Gram looked at me oddly and said, "I'm not sure... how did you do that?" She tapped her fingers on the table for a moment before snapping, "You're a biopodder. You must have written a quick program or body macro to take over your body and force it to say the words that you programmed in advance. Smart." Cyberbrain users were considered biopodders, just like Gloria and the ninja-butler were, even if the pod connected to a real body. It was kind of an odd distinction, but I did have to mention it whenever I went to another country, as borgs occasionally had more difficulty travelling.
I hadn't done that, what she guessed, but now I wish I had because disconnecting, even for a couple of seconds, had been wildly uncomfortable. I had felt stupid. Like, stupid enough to be clinically significant. However, it was over now, and it did tell me that there was something beyond just cold reading going on here. When I had disconnected, my otherself talked, and she wasn't "nearby", so there was no reading available by Gram.
"Okay, I believe you, I suppose," I finally said.
Gram seemed amused, "Oh, I am so heartened, dear. I'm not sure whatever I would have done if you hadn't." I snorted and thought, ' Alright, bitch, don't rub it in.'
How to phrase this? "I was pretty sure I was the only person on the planet to have a... special ability, so I was a little bit sceptical," I said, which caused her to hum good-naturedly. What was the fastest way I could get out of here? I never wanted to be around this woman again. I mean, I wouldn't mind speaking to her, but over vidcall.
Still, I was curious, "You're basically right as far as my power goes. You're not going to have some team of ninjas pop out of the wardrobe and throw a bag over my head, are you?" I sighed at the prospect. At least my body in space was probably safe. Although she might have been noted by observers entering and exiting my clinic, still tons of people did.
"No," she said all too reasonably, "It might be the smart thing to do, just in case you get killed out there in the world, but... no. You see, Taylor, I would like to live forever." The last statement was said with a wistfulness of a young maiden saying she wanted a nice husband.
"I can think of a lot of situations where you would take back those words," I said amusedly. Like being trapped in the centre of the sun, being transferred back in time and meeting Jack Slash before he died, and being kidnapped by Scavs. Any number of things.
She waved a hand at me, "Don't be pedantic, dear. It doesn't suit Annette's daughter. It doesn't suit you ." Ouch, Grams burn, "You don't have some sort of philosophical disagreement on the concept, do you?"
I shook my head, "Only if it were limited to only ridiculously rich people. Say, Gram, can you show me a brainscan of you? Like, an MRI or something better?" If every member of her family didn't have at least two doctors and loads of preventive medicine, including routine scans, I would eat this teacup.
She raised an eyebrow at the first sentence and then tut-tutted the second, "Who knows what someone like you could glean from a scan of my brain? I'd rather not."
I rolled my eyes, "I can't glean anymore than an exceptional doctor could. If not you, then someone else that also has a..." I used scare quotes, "power."
She hummed and nodded, and I received an image file wirelessly. It was a three-dimensional scan of a brain, as I expected. I opened it and looked specifically for any anomalies, my power thrumming with curiosity. There was no Corona, of that I could tell quickly. Gram said, "This is Conor Astor. His power is he knows what the ultimate orientation of an object he throws will be."
I whistled, "He must be good at craps."
This caused her to smirk, "No. He only knows the orientation of an object that will fall after he throws it. In most games of dice that I know of, you have to bet before shooting." She considered and then added, "Never play heads or tails with him unless you're the one who flips the coin, though."
Couldn't that be explained by super-proprioception? If I hadn't tested Gram here, this wouldn't make me believe it was a superpower. Just some freak quirk in the brain. "That doesn't sound very useful."
"It's actually one of the most useful ones in our current generation, Taylor. Your aunt has the power to know how many hairs are on someone's body," she said. Okay, that wasn't useful at all. I had heard of weird powers in Brockton Bay, but nothing like this. Parahuman powers always tended to have the capability to cause things to go terribly wrong in some way. Knowing when people were lying did sound like a very typical Thinker power, but it was clear she was the outlier. Parahuman powers always had the implication of violence, whether physical or emotional. Forget calling these "superpowers". They shouldn't even be called "midpowers," except for Gram.
