Gloria was silent for a long time before saying slyly, "And you said you hated psychiatry and clinical psychology. You sound more insightful than my professors."
I snorted, "I said I didn't like it. I didn't say I didn't know about it. I don't have the emotional temperament to be a good therapist, but I can certainly fake it for small periods of time for a friend." That caused her to smile, and I continued, "Now, about this man you shot. Honestly, I envy you. You killed him; that's good. You shouldn't feel bad about it; in fact, you made the correct moral decision. You shouldn't be confused, thinking that this is a symptom of incipient cyberpsychosis; this is just you being a good person."
"Huh?" she said, confused, "Uhh... I'm pretty sure that's not the correct reaction. You shouldn't feel good for killing someone, Taylor."
I sighed, "You shouldn't, right? That's what I thought, too. Let me tell you a story. Do you remember how we met?"
She grinned, "Yeah, of course. You got mugged on your way to work. We ended up transporting your muggers to the Shock Trauma Centre; it was kind of funny."
I nodded, "I thought so, too, at the time. Well, one of them had a shotgun and ended up shooting the other. That one died in the OR, but the shotgun wielder survived. I took more risks myself in order to take that one down alive. I specifically aimed for his kneecaps so that he would survive. Surprisingly, he wasn't charged with felony murder for his compatriot's death, only my mugging. So, he was out of jail in less than nine weeks." And it really wasn't even a mugging; they were Scavs, and I was sure I would have been disassembled and left for dead if their "mugging" had succeeded.
Gloria started to look uneasy, and I continued, "A few months later, I was curious about what happened to him, so I looked him up and discovered that since he got out, the NCPD shot him to death after he killed his next-door neighbour, a woman in her thirties and a girl about as old as David is right now."
I stared at her, completely serious, "Those people are dead because of my squeamishness, Gloria. I really envy you that you put down the guy who attacked you and don't have to live with guilt knowing that you're partly responsible for what he did afterwards."
She shook her head, "No way! That wasn't your fault!"
"Wasn't it? Even the cops, at the time, told me just to kill these types of people in the future. I thought that they were so jaded and cynical at the time, but really they were exactly right," I shook my head and leaned back against the railing, glancing up at the night sky. The sky was black, with barely a few stars visible through all the light pollution, "There are a lot of different types of people in the world. Most work a dead-end job, doing what they can. Some are like your mom, grifting what they can out of the system. But some people... pick up a gun and decide to take what they want, and create pain, terror and sadness in their wake. It sounds anti-social, but in the absence of a real, working system of justice, which we do not have, it is the correct moral decision to shoot these people. You probably saved ten lives with the one guy you killed, and you should feel great about that, not conflicted and worried that you don't feel guilty. You don't feel guilty because you intuitively understand that you did a good deed. "
Gloria looked quiet and thoughtful for some time.
I hadn't ever actually put these thoughts into words before, and they would have shocked pre-Night City Taylor, but living in Night City had a way of changing you, or rather revealing the true you underneath all of the extraneous polite bullshit society foisted off on people. Night City was a jungle, and in a jungle, it was possible to have a biblical view of good and evil, of right and wrong, of black and white. It wasn't that there were no greys; in fact, the whole city was grey. It was just that, for some reason, the grey made the black stand out better when you saw it. The badlands, the wastes where she had shot that man, was even more stark.
Still, I was long past feeling anything but a sense of satisfaction when I had to put down the real scum of the Earth. Perhaps I was being hypocritical in the extreme because I did realise that some of the systemic issues this world lived under brought this type of person to the forefront, and I was presently working for people who were responsible for a lot of the systemic issues.
Still, I would do what I could do and be satisfied with that. I grinned and said, "Let's go have some cake."
May 2067
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
Confidential Arasaka Compound
I was in a part of the base that I normally had no access to, but I was completely done with my work on the first-generation cybernetic sleep inducers and was just waiting to be transported to Japan. Apparently, there were only certain windows where they felt I could be transported safely, as they felt that until Militech finished reverse engineering the wreaths, they would definitely intercept me if they knew where I was.
