Any Corporation that sold products mainly to other businesses and not to consumers directly, especially those that had even a small military products division, worked like this. For example, I had both a Kang Tao sales rep and even an Arasaka one. Although with the latter, I had to work through intermediaries to get their products delivered to California, so I didn't have the same relationship as I didn't buy as many products. I mainly bought Smart Link cybersystems from them, as even with the added costs involved in shipping them to me, Arasaka was still a market leader in this area. Since I didn't sell too many of these systems, I didn't buy too many either.
I found it very amusing because back in Brockton Bay, despite all of the disruption, the world was running headlong into the digital age. To find that business worked much as it had back in the 1970s with phone calls, handshakes and word-of-mouth, close to a hundred years later, was very amusing to me for some reason.
At the same time that I agreed to purchase the boostware from Bob, my mercenary patient was smiling at me, saying, "Thanks, doc. This might save my life. Now I need to find some more things that might give me an edge to spend the rest of my sign-on bonus on."
I tilted my head to the side, "Have you considered a Sandy?" He may be my first customer!
"I mean, yeah, who hasn't... but they're a little bit pricey. I only got around five kay left, and I want to save at least a thou back, too," he grumbled.
I grinned, "Well, I may have a deal for you. I'm getting a shipment of brand-new, in-the-box, Sandevistan units here in a couple of hours. They're OEM-new, but they are of a few years old design, so I got them for a song. And I'm prepared to roll those savings onto you. I planned on pricing them at thirty-five hundred, but you'd be my first customer, so how about three thousand? If not, I sell a fairly wide selection of new and used firearms and tactical body armour in my pharmacy."
"They're pieces of shit, right? The Sandys?" he asked sceptically.
"No. Let me show you the specs. They're Militech, so they're pretty solid. The only difference between the current generation and the ones I'm getting is the current generation includes some better heatsinks. That means you can use it again a little bit quicker," I said while handshaking with the SmartWall in the operating theatre to display side-to-side the specs of the old and new versions of the Militech Chronus, "Honestly, you'd be hard-pressed to get this price even if you went to a seedy wrecker clinic, and here you have the OEM warranty, my warranty... oh and I won't steal some of your other cybernetics and replace them with shoddy models while you're unconscious like wreckers are known to."
He was already sold, I could tell. This might not be Night City, but nobody wanted to be slow. I tried to get him to talk about why Militech was hiring so many mercs, but he didn't know anything, either.
I did not need to strip out my firewall feature out of the braindance wreath, thankfully. It turned out that I wasn't the first to create such a feature either, and the Braindance SIG had informally standardised some rules around this type of protection. Its name was "emotional normalisation mode", it couldn't be turned on by default, and it could only be on top-tier, hobbyist or professional-grade wreaths.
My rig was already considered to be in the nebulous area between hobbyist and professional grade, but I had to include the price point I intended to put on as an MSRP in my amended application. It had to be higher than ninety per cent of all Braindance wreaths in order to be allowed this feature, which wasn't hard because mine was a hybrid product which was permitted by Braindance SIG.
I had made sure of that, as this was just supposed to be an extra feature for my sleep inducer. Something to convince people they were getting a good deal in the early adoption phase.
In my product, you were going to be paying a premium for the sleep inducer, not the BD, so it was already more expensive than ninety-seven per cent of all Braindance wreaths. I suspected the only ones that were pricier were other hybrid and niche products like, for example, the helmet I used to wear in Trauma Team.
Once I got the approval from the Braindance people, I finalised my design and started ordering the components. I didn't have any high-end circuit-printing devices, so I had to outsource the production of all my circuit modules. There were twelve on the product, of various sizes. So, instead of using just one company, I used three-all of which were bitter competitors.
That way, no single company could recreate the hardware of my device by just asking or coercing a single chip fab. Besides, most of the magic was in the software, which would only be programmed here. I also hired an external headhunting company to start hiring a few more employees. I had no HR department and didn't intend to start one, so I had to outsource this process for regular employees.
