She countered with twenty-five, which amused me. I was honestly not too attached to any of this stuff and was just playing around. Granted, it was just a shame to lose some money when I had been spending so much lately. She had a final offer of "Twenty per cent! And we get to take his car!"
I rolled my eyes, "If he has any friends, they'll track it down and murder you." Even I wasn't going to bother stealing it. Maybe I would have in Night City, where I could lean on the Tyger Claws who could help me dispose of it, but I didn't have the same relationship with the local triad, which called itself a Tong for some reason.
"Don't be daft, lady; it'll be in bits before the night is through," she said, eyeing me curiously.
Well, forgive me for not making the correct assumption that a little girl had access to a chop shop. I just tossed the shard at her and then followed my radio direction finder to home in on the jamming source. It was a small device inside the pocket of the headless pervert. I turned it off, then called out, "It's off. And if you have a so-called gang, how'd this guy get you? Nobody watching your back, girl?" I paused and said, "Oh, and by the way. If your gang are a bunch of wreckers, I'll flatline them and then break your leg."
I eyed her; she didn't rush out of the hole in the wall now that she had an accessible mode of transportation and egress, anyway. She snorted, "I don't really wanna talk about that. You can just put it down to me being stupid." When I threatened her hypothetical gang, she sounded exasperated and yelled back, "Wreckers? You're the one who zeroed all of these gonks and is talking about ripping all of their chrome out, lady!" Well, touché, brat, touché.
I ducked back outside the apartment through the hole in the wall and nodded. There was a wireless signal for the net and phones here, but it was still degraded. I glanced around. The man's apartment was large and had taken up maybe a quarter of the floor here, obviously being built from a number of smaller apartments that had been combined. I wondered what was in the other rooms. Maybe they were empty, or they were rooms for his goons? Moving at my normal speed, not the slowed-down speed I usually used to walk and interact with objects around people so as not to startle them, I used the penetrating radar to look into each of the rooms. They were mostly empty. So, he just didn't want anyone around him, I guessed.
There weren't four more borged-out cyberpsychos taking a nap in there, though, which was what I was suddenly concerned about. I took anything of value in the dead guy's pockets and all of their guns and headed back inside, tossing them on the table, except for the large shotgun, which I just leaned against the wall.
Walking back into the bedroom, I pulled out my personal link from the back of my neck and plugged it into the diagnostics port on the safe mounted into the wall. The Breach Protocol went quickly, as it wasn't actually my cyberdeck performing the hacking procedure. I had my personal link, interface sockets and even my wireless radios connected, via an entangled communicator, to a large, powerful computer back in my laboratory. The system was air-gapped, not connected to the net and had as much security as I could buy and stuff into it. It acted as a high-security bastion node wired, with instantaneous communications, between my implants and the world.
Honestly, it kind of made my Zetatech personal ICE system superfluous. I could still turn it off and connect to the world directly as before, just in case someone bombed my laboratory, but why would I? I would like to, perhaps, completely change out my cyberdeck for a system like this, too, eventually. Perhaps, do away with an obvious cyberdeck installation and connect to everything with my "deck back home." My deck back home which was actually a high-powered computing cluster.
It would have helped my quickhacks earlier, for example, if all of the heavy-duty computation was run on my "cloud" instead of in my brain. It would make the need for heat dissipation unnecessary, too, although I almost never deep-dived in the first place.
A few minutes later, I had the safe open. Inside was a stack of currency, a half-dozen datashards, a loaded Comrade's Hammer and about a kilogram and a half of drugs. The latter didn't look like anything interesting, although I had stopped the practice of tasting a minute amount in order for my toxicology subsystem on my internal biomonitor to identify it, as I often did in Night City.
For one, my curiosity wasn't there anymore, and for two, a lot of these substances were amazingly toxic, even in small doses. You'd think that recreational drug sellers would want their customers to survive long enough to buy their products more than two or three times. So, I took everything except the drugs out of the safe, and then locked them back up. Afterwards, I uploaded a self-adaptive virus that Kiwi had given me onto the safe's firmware, which caused the whole thing to blink and then go completely dark.
