It wouldn't really matter once I finished the schooling, as I could work on any of the three "shifts", but for now, I had to sleep at kind of odd times. The fact that I only needed a few hours of sleep helped a lot, though. So I just took a couple of hours off mid-day as Hasumi and Taylor for a "nap."
I had considered for quite a while what I should wear, and I finally decided to go with what felt most comfortable. Not a full dress like last time; instead, I was going with my "librarian outfit" with the pencil skirt. It looked very Militech, but I liked their subdued colour themes compared to most Corporations. Besides, it was my roots, I supposed. Or at least it had been NC-Taylor's roots, and I had co-opted them when I came here.
I was dressed fairly similar to a lot of people in the lobby of the hotel as well, and I casually waited in line for my turn to be scanned by the security pylons. This time I was carrying a pistol; I would just leave it with the security guy, though.
I walked through the scanning pylons, which immediately flashed red, and I was taken aside, just like last time. "Ma'am, I'm afraid that you will have to-"
He was interrupted by a second man walking up to him and whispering urgently into his ear, which caused him to freeze. He looked at me like I was carrying a bazooka and not a subcompact nine millimetre and corrected himself, suddenly, "Ma'am, my apologies. You may proceed. Your party is waiting for you in the Tavernier Suite on the hundredth floor."
You could hear a pin drop, and I suddenly realised I was the focus of a lot of attention. Not only was I being allowed to carry a piece on, not put a bracelet over my monowire, but I was being directed to the penthouse floor. I didn't like being the subject of a lot of people's attention, but I bared up and managed to avoid blushing with an exercise of will.
This level of treatment was certainly different, though. I guess I had Gram to thank. She had clearly told the people working here to be expecting me.
That I was being allowed to remain armed should have been done to put me at ease, but honestly, it just made me feel more anxious. It was a statement of strength, something like, "I'm not concerned about whatever you have with you."
I should have brought a grenade, at least. I sighed and walked to the elevator.
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Superpower? That's a midpower
AN: I am going to adjust the previous chapter that had the date for the meeting as "July 5". Instead, it is September, as I think it should be closer to the end of the year. I will also include a date/location at the beginning of the chapter and at any chapter breaks, if it changes, from now on.
September, 2066
Night City
I stepped onto the elevator and glanced behind me. There was a couple that looked like they needed to go up, too, so I held my hand to block the door of the lift from closing. However, they smiled funnily and just said, "We'll catch the next one, thanks."
I snorted. The elevator was huge. You could fit almost a squad of soldiers in here if you wanted, fully kitted out too. But I nodded and ducked back inside, allowing the doors to close. I said politely, "Floor one hundred, please." I was always polite with man-machine interfaces, just in case the AI actually took over the world, which was actually a serious possibility, one that might keep me up at night if I didn't have a way to instantly and infallibly fall asleep. Perhaps they'd remember my politeness. It didn't hurt anything.
I was a little surprised when the doors opened. I half-expected the ninja to be waiting for me, but instead, it was a woman in a literal maid's outfit. In another situation, I would accuse the woman of cosplaying, but she wore it more like it was a uniform.
If this was an anime BD, she would be armed to the teeth. I shifted my vision modes to a combination of forward-looking infrared and multi-millimetre wave radar, then used graphical compositing to combine the images in my vision. Machine learning software that I had co-opted from last century airport security scanners highlighted in red boxes several suspicious areas, and sure enough, she had a pistol and a brace of knives in her stockings. Lightly armed, then, like me. Not to the teeth at all.
The MMW radar was a new addition that I added to myself recently. I haven't even got a chance to put it in my other bodies. Dr Hasumi would get the addition soon but myself in space might have to go without. I was sure I would get enough tools to perform some rudimentary self-surgery, but probably not for some time. The radar transceivers were too large to fit in my already crowded Kiroshis, so instead, I put them in a small strip on my forehead, underneath the skin.