All the parts would arrive here, and assembly would be done on the second floor, which had over seven hundred square metres of space. More than enough. I needed some people who could assemble the devices, some people who could QA assembled devices, packers and supervisors. I was trying to keep the overhead quite low, though.
I personally would handle building a number of jigs that the workers would use to both build, flash and test the assembled devices, which should make it a process that did not need much, or hopefully any, judgement on the worker's part. Manufacturing was kind of a mindless job, but I didn't have the capital to buy manufacturing robots, and my little spiders weren't capable of doing it yet.
I only had enough funds to build ten thousand devices in the initial roll-out, and my venture only had enough runway for six months of no sales with the expected overhead for salaries. But I expected sales pretty quickly. I just needed a spark, and how good they were might go viral. If that happened, I would be running into the problem of not building them fast enough!
Wait a minute... viral? I called the front desk and called in my elfin receptionist. I grinned and asked, "Can you arrange a meeting between me and your roommate? It's about business."
As Sarah, with no middle initial and no last name, entered my office, I raised an eyebrow. She was with a man, another elf that I had worked on. I glanced over his features and instantly placed him and his name.
Realistically, I shouldn't have noticed or reacted to either, as I had literally created every square centimetre of their bodies, the same as a painter had created a subject on canvas. It would be like Nicolas Tassaert getting aroused while looking at his own painting La Femme Damnée ; it was ridiculous on its face. Still, I couldn't help but have my eyes momentarily drawn to the bust, hips and thighs of Sarah and the abs and biceps of the male elf.
Thinking about it, I realised that the cut of their clothes and quality drew my eyes to these locations. Well, not solely, obviously, but I couldn't help but appreciate the quality of the garments. I couldn't place them, either. Nobody sold Tolkien-themed clothes off the rack.
I was going to wait until both of them took a seat before sitting back down, but the man was trying to act the gentleman, which I found amusing. He probably thought it was old-fashioned, which it was, and that was a pretty good way to LARP as an elf. I wondered why he was here, too. Was he her manager? I did ask her about business, hoping to get her to accept the advertising of my product on her stream.
She had a foxy-like grin on her face, the kind that all but said she knew something I didn't. It kind of put me off, actually, as I didn't like the idea that people knew more than I did or that they even thought they did. That was a bit arrogant, but of course, nobody who had done the things I had done could have done so without a few issues with hubris.
Surprisingly, she started things first, steepling her fingers like a supervillain version of Galadriel that only needed a white Persian cat in her lap to seal the deal, "So, Doctor Hasumi, what do you need to know?"
Well, that was a weird question. I tilted my head to the side and considered how to respond to that. I asked, hesitatingly, "I need to know if you're interested in accepting advertisers and endorsing one of my new products?" Ugh. That sounded awful. Why would she ask me what I wanted in that weird way? Was she LARPing as a psychic?
She seemed to be caught flat-footed by my response for a moment before she chuckled and then laughed, laying her hands on her skirts in her lap. She stopped and shook her head, "Wow, when I'm wrong, I'm really wrong. Sweetpea told me you wanted to talk business. "
Sweetpea? That's an awful familiar diminutive to call your roommate. I frowned and narrowed my eyes, thinking, 'I'm starting to think that maybe they might be more than roommates. But why would they care about hiding such a relationship?'
She answered, as if she read my thoughts, "Idols are objects of worship, don't you know? We can't have something so pedestrian as a private life. At least, such a thing would have to be a..." she affected a pose, with a finger over her lips, and said sultrily, " hi-mi-tsu."
Then, she frowned and sighed, "How embarrassing. I was hoping that this was an opportunity for two upcoming fixers like ourselves to formalise a working relationship."
Was she NOT LARPing as a psychic?! Was she an actual telepath?! No, telepathy was impossible in both worlds, so she must be pretty good at cold reading. I've never been the best poker player either, although I was lightyears better than I used to be. Also, two upcoming fixers like ourselves? I fixed my best stoic expression.
I wasn't a fixer, although I occasionally did connect people living around Chinatown with either Kiwi or a few other mercenary teams she knew.
