairly quickly. He dug in right away as I plated another portion onto a resealable plastic container and sat it on the kitchen island to cool. My portion, I took to the kitchen table and sat down, noticing with a smirk that the boy's plate was already almost half empty.

"Say, do you think you could get Mom to agree to let me learn martial arts?" he asked with a hopeful intonation in his voice.

I blinked and asked, "This isn't about bullying, is it? I thought we had solved that." When he had been bullied in the past, I helped him walk through his strategies after we had solid intelligence on the enemy. Like a young boy, he took the direct and straightforward approach of waiting until the boy tried to bully him again and punched him square in the nose.

He didn't get in trouble. The boy's parents weren't anything that special, and moreover, corporate schools didn't strongly discourage fights amongst students, so long as they weren't too vicious. In NC-Taylor's memories, Militech took it one step further and starting at age ten, every child took martial arts, including full-contact kumite, within their own age cohort. Refereed spars were a standard way of solving minor disputes among students.

The school they had enrolled David in wasn't quite so martial, but he could still be expected to learn a martial art in a few years. David shook his head, "Nah, we've been friends now forever." That's what he had told me, but I had a philosophical disagreement with befriending bullies. Still, it seemed to have worked for David, with the boy in question being much more of a follower-type personality. It was only the lack of a leader to follow that led him to lash out. I mean, he was only six at the time, too, so it wasn't as though he was an irredeemable shit like Sophia Hess was, yet.

I waited for him to elaborate, and he sighed, "Well, you know a lot about growing up in a Corporation, right?" I frowned as that bordered very closely upon a forbidden question because, strictly speaking, Dr Hasumi did not . Still, I inclined my head, and he continued, "Well, one of the boys said that as you got promoted in a Corporate job, that you might be attacked more by your friends at work, and so learning a martial art would be a good idea. Is that true?"

I let my frown continue and held up a hand and made a waffling gesture, "Yes, and no. It depends. There are two types of corporate employees, well three if you count the hourly workers at the bottom..." I stopped myself before saying something along the lines of 'Militech called them' and changed it to, "But the two types of salaried employees could be referred to as staff and line positions. You really would only have to watch your back if you have a line position, and these positions are in the vast minority."

He scrunched up his face and asked, "What's the difference?"

"My job until recently would definitely be considered professional staff. I wasn't a line manager at all. Think of it like the Corporation is an Army, with line positions being the officers that command forces in battle, even if they are the lowest Lieutenant to the highest Generals," I said, thinking of a different way to explain it.

His face lit up, "Oh! And so the staff would be the enlisted soldiers?" He liked war movies, so it was a pretty good analogy for me, but I shook my head.

"No, that would be the hourly employees. The staff would be the officers that do not command soldiers in battle. For example, doctors like myself are officers in the Army, but even a Doctor that holds a General's rank can not give an order to even a Private in battle because they're not line officers . Many types of engineers... basically the egg-heads, specialists and administrative types, yes?" I clarified, then continued, "In a Corp, a line position will always be a manager of some type. Except maybe the entry-level, which might be something like assistant or analyst. And the staff positions might have a manager that is also staff; for example, my immediate boss is a doctor also because it is hard for highly technical people to be led by people that don't have similar educations, but even then, my boss's boss is a regular management type."

That was a lot for a second-grader to take in, but he was pretty smart, and after a moment, he nodded, "Okay, I got it. You're saying that if I don't want to be a manager-type when I grow up, then I don't have to worry about being stabbed in the back. But I don't know what I want to do when I grow up, so isn't it better to uhh... keep my options open?"

I thought it was kind of depressing that a second-grader was calmly considering the possibility of being stabbed in the back by a coworker or someone he might consider to be a friend in the first place, which caused me to purse my lips in displeasure as if I had taken a big mouthful of the faux-lemon juice that I just used to make dinner. Still, I nodded, "Yes, that's very insightful, David." This wasn't the first time I had noticed that David was several years above where he should be cognitively. Most kids his age wouldn't be able to think about things so logically. His main problem going forward in school would be to avoid getting bored and jaded, and I had told Gloria as much, but she wasn't sure he should be promoted to a couple of grades either, as he was a bit small, even for his age.