So I was bored and offered to help their cybernetics surgeon, so I was doing a number of small surgeries. Their clinic was stocked very oddly, and they had an absolute ton of neural, cognitive and netrunner cybernetics. I asked Yuki, " Just what does Arasaka do in this base? "
He frowned and looked unsure, " Uh... beyond basing a small fighter squadron here, I believe that, for the most part, this is a research centre focused on portions of the Old Net, but I don't really know any more than that, and furthermore, neither you nor I have a need to know, and it is classified. Just like their workers have no need to know the extent of your work here, either... but if you are really curious, I can see about requesting you to be read in on the project. "
"Yeah, yeah... I don't think that will be necessary," I said, waving a hand. I didn't really care that much, plus I wanted to save any favours like that for things that I was really interested in or really needed to know. I hadn't done any surgeries on any secret netrunners, but I had done a couple of Arasaka fighter pilots, and they had a number of interesting augmentations. They all had boostware and sophisticated neural interfaces that were similar to a cyberdeck. They would interface with the computers in the aircraft, and the pilot would fly the plane in a virtual reality interface. The aircraft's sensors would be his eyes, and the aircraft's control surfaces would be their limbs. It was quite fascinating, I thought. Each had enough physical augmentations to live continuously at 9Gs, so they could accept a tremendous amount of acceleration, too.
A few days later, after that conversation, I found myself in the clinic on a Sunday. The base surgeon didn't work weekends, so I offered to come in and do a few elective surgeries for the people of the base. After I was finishing up installing a new pair of cybernetic eyes in a girl that worked in the administration, suddenly, the lights went out, as well as my connection to the base subnet.
Blinking, my eyes shifting to low-light mode, I quickly took stock of my patient. I didn't need any of the further equipment, thankfully, so I finished in the dark, the base's emergency lighting not coming on for a full minute.
Now that my patient was safe, my curiosity was taking hold. I left her there after adjusting her sedation levels and walked out of the clinic, having to force open the door manually. The corridor was lit dimly by the red-tinged emergency lighting installed on the walls, and I could hear some gunfire down the hall. If I was smart, I would quickly go hide back in my clinic, but instead, I walked towards the gunfire.
I found a dead body no more than ten metres further. It was a member of the Arasaka security forces on base, in their matte black and red armour, but he appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, specifically a pericranial entry point to the temple with the sidearm that was still in his hand. Frowning, I kneeled down and relieved him of his weapon, doing a quick function test, "Virus attack...?" I asked myself questioningly and quickly shut down all external radios on my cyberware. The base wireless connection was down hard right now, anyway. One of the few modifications to my cybernetics that Arasaka insisted on was changing out my normal wireless card with a version that would only connect to the access point in the base. This was apparently pretty standard for anyone "on deployment" at a confidential and classified location, I supposed. It would have been a real problem if I didn't have all my other ways to connect to the outside world.
With a gun in my hand, I felt a lot better now and I continued my exploration, going into a large hangar or garage, and instantly I froze when I detected movement. Glancing around I saw one lone Arasaka security forces member raising his HJSH-18 Masamune slowly at a group of four people that seemed to be stealing a vehicle.
Blinking, I zoomed in on the nar-do-wells before changing my classification. These children were stealing one of the Ō-yoroi mine-and-ambush-protected armoured vehicles. They all had dark form-fitting coolant suits with Arasaka markings on the back, and I could instantly identify some cybernetics installed on each of them. They couldn't be more than eleven years old.
My body moved without thinking, running towards the man who was still lifting his rifle up and hadn't quite reached his aim point yet. I got to him long before he pulled the trigger, and with a hand, I grabbed his head and smashed it into the side of a nearby vehicle, instantly knocking him out. I thought smugly, ' No, I don't think you'd be shooting children today, sir. ' It was fortunate that I had enough time to disable him that way without shooting him, as that would have caused a lot of questions later. I didn't know what was going on precisely, but I knew shooting kids was not going to fly with me.
