It was weird, I hadn't used to be so artistically inclined, but if I used both of my brains together, I managed to create something quite aesthetically pleasing while still retaining enough space inside to hold all of the electronics. It was like some of the areas of my cognition had expanded since I had started my network. I had numbered each of the limited editions from one to five hundred, and Vixen was going to sign each of them.
They'd retail for double the price as the normal unit, or €2,000, and Vixen said I could have charged even more. She'd get twenty-five per cent of the sales from these limited editions in addition to her standalone fee for endorsing the product. She sat aside twenty of them for viewer giveaways, too, which I took the hit for.
Her net show was... not what I would consider entertaining, but she certainly had a lot of people watching her. A few of them revolted and called her a sell-out when she started advertising my wares because who would want to buy an electronic sleep inducer? She was quite stern with these followers, though, and told them it was something new, explaining that she had been using one every day for two weeks and only needed to sleep two or three hours a day without any of the side effects that one normally associated with this tech.
People were a bit suspicious, but a lot of people said they would buy it just because she signed it, even if it didn't work. That made me suspicious at first, but then I gaped as notification after notification came in from my net site. In less than an hour, over half of the limited edition units were already sold. That was five hundred thousand dollars sitting in my company's incoming account, more when you considered shipping fees and an easy one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollar fee that I instantly owed the elf.
Maybe a twenty-five per cent cut was too much for her limited editions. Well, too late for that now. At least I only produced a limited number. It would be worth it if it got inducers on the heads of people who could then tell their friends and family on social media how they weren't pieces of shit.
Looking at the stage of orders me and my employees had to fulfil... Well, it was time to get to work, I supposed.
I had sold out of the initial production run in a little over a month, which was great. It surprised me! Using some of the proceeds, I bought three properties near me, including one directly next door to my clinic, from the estate of an amateur real estate investor that had gone missing and been declared dead. It was a good deal, but the price was still two times more than I would have paid before I started gentrifying the area.
On the plus side, I didn't pay all cash, either, but I managed to get financing for all of them. It was a simple decision for both me and the bank, as we both felt their value was only going to rise in the future, and I needed my liquidity now. I only needed to use my own money for the down payment. Commercial lending had a lot less usurious interest rates than consumer lending, but it still amounted to over eight per cent interest a year, but there were no prepayment penalties, so I expected to actually pay them off far sooner than the twenty-year term.
My own landlord tried hiking the rent I was paying, and I just threatened to leave, so instead, I bought my property as well. The company that sold it to me was happy because they had made a profit on the investment, even if it wasn't as much as they could have gotten if they could have coerced me into paying the inflated rent. But since I was the one who was gentrifying the area, not them, they thought my threats to take my ball and go home were credible.
I also hired some more employees and bought enough components to assemble twenty thousand units this time. One of my chip fab suppliers offered to give me a discount if I brought all of the work under their umbrella, but I declined. Although there was no way to keep the electronic design of the system secret for long, as they could just be disassembled, there was no reason to rush it.
My suppliers were the first ones to know I had items that were selling a lot, though, as they had to fulfil my orders, so that triggered some of my contingency planning. I surprised my Militech rep with a purchase order that doubled the amount of combat and surveillance drones I owned, and I wasn't done. I also hired, for the first time, direct Militech military aid, but at the moment, it was limited to one squad in an MRAP that would make a patrol around my area once every two hours on an irregular schedule, dispatching any very obvious armed ne'er-do-wells they saw. It was still expensive but cheap compared to them permanently being on-site.
After careful consideration, I called my Arasaka rep, who was in Tokyo. They had the best price-for-features of bipedal humanoid combat robots.
" Hasumi-sensei, it is pleasant to hear from you again. Do you need some more Smart-Link interfaces today?" the man politely asked after answering the call. He appeared wide awake despite the fact that I knew he was based in Japan, and I figured he probably ran on a North American sleep schedule and serviced mostly clients in this continent and South America. Probably more in South America than North, actually, as all of the products he shipped came from there when they were eventually delivered to me.
