I nodded. Their snapping him up meant that they didn't mind paying him a premium just for his experience developing the military features and user interface. That told me that Arasaka expected to acquire my technology and wanted to shorten any development time at all. That could be good news or bad news.
"Fair enough. Let's go downstairs to the clinic. What kind of cybernetics do you want?" I asked, curious. He listed off a number of neurological and cognitive boosters that I just happened to have in stock, the latter being Arasaka models in fact. I raised an eyebrow, "I'm sure your new boss would give you a hefty discount on a lot of this."
He snorted, "My dad said never go for the free or cheap company chrome. What if I make an ass out of myself in front of Hanako Arasaka on accident and get fired? They'd turn it all off when they termed me."
"They would shoot you, depending on what you said to Hanako-sama, and the police would write suicide on your death certificate," I said mildly. That caused him to chuckle nervously. Still, he had a good point.
"Ahahaha... about that. Do you happen to have a really high-end Japanese language chip in stock? The kind that won't make me seem like a stupid gaijin? " he asked hopefully.
I nodded slowly. I had used mine for so long that I was natively fluent in both Japanese and Mandarin now, and it was sitting in my desk drawer. I still didn't have a lot of the cultural referents that someone actually growing up in Japan would have, though. Still, I fished it out for him and slid it across the desk, "We'll call it your going away present in lieu of a cake, okay?" It was only worth about a grand, anyway.
January 2067
Los Angeles
Cherry Limited Factory Floor
I practised the philosophy of "Management by Walking Around" both on regular schedules and also randomly. This was one of the former, as I walked around and talked with all of my workers every Monday. Everything was going well, except that we couldn't keep up with production.
Arasaka had agreed to the minimum terms necessary to license my technology, and we were just waiting to sign the papers. It was actually a different Corporation that was licensing the tech, but Arasaka owned it through a half dozen shell companies in various nations. I didn't care. I hoped this made Militech decide to reciprocate instead of standing firm in their desire to acquire my entire company.
They'd have to significantly up their offer if they wanted the whole company, as it was going to have significantly more revenue coming forward, and thusly it should be valued much higher than they had.
As I stepped into the security office, I smiled at the security manager I had hired. He mainly did local security, stuff like keeping the employees themselves from wild pilfering, whereas Kiwi or other mercenaries I hired did what an actual Corporate Security Team would generally accomplish. In that sense, I acted as the Security Manager myself, but still, the factory security manager had five employees under him.
"Ah, right on time, Boss," he said, with a grin, motioning for me to sit down in front of his desk, which I did so.
I chuckled, "I must be getting a little too predict-" I froze as an internal alert caused me to shift my attention to my HUD. The klaxon was an impossible-to-ignore tone that I had cribbed from Star Trek: The Next Generation's Red Alert tone. That show had been a family favourite, even imported from Earth Aleph as it was. A second Star Trek series existed in this universe, too, but it was wildly different. The Federation of Planets was a lot less socialist, and the Ferengi were portrayed as wise good guys, always helping the poor stupid humans.
The alert was coming from my surveillance system. It had optically tracked at least four AV-4s and an AV-8 that were converging on our location. The helpful non-sentient AI had already queried air traffic control, and they were on no approved flight plan, and in fact, ATC didn't have them on their scopes at all. The feed from the security system should have then cut out, as I noticed a huge amount of white noise in the radio spectrum. The point sources of the jammers were all inside the factory; one of them was inside this very room.
"Shit," I started to say, but before I could get anything else out I glanced down at several darts sticking out of my chest, with my head of security holding an autoloading dart gun in his hand.
"It's treason, then," I growled. I was resistant to most sedatives but definitely not immune, and my biom had told me that he had given me enough to make a normal person stop breathing. I'd still have enough time to kill this asshole, though.
Or so I thought. I stiffened as muscular-destabilising electrical currents raced through my body. He didn't have a Taser on him, and this was stronger than that. I localised the current to a device that had been installed in the chair I was sitting at. I was getting shocked through my ass.