Finally, she asked, curious, "Is there anything interesting about his brain?"
"I think he has a mutation to his myelin sheaths, but I believe this is a genetic alteration he received in childhood. It's quite interesting, but only because I hadn't considered this modification. Other than that, no," I stared at her. I was a little upset she had tricked me into talking in front of her before revealing the fact that I couldn't lie to her. I always liked having the option to lie, "Let's get down to brass tacks, then, Gram," I said firmly.
Sionainn watched her granddaughter leave and summoned William and Cara back to her. Cara went immediately to clean the table while William arched an eyebrow at her. He asked, "You're just going to let her go like that?"
"It is what I agreed to with Annette," she said primly.
He snorted, "As if you wouldn't go back on that in a picosecond if you thought it was necessary. In fact, just inviting her here was going against your agreement with little Annette."
She waved a hand, "Yes, yes. Do you have the bullet points from the two observation teams again?"
"There is a bit more uncertainty due to the fact that she is likely using her own sleep technology. That said, there is a seventy-eight per cent chance that she and this 'Dr Hasumi'..." he used the air-quotes gesture, "... have synchronised sleep schedules. This would track with your speculation that she somehow modified Zetatech's neural implant architecture to synchronise and copy her mind into another body. Are you sure you want to let this kind of technology walk away? It would be like a second life, some might say."
She snorted, "It's worthless. Utterly. Why would I care that some copy of myself continued living if I died? It would not be me. Worse, it would know all of my secrets." She shook her head firmly, "Go and arrange the other meetings we scheduled today. I suppose we'll leave on the morrow, as planned."
He nodded, "You're meeting with one of the city councilmen next, Lucius Rhyne. And after that, a Militech VP. They're a bit nervous that you came to this city that they're trying to annex, especially with our ties to Arasaka."
She sighed, put out, "They're the ones that made us sell all of our Militech shares. Something about foreigners owning sensitive national defence infrastructure, if I recall." She waited until William left the room and then retriggered the privacy systems on the table.
This application of how to use her power she did not tell even other members of her family. It wasn't entirely accurate, either, but statistically, it was far better than a wild-ass guess. While focusing strongly on her sense of knowing , she said, "It was a good decision to let Taylor go to follow her own plans." She winced as she felt a slight headache and then nodded.
The truth of that statement was fairly high. Good. While she couldn't ask too many questions like this a day, as they caused headaches, they always helped her decisions when they were at this level of confidence.
The feeling wasn't objective. The knowing depended on all of the information that she possessed, but the power was able to collate everything she knew, including things she didn't even realise she knew, into a somewhat cohesive whole. The less she knew, the less accurate the reading would be. That was one reason she had invited her granddaughter to tea, as getting more information, even if it was information she didn't realise she had, always helped. That and she actually was concerned that the poor girl had hurt herself with some unreliable Zetatech neural implant.
Over the years, she had tested this part of her ability with Edgecrusher's assistance, and she was still over a standard deviation more accurate than the AI himself in prognosticating, even if she couldn't do it as often as he could. He was a prognosticating machine, literally.
Speaking of which, she pulled up some information from the AI. It made suggestions for decisions she could make, but she always would go over all of the information herself, at least what she could. She had numerous choices to make every day, and she always spent at least a little time looking at the underlying reasons for the suggestions.
It would be the height of irony if she outsourced all of her decision-making to a hyper-competent subordinate, just like the Astors had done with her. She wasn't about to let that happen. If the AIs behind the Blackwall took over someday, they would have to work for it, just as she had. She wasn't just going to hand everything to them on a silver platter.