Two of the children who were stealing the vehicle gaped at me when I did this, one of which was a pale girl with pink hair in a pixie-cut with intense eyes, staring at me as she jumped up on the side of the vehicle as they got it going. She stared at me for a long moment before finally nodding and then jumping into the cabin of the vehicle, closing the door behind her. The car then drove straight through the thin garage door like it wasn't even there, leaving a gaping hole behind.
Stepping away from the scene of my crime, I wondered what the fuck had just happened. I was thankful that the entire base seemed to be deactivated, so I was hoping that included any of the audio-visual cameras inside this garage. It was only a few more minutes before an entire squad of security guys showed up, swarming me. Rather than being upset, though, they seemed relieved, with the leader speaking over his speaker, " Hasumi-sensei, please come with us. This facility is no longer secure; we're going to fly you out immediately."
I let them lead me off and even let one of the guys take the pistol that I was carrying. Me and Yuki were bundled into an AV-8 which took off and immediately turned to the south.
As we flew over the city, I noticed that at least half of the city was as dark as the base, completely without power. Now that was impressive.
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She got the job!
May 2067
Night City
Gloria's Apartment, Santo Domingo
"I tell you, that damn dog only likes you and David," grumbled Gloria as she stood, mostly paralysed, in the maintenance bay I built for her in her new apartment. The dog in question was right next to her, worrying on her shoe while softly growling.
She was renting a large three-bedroom apartment so that she and David could have their own rooms, which they had become accustomed to back in Los Angeles.
The last room was a guest room, but she mainly used it as a study for schoolwork for the both of them, as Gloria seemed to be intent on continuing her education, already talking about taking night and net classes when she hadn't even secured a job yet, but that shouldn't be an issue as qualified RNs were always in demand. It was in this room that I had placed the maintenance bay against on wall. It didn't take much space unless Gloria was inside it, so it was out of the way.
As full-body replacements went, Geminis didn't need a lot of maintenance. They were about a third biological, so that part was mostly self-repairing, but that wasn't to say that they didn't need any.
Ongoing maintenance was one of the ways full-body cyborg users were controlled. It was expensive, but it had no reason to be beyond the fact that it encouraged cyborgs to seek gainful employment where their maintenance could be provided as part of their wages, like health insurance. I was definitely breaking the agreement that Raven Microcybernetics had doctors who sold their equipment sign by installing this in the end-users apartment and even teaching her how to do most of the maintenance herself.
But I never signed that agreement in the first place as I bought the body on the black market, so there. Nyaa!
"He comes from a long line of wolves," I told her with a grin, "He is a predator."
She scoffed, kind of. She didn't have full control of all of her facial muscles, just enough to talk, "Predator? He can open the refrigerator door, and he has a habit of stealing cookies."
I snorted. Although he had a very dopey-looking face, he did seem to be pretty smart, just like Mrs Pegpig was. I had thought he was mentally challenged at first, but he was very sneaky with it. He did have a very stupid, dopey-looking face, though. I still wondered where the bird had found him. It wasn't like there were wild packs of pugs around. He was basically David's dog now, though.
After finishing the diagnostic, I nodded and told her, "There's a small capacitor that is in the process of going bad in some of the circuitry of your left leg. That's why you feel a bit off when flexing that leg." I shared the screen of the maintenance diagnostic and showed her how I had identified the problem, "It's not outputting the voltage it should, so we'll go ahead and change it. It shouldn't take very long."
With a mental flip of a switch, she was no longer paralysed. The scanning devices in the maintenance bay were purchased off the shelf, and the bay very much resembled the standard ones available for lease by Raven Microcybernetics. As such, they required the victim-err patient to be still in the process of scanning, so the simplest solution when dealing with a cyborg was just to turn off their ability to move their body. Gloria carefully pushed the pug away with her toe, which I found amusing.
I asked her to strip while I grabbed some tools, then glanced back and blushed faintly and told her she could keep the panties on. It was odd that I reacted at all, as I was very familiar with every centimetre of her body, but that was before she started using it. Things changed when someone was living in it for quite a long time.