The current was designed to incapacitate me non-lethally until the sedatives took effect, I guessed. Perhaps in the future, I would be less predictable in my meetings and a little bit less trustworthy.
After that, that body fell unconscious.
January 2067
Lagrange point 3, Earth-Moon System
EVA
I closed my eyes briefly after finishing welding a bead on the spindle we were slowly building. Far from the interior electrical work I had been expecting, I had been doing actual zero-g construction for a month, and I had just watched my other body be rendered unconscious by someone I would have described as a mook.
It was embarrassing, and it was just as disconcerting when part of me was unconscious, but it was a little bit better than last time because you didn't generally dream when you were as drugged as I had just been.
Still, floating in space in a construction hardsuit with dangerous tools everywhere was not the place to have an issue like this. I keyed my push-to-talk and said on the workgroup comm to my supervisor, "Ayodele, I need to take five. I think I'm getting a little vertigo."
Most of the managers on the Galileo station were of Nigerian phenotypes, specifically from the Yoruba people that had called Lagos home, mainly. Most of the O'Neill workers had been Africans that the European Space Agency had convinced to come into space for a new life. Lagos was a lot like Night City, an amazing city, but there were plenty of people who would leave it for a chance like that, especially if someone else was going to pay your lift ticket.
However, the truth had been eighteen-hour work days, pay in company scrip and zero safety margins. Eventually, all of the crew revolted. Successfully. I was pretty sure that they had some mass drivers that could imperil both the Earth's surface and, more importantly, the Crystal Palace, so the ESA and Corps involved had, surprisingly, let them go. They even stopped oppressing the workers in O'Neill three and four so badly, so those two stations were still Corporate owned. Ayodele hadn't even been born when that happened, though, but her parents had been. She came back on the radio, surprise in her voice, "Ya? Okay. Police all your gear and get in the scooter. You're about done with your shift anyway."
She was surprised because she had expected this reaction from me a month ago, not now. Still, spacers had learned one thing really well from living in a completely artificial environment. If someone said they weren't one hundred per cent on an EVA, the EVA stopped.
I grabbed my tools, making sure I didn't leave anything. There were stiff fines if you let go of a tool in space. They would have to charter a scooter to run it down, lest it become a hazard to navigation. Nobody wanted it to come back around someday to cause a pressure emergency or hole a ship. I had since learned that the crew members in the freighter that had brought me to the station had been exaggerating a lot when they told me how long it would take for a hole in the cabin to evacuate all the air. You really did have a fair bit of time unless the hole was massive. Counter-intuitively, air would escape in an airliner faster due to the pressurised cabin causing a huge pressure differential compared to the one atmosphere and vacuum.
Still, I imagine teasing groundsiders was something of a national sport up here. Soon, I would be able to join in. After I hopped into the scooter and buckled in, I shifted my mind back to Los Angeles. I was still unconscious, but my entangled pairs still worked. My body hadn't been moved yet, and the AVs had started to land. I considered having the Arasaka drones attempt to fight off the intruders but if they had gone to the extent of suborning my security guy, then they would know what assets I had available. I ordered the bots to swarm the factory floor and guard my workers instead, ordering my employees to seek cover. Perhaps if I had all of the combat bots in the factory, they could fight off this incoming force, but they were spread around my factory, clinic and warehouse.
Then I triggered a few contingencies, sending a message to both Trauma Team and Militech. I didn't think that I would be rescued this time, though. I had a feeling. So, I triggered a self-destruct command on the factory hardware that flashed each of my sleep inducers with their operating system. Each sleep inducer had heavily encrypted firmware code that would run on only that particular microcontroller. They could take a copy of the encrypted software from a purchased inducer, but it wouldn't run on any other hardware.
They could still perform a full cryptologic reverse-engineering attack or attempt to de-encapsulate the microcontroller in an attempt to acquire the private key to decrypt the software package, but that took quite a while, even for Megacorps. In this day and age, physical DRM has vastly exceeded the state-of-art of reverse engineers. It wasn't impossible, but at the moment, the pendulum had shifted to favour copy protection. In the past, the opposite had been true, and I was sure the pendulum would shift again in the future.