Plus, he wasn't quite what I would consider socialised in the same way as a fifth grader in a Corporate school would be, even if he was as intelligent.

I finished my plate and said, "I'll ask Gloria to find a dojo or school nearby. Maybe Tai Chi Ch'üan or Aikido..." I said the last to myself, as I thought he was a bit young to study a "real" martial art that involved a lot of practical striking or real submissions like boxing, judo or jiujutsu, but something that was more discipline-oriented and "soft" would probably serve him well.

Medical science had solved the issues that caused chronic traumatic encephalopathy in high-impact athletes like boxers. So long as you took a pill containing some nanomeds no more than six hours after receiving a concussion, you wouldn't have any lasting damage or CTE down the line. Still, it was a bit much for a young kid to put on boxing gloves.

I didn't think either Tai Chi or Aikido would be much help if he found himself in a fight with someone who knew how to throw a punch, but both were very good disciplines for learning the mindset of martial arts, so either would serve him well and provide a good foundation. Given the area around where we lived, it was probably going to be Tai Chi. NC-Taylor had taken Tai Chi when she was ten, too, followed by boxing when she was twelve.

David grinned and nodded, "Awesome, Doctor H!" I made him clean up our plates, even if he did have to stand on a step stool to reach the sink. He turned on the SmartWall in the kitchen to the television, which looked like the News channel that I had tested when I had the unit installed. I didn't really consume much media outside of my internal systems these days.

"Sell! Sell! Sell! The market is in free fall! It is a sea of red as far as the eye can see! The market has seen its biggest single loss of market capitalisation in fifteen years, with the big losers being Biotechnica, Petrochem and SovOil! This is, of course, due to the news that broke this morning about the mysterious algae bloom that has been seen on beaches worldwide for the past weeks!" the talking head on the TV said, excitable and inconsolable.

David went to change the channel, but I held my hand up to stop him, "Wait, I want to hear this."

"It was none other than Bes Isis from our own Network News 54 that broke the story that the unusual algae is actually a bio-engineered lifeform designed, apparently, to produce CHOOH2! Is this a project from Biotechnica that escaped containment or some sort of attack by a competitor? Nobody knows. Biotechnica has been silent, except for a statement that they believe their long-term profits will not be impacted. Hard to believe though, as CHOOH2 has been a leader in the energy sector for decades. This instability caused the price of the commodity's 90-day futures to briefly dip into the negative today before rallying..."

David blinked, "How can the price of something be negative?"

"Simple. They'll pay you money if you buy it instead of you paying them," I said, grinning wildly.

That caused the boy to gape, "How unlucky! We could have bought it all and got rich!"

"Oh yeah, then in a few months, the Port of Los Angeles calls your mom, telling her that her son David's oil tanker has arrived. I think that'd go over real well." That caused him to gulp, and I chuckled, "The reason the price dropped, briefly, into the negative was that there was such uncertainty that they thought they might run out of places to store it," I told the boy with a grin, "But that, clearly, didn't last. It was stupid because it is not like CHOOH2 demand is dropping or that this new replacement will come to market in the next few quarters... so actually, now that I think about it... you're right. We could have made a killing. We would have been able to sell those futures contracts by tomorrow for a huge profit. We wouldn't have had to wait till the oil tanker got here."

That caused a self-satisfied smirk to appear on David's face.

I had never taken any kind of short position or puts contracts on Biotechnica. Not only would it have been another datum that might help identify me, but I honestly didn't trust any of the market makers in this situation where they would have to pay out a great sum on a contract like that. But now, perhaps I could buy some shares on the dip in other enterprises.

This sell-off seemed to be emotion-driven; it wasn't like someone could skim some algae and dump that in their tank right away. What type of companies would be needed to create things to harvest it? I wondered at that for a moment before I came across the idea of shipbuilding concerns. I looked up a few shipbuilding companies and gaped that all of them were up, in the double digits, while the rest of the market had tanked.