She sighed in contentment as the world passed slowly around her. Advances in technology were truly great. She had recently upgraded her Kerenzikov system and now could get an hour's work done in a little more than ten minutes, which was fifteen per cent improved from the last version. Stealing more time from the day really was wondrous. As she worked, she thought about what William had said. He hadn't been entirely wrong, even as impertinent as he was.
She discounted the utility of a copy of herself existing, in fact, she would immediately kill one if it ever happened. There could only be one Sionainn. However, she was self-aware enough to realise that a lot of people did not think as she did. In fact, this was the thrust of Hanako Arasaka's work on Soulkiller for the past fifteen years.
She wasn't supposed to know about that research, though. Was the filial daughter attempting to seize immortality for her father? The girl was a genius netrunner and programmer and, despite everything, certainly seemed to love her father. It was a shame that poor Saburo was a bit too old compared to herself.
She was confident that even if Taylor didn't solve this issue herself with her Astor-family power of knowing biology that there was a very high percentage chance that existing life-extension technology would advance enough while she was still alive that she would still end up being functionally immortal. In this way, what she asked of Taylor was merely a hedge.
Both Edgecrusher and her own estimates had this breakthrough happening in the next fifty to seventy-five years. Saburo might not last that long, despite everything done to save him. Even if you could slow the process, your brain would still age, regardless of how young your body was.
If anything, it might be better for everyone involved if little Taylor only produced competing golden apples once old Saburo shuffled off this mortal coil himself. The man was a bit much. He reminded her of those last few samurai that lived after the Meiji restoration in Japan as a man-out-of-time. For Danu's sake, the living fossil had fought in World War Two.
She hummed and decided to use another question, "Taylor collaborating with Hanako or Arasaka in general, will appreciably extend Saburo Arasaka's life, or alternatively allow a copy to live as him after he passed away."
She winced at the increased headache but still smiled.
Things could have gone much worse. I had been expecting them to go much worse. She had offered for me to "return to the family" if I wanted, but I was pretty sure that would only limit me.
In exchange for letting me go my own way, she wanted functional biological immortality within twenty-five years. Easily achievable. It was kind of fortunate that I hadn't actually solved that problem yet, even if I was a lot closer than she likely thought I was. I could use shades of the truth to, hopefully, bypass her truth sense, and she didn't remark on my statements about how I was working on such things but didn't expect to succeed soon. The only reason I didn't expect that was I immediately changed my priorities to put that on the back burner.
She was a little perplexed at my idea of releasing such a thing to the world at large. It was my opinion that we could easily house an order of magnitude more people on this planet in utter luxury if we, as a society, had the will to do so, and that didn't even include all of the construction in space. Space would be where true growth happened in the next one hundred years, I was sure. We, as a species, needed more people. Every time a person was born, there was a chance that he or she was a genius. Singular geniuses did more to advance technology than teams of researchers, in my opinion, so the more people around, the better. It sounded hokey, but people were one of our greatest resources.
She laughed at me and called me a communist jokingly. A communist? I preferred to think of myself as an optimist. Besides, I was by definition in the capitalist social caste, as I owned most of the means of my own production, so it wasn't like I was out to empower revolutionaries whose first step would be to guillotine me. I just wanted everything to be just a little better everywhere. Was that so much to ask?
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Higher education
October 2066
Los Angeles, California
The meeting wasn't in person, which told me about how much this Dynacorp suit disrespected me. I had his dossier pulled up on the side, as I already had as detailed a background investigation performed as possible before speaking with him. There wasn't a lot of good to say about him, and honestly, he probably should be in prison. From what I could tell, he had a motor vehicle collision while he was operating a car manually while drunk, which seriously injured a couple of people a couple of years back.
Drunk driving was a lot less severe of a crime here than it had been in Brockton Bay, and that was because most cars had autodrive systems. It was still illegal unless you had a fully AI-controlled car, but it wasn't often enforced-especially since it didn't often cause any accidents since most autodrive systems could at least get you home. But driving a sports car manually while drunk was still supposed to be pretty serious, as far as the cops were concerned.