Damn. I was hoping it would spark and smoke would come out. It looked cooler when that happened. Either way, it was bricked now in the locked position. I just wanted to make sure that this girl's friends wouldn't get it, as who knows? They might have a runner that could crack the safe easier than I did. Probably not anymore, though. I didn't want to encourage either drug use or the drug trade in the little girl I saved.
There was about twenty grand in cash, which I shoved in my pocket. The data shards contained mostly encrypted data, but a few had some money on them, amounting to another twenty grand or so, which I sat aside. If this was Elflines Online or World of Heroes, this would have started a quest series where I could use this discovered information to probably track down some sort of child abuse ring or human trafficking ring. But I just wasn't about that.
Besides the fact that the shards all appeared to be encrypted, and breaking encryption was not easy, I wasn't actually a superhero. How could I live in this world if I was? My philosophy was that there was so much injustice in this world that if I made it my mission to stop all of it, then I wouldn't have time for anything else. I had long-term goals of improving the quality of life for all of mankind, not merely punishing evildoers.
That said if I went about my business and saw you doing great evil right in front of me? Like Mr Headless over there? Well, it would cause me indigestion if I didn't try to smite you. I wanted to live a carefree life, in so much as that was even possible.
But... maybe the cops would learn something from them. So, instead of keeping all of the encrypted datashards, I just tossed them onto the kitchen table so the cops could find them. Of course, I doubted very much the LAPD would do anything with them when they finally investigated this murder scene, but I had been surprised before.
It wasn't my job to investigate crimes, and I wasn't taking on their responsibility onto my shoulders just because I killed this guy, so I didn't feel wrong about not being Quixotic about it. I had far more enormous windmills to joust, anyway. So the cops, or maybe the little girl's gang, could have the pleasure of those shards, depending on who picked them up.
Speak of the devil... I saw a van that at one point might have been white but now was more primer-coloured drive into the building's parking garage and parked right next to the stairs I used, not even in a valid parking space. Raising my eyebrows, I saw a gaggle of about ten children about the same age as the girl I saved to get out of it.
It was pretty comical. It wasn't quite at the level of three children in a trenchcoat, but it wasn't too far off from there, either, as I saw a couple of pillows used as a booster seat on the driver's side when they opened the door. The gremlins were armed with an eclectic seat of mostly improvised weapons, although the two leading the way each had an awful BudgetArms submachine gun. Bad choice; the recoil on those plastic pieces of crap was insane, even for a full-grown man.
"Brat, your friends are coming up the stairs. I can see them on the surveillance cams. You should tell them if they point their guns at me, I will shoot them," I warned the girl. I wouldn't, actually-unless this gang was literally made up entirely of Damien-childes and were children of the corn. Even then, I would feel really bad about it.
Almost instantly, the two brats in the lead froze and were very careful to point the muzzles of their weapons at the floor instead of imitating a make-believe tactical assault as they climbed the stairs. I wanted to laugh as they barely got ten floors up before they were huffing and puffing. They should have taken the elevator. Amused, I asked the girl, "What's the name of your gang? The Baker Street Irregulars ?"
I would lose it if they all had little British accents like she did. Although, wouldn't that paint me as Holmes to her Wiggin? I supposed there were much worse people from literature to compare yourself to, but I wasn't about to start smoking opium and solving murders, either.
"Huh? No... we don't have a name, lady," the girl said, confused, which I ignored. To me, they were the Irregulars now.
The Comrade's Hammer was a bit too big to put in my pocket. It was a pistol about the size of a heavy-duty sawed-off shotgun and three times as dangerous, but I found a small bag to stuff it into. I wasn't bothering with the other weapons I found here or took from the dead men. The Irregulars could keep them. Hopefully, they'd grow their armoury and throw away that BudgetArms piece of crap.
The eight children arrived shortly thereafter, and they were careful enough not to point their guns at me, but they clearly didn't trust me. Their reunion with the little girl was emotional, and for once, I saw some genuine emotion from her, including tears welling up as she hugged several of them.