"Not today. I'm interested in purchasing three squads of Raijin Mk2 combat security bots. My firm has begun manufacturing electronics on a small scale, and I definitely need to upgrade my security. My present security systems can't go in and out of buildings and are purely for exterior defence," I said simply. The Militech drones were very effective, but they were solely for exterior defence and patrol. They used anti-gravity technology to hover around, and that was still incredibly bulky. For all of that high technology, they were pretty cheap... probably because anti-gravity was still a very clunky technology. And they were only cheap as combat drones went, anyway. Each unit cost forty grand.
His eyebrows rose appreciably, " Certainly. I wish we could have gotten your business in the entirety, but given your present location it is, perhaps, not surprising. But you're right to call us; we are the market leader in humanoid robotics." I wasn't sure about that, but they were definitely the market leader in humanoid combat robots, especially for the cost. Still, this would cost a fortune no matter how reasonable their costs were. I also couldn't have called them first because they couldn't have gotten me an end-user certificate for armed robots, but now that I had that, I could field any number or type of robots that weighed under a ton each.
It wasn't technically illegal for me to buy them, either. Theoretically, the man I was speaking to didn't work for Arasaka, and the products would all be delivered by third parties who, putatively, were the sellers. It was a figleaf, though. My rep looked happy, probably at the large sale, " We have a number of current-generation models in our warehouses in Colombia right now. We could get them to you within a week or two at the most, I suspect. Three squads would be ten units each, plus all charging stations and peripherals. Do you need individual arms for them?"
I nodded rapidly. I had some guns, but not enough to outfit a rump platoon of robots, " Yes, please. The standard HJSH-10 Nowaki for each, plus four spares." The Arasaka had replaced the Nowaki in front-line service with its newer HJSH-18 Masamune assault rifle about a decade ago, but the Masamune was expensive. I didn't want to buy three dozen of them. The Nowaki was almost as good and, moreover, cheap. I thought about it and realised I didn't have a Masamune, and it would look pretty good on the wall for sale in my pharmacy. Arasaka goods were sometimes sold for a premium since they were technically banned, " And throw in four Masamunes, too. And at least twenty-five thousand rounds of ammunition and five magazines for each weapon." The ammunition I could buy here, but I might as well include it as well.
I winced at the price but paid it, including the insurance on the shipment, which wasn't insubstantial. The Arasaka rep smiled, " I'm glad you called now. It is getting difficult trans-shipping arms into North America since President Kress has begun widespread sabre-rattling. I don't believe I would have been able to fulfil this order in a month... I certainly wouldn't have offered to sell you insurance on it then."
Sabre rattling? I didn't actually keep up with the news too much, as it was all fake, but I started to think that was a mistake. " Sabre rattling? What is going on? Is it anything more than the usual denigrating of the Free States that she always does this time of year?" President Kress had been the dictator of the New United States for forty years. Since the last Corporate War, and she did have a pattern of making speeches excoriating the Western states almost annually.
He raised an eyebrow, " Surely you know about the algae that are on almost every coast in the world by now? That it makes fuel?" I nodded slowly, " Then it shouldn't be surprising that coasts have suddenly become much more valuable commodities. Arasaka Corporation has already unveiled a first-generation drone harvester, and other firms are no doubt rushing to do the same. The west coast of the NUSA has two thousand kilometres of harvestable coastline. It's not surprising the NUSA wants it under its control. I'm surprised they haven't invaded Mexico yet." The last, he said amusedly. He seemed very pleased with this situation, and I realised why when he finished with, " For once fate, or rather whoever made and released these algae, smiles on us small island states, eh Hasumi-sensei?"