On the custom-built industrial device that encrypted the software and flashed it onto each wreath, a small thermite charge was set off. There wasn't a bang but a loud hiss that turned the memory into slag. Forget getting data out of it; you wouldn't be able to separate its constituent molecules anymore.
I'd probably have to do the same to the factory system and private subnet too, but I had already transferred all of my private data to my system in Night City. Still, I didn't want anyone to get a chance to examine my Haywire pairs, a few of which were connected to the subnet computing cluster. Those had similar thermite charges connected to them, but I held off for about five minutes until I noticed at least two netrunners attempting to breach the system. At that point, I trashed everything and completely lost any further connection to Los Angeles, except for the several pairs inside Dr Hasumi's body.
January 2067
Unknown Location
I "woke up" and found myself tied to a chair very securely. The room I was in was large, like a warehouse. If Petrochem and Militech hadn't systematically levelled all of the abandoned buildings in the port, I would have suspected I was there.
It wasn't a good chair, but it was well-constructed out of steel. I tested the bindings out of habit and found that I wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't bolted into the ground, though, so that was an option. There was still a jammer preventing me from connecting wirelessly to the net, so I couldn't figure out where I was located. The jammer was attached directly to my neck, though, so it was probably a low-strength one. Maybe low strength enough not to be detected by Trauma Team?
They had extracted me before Trauma Team had arrived and then even damaged Trauma's AV-4 with a surface-to-air missile launch, causing a forced landing. Generally speaking, this was like hitting a hornet's nest, but it did give them enough time to go to the ground, I guess. Trauma would be looking for them, though, for sure. For Revenge, if nothing else.
"Ah, Dr Hasumi... those restraints were designed for combat borgs. I don't think you'll be going anywhere," a woman said, which caused me to look up and find her in the low light of the large room.
I raised an eyebrow, "Straight to the hard sell, really? This doesn't bode that well if you want to 'recruit' me."
That caused the woman to chuckle, seemingly genuinely, "Ah... we don't. All we want you to do is sign this form, and you can go. After you transfer all the source code and design files, that is. We'll sell it along, as we're just middlemen, you see. That was a nasty trick with the thermite." She held out a physical sheet of paper, close enough that I got a look at it.
I blinked. It was a simple document, and my signing it would turn it into a license for all of my technology, not to anyone in particular but to anyone who had that physical document. Basically, a license as a bearer instrument. How perverse. Was this group really not affiliated with one of the large Corporations that had been trying to acquire my company recently? This license would definitely cause the Veritas contract to execute, but if they were selling it, that would mean they wouldn't be able to ask for as large a price. It would still be very valuable.
How did they get all of the military hardware into Los Angeles, including half a squadron of armed AVs, though? It didn't add up that they were, precisely speaking, independent as they were claiming. If they were, it wasn't actually good news for me because they'd have no real incentive to actually let me go and a lot of incentives to put me in the ground. Anyone looking at me as only a single, one-time payout might not have the foresight to consider how I might make even more in the future.
"No, I don't think so," I said simply. The longer I could drag this out, the better my chances were.
The woman clucked her tongue and said, "I'm afraid I wasn't clear. Refusal is not an option." Suddenly a holographic display on the floor activated and projected an image in between us. I had to stop myself from trying to break my bounds again. It was a video that seemed to show Gloria, David and Kiwi all tied against a wall. They all looked a little worse for wear, clearly having been knocked around a bit.
I offloaded all the fury I was feeling into my two other bodies so that I still seemed unperturbed and stared at the woman levelly, silent.
"Oh? Maybe this dossier we have on you is wrong, then?" the woman asked curiously. And suddenly, someone started beating the shit out of Kiwi on the video, but something I saw as she was knocked to the ground caused me to freeze.
Her deck. Just two days ago, Kiwi had finally finished completely jailbreaking the NetWatch NetDriver and snuck to my clinic to have me put it in. I had built a custom plate for it to disguise it, too. But the cyberdeck on Kiwi in the video was her old Fuyutsuki Tinkerer. This was a fake.