It allowed me to look beneath people's clothing to some extent so I could, occasionally, identify hidden weapons. The images produced weren't of sufficient resolution to be lewd, especially because to generate a fully three-dimensional image, I would have to walk around a person in a circle while shaking my head at them. Despite that, it was still quite useful to identify who was approaching me with a gun in their waistband or wearing a suicide vest-the latter I hadn't seen yet.
"Miss Hebert?" the maid asked me, and I inclined my head. She smiled affably and said, "If you'll follow me." I nodded and followed behind her, switching my eyes back to visual spectrum mode and ceasing my radar transmitting. The penthouse was very large and set up in an open plan that I absolutely despised. It wasn't like there was anything wrong with it in particular, but I just liked walls and clearly separated areas. It was the architectural equivalent of having a bunch of screws piled in a drawer instead of sorting them by size in their own individual cubbies.
We walked around a corner from the vestibule, and I could see most of the entire penthouse level, even the edges of a bedroom area that was barely hidden behind a SmartWall that took up a large portion. The living area was what I might refer to Japanese-Euro fusion as there were wood-panelled flooring instead of tatami and small, low-to-the-ground open-backed chairs instead of zabuton pillows. However, all of those were sat to the side, and a more traditional circular European table and chairs were in their place.
Ah, there was the ninja. Standing a little bit behind and to the left of Gram. I was a little more confident I could take him this time, especially if he had to protect Gram here, but I wasn't here to find out. I doubted very much that they would fight fair, either. This maid was probably a combat gynoid or something ridiculous like that.
I tried to avoid tensing too much as I got my first look at Gram. I almost tripped when I realised she looked somewhat similar to an older Sarah in her elf guise that I had helped design for her, except red headed. Was she trying to make a statement that she knew about me as Dr Hasumi? I already thought that she might, but as soon as I thought that was what she was trying to say, I discounted it. She wore her "style", for lack of a better word, too well, and I didn't know anyone that would go as far as elective biosculpting just to send a message to a granddaughter that they had never seen before.
I hated that I knew this term, but it would be difficult not to with all the elves I had made in the past, but Gram went along the traditional "erofu" model. She looked to be in her early thirties, although I knew she was in her early seventies if she had the same relative age difference as Brockton-Gram. She was slim, not surprisingly, except for some well-defined hips and bust-line, with pale-complexioned skin and long, braided, red hair. There was a light dusting of freckles on her face, but my expert eye immediately decided that they were cosmetically added.
I didn't think anyone as wealthy as Gram would keep the bog-standard human gene expression for freckles when it also opened you up to certain illnesses like basal-cell carcinoma, as well as a number of kidney issues. The most striking part of her was her eyes. They were green in the same way that a cut emerald was just a rock, and they seemed to stare directly through me. It looked like she could see five metres through me while I was a pool of clear water only two metres deep. It was kind of upsetting, actually, and I frowned.
"Taylor, Taylor... thank you for accepting my invitation," she said, standing up and motioning me over to the table to take a seat. I stopped myself from raising my eyebrows. Her voice was quite melodious, and she had to have either some sort of vocal cybernetics or serious vocal training. Her accent was something like Irish, although it wasn't as overpowering as I remembered from my brief testing of the "Derry" mode when I was pretending to be the blonde Miss White.
I let myself flow towards the seat she indicated and sat down, saying neutrally, "Thank you for the invitation. I appreciate it."
That caused her to chuckle and say, "Is that so?" She took a seat as well, although the ninja man remained standing behind her. Damn. I didn't have any trustworthy minion to bring along with me, but I had the time to clone a random body and install a Haywire FTL com system and Tinkered-up remote control system so that one thread of my consciousness could control it. It would have been equitable if I had my own minion, even if I had to play the role of it myself.
Just to be safe, I double-checked all of my contingency systems. I had a couple of things that might or might not kill everybody in the room except for me. They were actually three types of the same thing, a type of rabidly virulent flesh-eating bacteria that I could aersolise. I carried the speciality bacteriophages in the form of white smoke which might save my own skin. I wasn't sure of the chances of the bacteria working on the ninja, though, since the organic material in a Gemini body didn't have very much actually in common with a human genome, despite the fact that its appearance mimicked humans so well. Attack vectors for biological agents were small as well, and even with no organic components, a Gemini body would still be somewhat functional.