I rolled my fingers on my desk and said, "Please excuse me for a moment." Then, not bothering to excuse myself, I called Kiwi, who answered immediately. I asked her, "Cado, did you finish that BI I asked you to do on my receptionist's roommate?"
"Firstly, don't call me that. Second, ages ago. Did you not even read it?!" she asked, sounding upset.
I sighed. I had been pretty busy, "... I must have forgotten. Sorry. Can you give me the highlights real quick?"
"Goes by the name of Sarah in the flesh and Vixen online. Unknown real name. She's an independent Media during the day and something akin to an information broker at night. Threat level minimal, although she appears to be trying to set up a mercenary team consisting of some of her fans, if you can believe that," Kiwi said, and I was glad only I could hear this side of the conversation, "A couple are former NUSA military, but the rest are chumps."
I tried to think why she would classify a nascent mercenary leader as a minimal threat level, but then I realised that this wasn't at all out of the ordinary in LA. "Vixen online? She's a runner?" I did know that she had a cyberdeck, it was the most radical augmentation she had if you didn't count her changing the entirety of her appearance, but that didn't mean she was a runner. I had one too, and I couldn't be classified as a runner, either. I was merely an interested hobbyist at best or a poseur at worst.
"Eh, she's not leet, but she's not a noob like you, either," Kiwi said, grinning on the vidcall, chuckling, "So yeah, she is. However, I actually meant that this is her streamer name. Her net handle is different, but I believe her ICON is a nine-tailed fox, so she definitely has a theme there." I couldn't throw stones from my owl's beak on this one.
"Okay, thanks, Cado," and she disconnected before she could yell at me. If she didn't want to be an avocado, she should pick her own name. I hadn't gotten any of her team to use this name, though, sadly.
I glanced back at the two. Miss Sarah had an amused-looking expression on her face. Should I decline that I am a fixer? I didn't consider myself to be one, but thinking about it, I realised I did do sort of the things that a fixer did. Regular people had no contact with the shadier side of life, and LA was no different from Night City. You couldn't count on the police. I had gotten a reputation around Chinatown as someone who knew reliable people-reliable people that could help a person with their problems discreetly.
I had thought I was just forwarding Kiwi and some of her friend's gigs, but I could see how the misunderstanding could arrive looking at things from the outside. So Sarah was some kind of information broker? Attempting to branch out into becoming an actual fixer? A social predator type, clearly, from her cold reading of me earlier.
If the real world were like Elflines Online, which I had started to play a little, then Coolness/Charisma would be my dump stat. So, I was always a little wary of social-predator types, as they tended to remind me of Emma. Emma would have been a Charisma build for sure. Some sexy bard or sorceress character, no doubt.
"Thanks for waiting. Sorry, it seems like we got off on the wrong foot," I said mildly.
She nodded, pouting, "Yeah, and I was sure you were going to ask me about who was behind the repeated attempts to firebomb the warehouse you owned a couple of blocks away."
I blinked. I did want to know that. It was a mystery that neither Kiwi nor I had been able to solve. My initial belief was that the culprit was among the local gangs, but I had already demonstrated my willingness to retaliate heavily, and it was always out-of-area thugs.
The warehouse was on the edge of my drone's patrol area, and I couldn't afford to keep Kiwi staked out there forever. I had been considering buying more drones based at that warehouse, but I couldn't really afford it until my product launch.
In every case, someone in full-body coverage would get out of a stolen car and throw an incendiary device that was gradually getting more complicated through a window. Then they sped off. Thankfully, my little spiders could use fire extinguishers, though, so the damage had been minor.
I narrowed my eyes at her. How did she even know I owned it? I owned it through a shell company, after all. But I guess it was an "information broker's" business to know things, "Uhh... I do, actually. I haven't been able to find out who is behind it, and the attacks are slowly increasing in complexity. Nobody will insure that building, either, so if it burns down, I'm going to take it..." I was distracted, so I had to stop myself from saying what my inner monologue was thinking, which was 'in the ass' and instead managed to get out after a pause, "on the chin." From Ms Sarah's smirk, I think she could tell that I had self-censored.