Okay, so that was an obvious idea. Instead of trying to pick a particular winner or loser, I just used one hundred thousand eurodollars to buy shares in a market-indexed fund. Sure, I wouldn't gain as much, but I still would probably gain at least fifteen or twenty per cent when the market corrected in the next few months. I was smart, but I was only really a genius about certain things, so thinking I could make some sort of complicated financial instrument was folly, anyway. Not only were there actual financial geniuses out there, but AIs also worked the market. I would only make money by brushing with the broadest of strokes here.

Seeing Biotechnica down over thirty-five per cent made me feel good inside, although the statement from their representative kind of rang true. Their losses wouldn't start for another season when farmers decided on next year's crops. But I wasn't stupid enough to think that Biotechnica didn't have anything to sell them. I just hoped they were food crops. The idea of using most of our arable land to produce fuel wasn't really a good idea, I felt.

Still, seeing that something I had done had cost the Corporation over two hundred billion dollars in market capitalisation made me smile. I kind of felt bad for Petrochem and Sovoil because they had never really done anything to me. I wondered if these types of companies that grew wheat and refined it into ethanol then added the few additives that made it "CHOOH2" would stay in the energy business or would they shift more into more general farming.

They had the opportunity to do either or both. There were tons of ways you could harvest my algae or even cultivate it yourself. Well, there was no reason for me to think about it. I was sure they were all over it, being savvy bizmen and the like.

"Are you spending the night?" I asked David, who nodded rapidly.

He said, "Yeah, Mom's got a twenty-four at the hospital, so she won't be back until tomorrow at noon." Making the baby nurses work a double shift? Normal nurse shifts were just ten or twelve hours, but Gloria was used to working twenty-four-hour shifts, so I didn't think she'd have a problem. Sometimes she worked thirty-six-hour shifts, but that was lunacy, I felt.

I nodded, "Alright. The guest room is still set up for you. I'm going to be most of the night in my lab. Where's my bird?"

He frowned, "The last time I saw her, she was sleeping in the breadbox. She can open it herself, so we've stopped actually leaving any bread in there. She just eats the whole loaf otherwise or steals it. She is strong, too. I saw her fly off with half a loaf of bread hanging out of her beak."

I didn't notice her eating any bread, but I noticed that we had been running out of bread very quickly. That meant she never did any of this when I was around, which was another mark of her intelligence. I scooped the sleeping bird out of the birdbox, and she squawked in protest until she saw it was me and then merely cooed and jumped on my shoulder. I didn't know why she was sleeping in a breadbox when she had a very nice cage that she could also open and close herself, but she was an odd bird. As far as taking the bread out of the building, she was probably rebuilding her harem.

I walked, bird on shoulder, into my laboratory.

Dr Hasumi's clone was completely finished but brainless, as I had also cloned a copy of my brain separately. The brain was done, too, but completely mindless.

At first, I thought that it wouldn't matter what genome I would use since the cyberbrains would, in its first step, copy all of my brain structure over to the new brain, using a combination of nanomachines and electronic techniques to encourage the neurons and axons to form the correct neural map.

I figured that would be good enough, as it wasn't as though either Taylor Hebert or Hasumi Sakura was a mutant and had exceptionally different neural tissue.

However, I had since read all of the files that NC-Taylor sent me, and she had a number of papers from scientists in that universe that discussed the origin of powers, specifically the anomalous area in the brain that was referred to as the Corona Pollentia and Corona Gemma. Nobody knew why, but everyone knew that these areas of the brain were key to a parahuman's power. In this world, they just kept diagnosing me with benign brain tumours.

These files included a bunch of NC-Taylor's notes, and I came to the conclusion that while it was clearly not entirely genetic, there might be some sort of genetic factor. My clones would have to have my power, too, so that meant cloning a whole Taylor Hebert brain and then slowly copying all of my current neurons and axons onto it. Hopefully, that would cause the brain to experience a "Trigger Event", as I was reading about.

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