The leader, a boy of about the same age, walked up and said to me bravely, "We brought the van."
I nodded, "Alright. Let's take the elevator back down this time, eh? You guys can have anything I left in this apartment, but I wouldn't stick around here for longer than a few hours."
There was a brief conference, and during this time, I grabbed a vacuum cleaner and quickly vacuumed up all of the powder from my earlier grenade. There was no reason to leave any of that around for inspection later, and I doubted anyone would be checking inside the vacuum's trash bag.
Half of the children stayed behind to loot the place, including one child that looked like he had a thirty or forty-year-old external portable cyberdeck. The kind you saw back in the 2020s before the DataKrash. That caused me to stop in my tracks and stare at it. It had a faded SGI logo on it. Wow, that was an antique. The kid saw me looking and looked defensive, his eyes immediately going to my brand-new-looking cyberdeck on my neck as if I was judging him, "It-it's not that bad!"
I shook my head, "Is it stock inside?"
"I mean... for now!" he said, still defensively, "But I'm gonna tots upgrade it!"
Good, he hadn't ruined it yet! "Don't! That's an antique. A collectable, even. Bring it to me after all of this is over, and I'll trade you a..." I paused, considering what I had in stock, "A brand-new mid-level Tetratronic or Fuyutsuki Electronics cyberdeck. Including the installation fees." The kid was about thirteen. He was a little young for a cyberdeck, but he already had an OS and optics like the girl I had saved. I wasn't one to judge, as NC-Taylor got one when she was only fifteen. My wholesale price for those cyberdecks was about seven grand, and both retailed for ten, so I was serious about wanting to buy this collectable. I would restore it and then give it to Kiwi as a birthday present. It was an Elysia. They say this was the same model of deck that the infamous Rache Bartmoss used to destroy the Old Net, so it was weird to see one around. They really were collectable and sold for sometimes more than ten thousand when they randomly appeared on the market.
He gaped and nodded rapidly. After that, I loaded the dead bodies onto the elevator, and we travelled down to the garage. The drive back to my clinic was uneventful, and I directed him to the loading area in the back instead of my patient parking lot. I said, "I already know what this doc will give me for all of this stuff, which is about fifty thousand." I was lying; there was no way I would buy this stuff for more than thirty per cent of its MSRP, as it was both used and also sourced from a dead body and not a living patient.
Still, I pulled out the twenty thousand in hard cash I had taken from the safe, counted out one-hundred bills and handed them to the girl I saved, "As agreed. Bye, now! Tell that kid with the deck he can come exchange it here any time he wants. Run back to that apartment, get your friends and leave ASAP," I advised them.
About fifteen minutes later, Sarah, the elf-girl, walked into one of my operating rooms, saying, "Your receptionist said you were in here and not with a patie-" she trailed off, seeing that I was performing an autopsy, or rather a pathological removal of cybernetics, from the headless pervert. She must have recognised him. Oops. She said, " What the fuck?! I just told you about him an hour ago!"
Haha, how amusing. She lost all of the ethereal elf personality and snooty vocal tone she affected when she got flustered.
I watched the elf's stream for the first time because it was going to be the first time she was going to be advertising my product. After she got over my rapid termination of that "real estate investor", she was amazed at the product, and I had let her take a prototype home.
It was hard to argue against a product that reduced the sleep a person needed from eight hours to two and a half to three and also caused you to fall asleep instantly. Of course, you could nap with it, too, but at the same time, it was only one of the longer two or three-hour cycles that your physical rest and hormone balancing occurred.
I was considering performing an RCT and writing a study about its effects, but I would need to ask for assistance from Cedar-Sinai to help navigate the IRB process for conducting human experiments. It wasn't a big deal, and it was easy to get approval... too easy, perhaps, given the nature of some medical papers I've read, but I had never done it before.
Sarah had wanted to go further than merely a pay-for-endorsement deal after a couple of nights using the device. She wanted that, too, of course, but she also convinced me to create a "Special, Limited Edition Vixen Version." It was the same electronics repackaged into a case that looked like a tiara made of a garland of flowers instead of a normal BD wreath.