Oh. Yeah. I mean, I hadn't forgotten that. Honest! Nor had I not realised the significance. But yeah... I could see why this sabre-rattling might be a little less sabre-rattling and a little more sabre-unsheathing this time. I hadn't thought about it because I assumed the algae was mostly going to benefit Corps. But I had intentionally designed it to grow in territorial waters, partly in order so the Corps had to give nation-states a little bit of a cut. It wasn't then surprising that the NUSA was attempting to maximise that. I just hadn't thought that anything I could do could have such widespread consequences, even if that was exactly what I was going for.
I was quiet for a moment, thinking. From what I've read in Dr Hasumi's diaries, her opinion of Arasaka Corporation was... complicated. As a Japanese nationalist, she approved of a Japanese Corporation being a "world power" as it was, but she didn't particularly like how it almost destroyed the nation in the last corporate war, nor how Saburo Arasaka almost acted like a second Emperor. Still, all of that was merely internal grumblings.
She would have absolutely supported them against any foreign Corp or nation, so I decided to mention a little primary-source intelligence, " That must explain why I am selling so many combat augmentations, many times a day, to mercenaries whom my Militech sales rep informed me Militech was hiring. I'm pretty sure the other clinics in Southern California are no different."
The rep nodded slowly, " Thank you for that tidbit. I'll make sure the right people get told." He coughed, "Well, I have to go." He bowed formally, " Thank you very much for your business. We appreciate it."
Ahh... I had reached the "bow tier" of sales. Nice. I had spent enough. I had Dr Hasumi reciprocate politely.
My laboratory looked empty, and it was because a lot of my equipment was gone, including Kumo-kun. I had taken him with me, along with my Taylor Hebert body, and was currently repeating my arrival to LA in reverse. I had arranged to return to Night City with the same family of Nomads that had brought me here.
I had to finally come clean, at least partially, to both Kiwi and Gloria, who were a little discombobulated about it. I mean, they would realise something was up when Taylor Hebert showed back up in Night City after all. I had not really answered any of their questions about it, merely saying that they could treat both people as me after swearing them to secrecy. I was pretty sure that they thought I had just cloned myself, which I had, I supposed.
Cloning a body was not a novel technology, but cloning a body with a brain that wasn't blank was. Even that was way too disruptive of technology, so I didn't want it mentioned anywhere. It was something that Biotechnica might be able to do, but if so, they weren't advertising it.
There were the perennial rumours of Soulkiller, but if Arasaka had that as the rumours said, I was sure they didn't presently have the ability to neuron-by-neuron and axon-by-axon overwrite a cloned brain with the copy of the brain that Soulkiller created. If they had, I would have heard about it, I was sure.
There would be some additional factors to the rumours on the Dark Web. Rumours beyond that Soulkilled people became AIs that controlled the world from the shadows, from behind the Blackwall.
Kiwi was planning to stay here in LA. She had more responsibilities at my company, and she even added another team member who was a former officer in the NUSA military. I think he got discharged as a first lieutenant for punching out a superior officer, but since they only forced him out and didn't give him a Dishonorable Discharge or even a Big Chicken Dinner, they had to have agreed with his decision. It was just that you had to know striking your CO in front of your men meant your days in the Army were done. I frowned, as that was all NC-Taylor memories giving me that insight.
The fact that she got a team member with proven small-unit leadership credentials, credentials that she lacked, meant that she was pretty confident in her team, her leadership, and her position. I thought it was quite a good thing, personally.
He was now her second-in-command and most often worked detached duty here for me. None of her team were employees, but they were listed as contractors and consultants. The main change was that the quality of the jobs they took on the side rose a notch. The risk profile was the same, generally, but they often were hired by other firms around town instead of just drug-addled gangbangers and seedy fixers like Ruslan's team had mainly worked for.
An alert informing me that I had a pending appointment in a few minutes brought me out of my reverie, and I left the third floor and went down to the ground floor and into my office. Pulling up my calendar, I frowned. This was a meeting I had been worried about a little. I didn't know who this person was, but they insisted on a meeting and claimed they represented a large corporation and couldn't discuss the reason for their meeting or even identify their employer over the open air.