I didn't know at all about the maid. She looked like a regular, petite girl, which probably meant she was a combat gynoid, even if I couldn't detect it.
This was something I had taken from NC-Taylor's files. I got the impression that she was a bit better than me in terms of creating wildly implausible things like this, and I was a little jealous.
Most everything I created had to be more down-to-earth, at least physically possible most of the time. I wasn't sure, but this bacteria seemed to violate some of what I knew about thermodynamics. It shouldn't have the chemical energy necessary to be as... effective as it was. It had skeletonised an unfortunate test rat in seconds, and seconds after that, the bones melted. Still, my power dutifully let me duplicate it, at least, but I got the impression that it would appreciate it if I didn't go ham with things like this all the time. Even Mrs Pegpig cooed at me in disapproval when I made and tested it. It was also the single most dangerous thing I had ever had near my body, and even with the alleged counteragent, it made me nervous.
My last resort was a system I installed in my cyberbrain that would stop all electrical activity in my brain. Permanently. And then my cyberbrain would explode, just to be sure. The activation requirements for this were quite complicated, not surprisingly. I didn't want someone to be able to hack me and kill me. It had to be activated by one of my other bodies and wasn't, by default, connected to any part of my system's network. I could arm it by having Dr Hasumi or Hana touch my tongue to the teeth in my mouth in a certain order five times in a row.
That sounded hard to do, but it was something I absolutely wouldn't do by accident as I had crafted the pattern to make that utterly impossible. Plus, one of the things I discovered I was better at now was spatial memory things, which followed, somehow, to tongue dexterity.
It was only when the system was armed would the circuits be physically connected that would allow it to trigger. At that point, I could trigger it manually, or it would trigger by itself if it detected I was either being tortured severely or if it detected my cyberbrain was being tampered with. This was mainly for "fate worse than death" options, but I wouldn't allow myself to be subjected to thorough brain scanning again.
Well, the last time hadn't even been that thorough. I was more worried about systems like Soulkiller. If my brain was thoroughly scanned, destructively or not, I and all of my memories could be digitised, and something digitised could be inspected and interrogated via software. That couldn't be allowed. My secrets were for keeping.
It was scary to think about because my philosophy regarding my networkself had never been tested. It was possible that I was just deluding myself on how it would be, and if that system ever triggered, I would just die, forever and ever, amen. It was almost a metaphysical question which I didn't particularly like, but it was one I had already answered, to myself at least. As much as that was a poor way to describe it, I had faith that my continuous stream of consciousness would continue, even if parts of it died.
Gram coughed delicately and said, "There was just one question that I'd really appreciate it if you could answer, dear, as Cara brings out the tea. And I do apologise for being so uncouth right off the bat, but... you are Taylor Hebert, daughter of Annette Rose Hebert, yes?" Her green eyes stared through me, and I felt a bit of a chill.
I sighed. It looked like some of my worst-case scenarios might be the most accurate. I had wondered, thought and modelled about why Gram invited me here. I had already figured out why the ninja-man attacked me... it was the same reason I suspected last time. They thought I was an impersonator, a changeling, a dopplegånger. I just had the wrong side of the family that was responsible. I had thought it had been from one of Alt-Danny's spook friends, doing his buddy a solid even after he had passed away. I had thought it was kind of nice, actually, after I got over it.
But since I discovered that I was wrong, I realised that she could have sprung for a lot more resources. Say, constant surveillance. I had been very careful to make my escape to LA, but I was worried about people finding me retrospectively. I was confident it would be hard, even for serious intelligence operatives, to do that, to make that link between Taylor Hebert disappearing and months later Sakura Hasumi reappearing. But it would be simple as pie if they followed me to the Konpeki Plaza, watched me do the gig, and then followed me to the safehouse Wakako set up for me.
