This repair was lucky because the circuit board was available from one of the "access panels" on her calf. Rather than a panel, per se, it more resembled a very fine and almost invisible seam. I pulled the small circuit board out with a pair of forceps. Gloria frowned down at it, "And how would I repair it? Component-level repair of electronics is a little bit beyond my skill level."
I nodded. Although it was true that any modern Med Techie had a lot of practical electronics repair experience due to cybernetics, removing one small surface mount component on a very small board was not the level of skill even most doctors had.
I said, "You wouldn't-if I wasn't around, you'd need to hire an actual techie to do this part. But, if you're interested in expanding your skills in this direction, even if it is just to repair your own body, I can point you to some classes you can take or audit. I'd recommend you then start a hobby of repairing hand-held Agents. They're cheap and widely available, and it is not a big deal if you brick a few dozen and you're not out as much when you do. This small board would cost about two thousand eddies if I had to buy it from Raven." Agents were what I would call a "smartphone" in this world. In my mind, I still called them smartphones, though, but that wasn't a word that had survived the '90s in this universe, so people looked at me askance when I had used it a few times.
She nodded, seeming interested, and I sat the board on a table and used my high-magnification vision and tools to quickly unsolder and remove the faulty capacitor, replacing it with a slightly beefier version and walking her through the process. The last step involved brushing on a sort of clear-coat epoxy as a protective layer, which I had used solvent on a q-tip to remove previously. It took a few minutes for the epoxy to dry, so I spent the time explaining each stage of the repair.
I was already pretty sure what was wrong when she told me her complaint over the phone, so I had everything I needed just in case. There were a lot of complaints over the series of tantalum capacitors that the last few years of Gemini models used in some of their distributed control boards. It would have been better to use a straight graphene supercap as I had used it as a replacement, but those were a spacer product and about five times the price as traditional capacitors.
I slipped the board back in her calf, reconnected it and nodded, "Do a full body reset and physio-self test and calibration. See if that solved the problem." Gloria nodded and then froze for half a second before she started moving again in a type of slow kata-looking callisthenics routine.
She grinned, "Works great, now! That little lag is gone."
I tilted my head at her little routine and asked, "Is that some kind of martial art? I don't recognise it."
She nodded and grinned, "Yes, but I can't teach it to you."
"Oh? Is it secret? Do I need permission from your Shifu?" I asked amusedly. That suddenly gave me an idea for a short part of Rage of a Villainess, thinking the protagonist could say something along the lines of, 'I'm not permitted to teach this art before reaching the Nascent Soul stage!' I made an entry in my narrative notes file.
She chuckled and shook her head, putting her pants back on, "No. But it's a martial art designed for Borgs. Regular humans, even if they're somewhat strength-enhanced like you, just can't get anything out of it. Really, even Geminis are a little too weak and frail to get the maximum benefit out of it, too."
That surprised me. I wasn't aware of any Borg-specific martial arts, but it wasn't like I was anything but a hobbyist. Although I had started taking Kendo, Aikido and Judo classes as Hasumi, it wasn't like I was one of those types of people that hung around the gym or dojo all the time. The fact that she said that a Gemini was a little weak to get the full effect out of the art was also surprising. Gloria could bench-press over half a ton easily and might be able to do three-quarters of a ton with extreme effort. I arched an eyebrow, curious, "Where did you learn this?"
"Ah. I met a lot of other full cyborgs while I assisted on that professor's research project. Mostly borderline to actual cyberpsychos, but we got along pretty well, and they introduced me to a few people who could teach it," she then looked a little embarrassed and said, "I can't really talk about it with outsiders, but I've already found another teacher here in town, though."
Outsiders! I grinned wildly. How interesting. It seemed like there was some sort of full-borg secret society. I very much approved of Gloria being a part of it, too. When I first met Gloria, she literally had no life outside of work and taking care of David. Before I could express my approval, she asked, "Speaking of which... would you be willing to do some similar work for a few... well, I can't really call them friends precisely yet, but acquaintances? They're mostly in Alpha classes, but one of them is in an old IEC Wingman, and one other guy has a thirty-year-old Militech ninja body. They're all struggling a little bit with psychosis, but I think that the lack of routine maintenance is as big an issue as any psychological ones they have. Probably wouldn't be able to pay much, though..." she trailed off.
I blinked. Alpha classes, well... everybody and their brother made that kind of full-body replacement. It was the generic labourer type. Over ninety per cent of all Borgs were of this variety; they were "the clanking masses." Varied and highly customisable, the Alpha was the Toyota Hilux of full-body replacement.
However, the Wingman was a specialised body designed for fighter pilots and astronauts. Since IEC went out of business, they weren't sold anymore, but they were pretty unique. They were almost guaranteed to have very high-end boostware included too, and it would be interesting to see a type of boostware designed for Borgs and how it diverged from the kind designed for regular humans. It would be mostly neuro-focused, as you didn't really have to improve the latency in an already electronic nervous system equivalent.
It reminded me of the destroyed, semi-disassembled Dragoon I still had in my storage unit. Although I had come a long way, I was still pretty sure I wouldn't be able to completely repair it yet-but doing routine maintenance on other full-body replacements now was something I felt comfortable doing, even if they were entirely mechanical. However, as much as I would like to look at those two unique models, I was a bit leery of being too close to a "borderline cyberpsycho" full-body replacement.
After a moment of silence, I said, "Possibly-as long as you were with me." I'd also want a number of safety measures I didn't yet have in my clinic. Maybe a large directed EMP or a high-voltage security system.
Gloria laughed uneasily and said, "Ahahaha-of course, I was going to suggest that anyway."
I nodded and said, "If you want, let's try the Wingman guy first." Although kind of strong and very fast, they weren't as dangerous in most situations as the unstated "ninja" model. And what model was that? I didn't know. Maybe an old Eclipse? If so, that was about as unusual as my Dragoon, although much easier to hide, fit in and disguise as a regular Alpha-type or possibly an Enforcer-type police body than the Dragoon. There was no hiding that borderline mecha as anything but 'OMG. WTF.'
The Militech Eclipse was a very advanced full-body replacement at the time it was built in the early 2020s, and it was one of the few that they still managed to build after the DataKrash in limited numbers, at least for a little while. I believe the last year it was manufactured was in the early 2030s, similar to the Dragoon.
However, it suffered a bit from a jack-of-all-trades issue. It was designed for covert ops, but it had a little bit of everything, including things as wild as integrated hypodermic needles in the fingers and a detachable explosive rocket-propelled finger-bomb in the left ring finger. It ended up being good at a lot of things, but it wasn't the best at anything, and that sealed its fate because it was a specialised kit to begin with.
Heinlein would say that specialisation was for insects, not mankind, but cyborgs were different. Specialisation in cyborg bodies was very desirable, especially since you could, theoretically, wear them like clothes. Another point in favour of taking a look at the Wingman first was I was one hundred per cent sure I could find the maintenance manuals for the Wingman since IEC was defunct. Militech might guard the files on their old tech more strenuously; I just didn't know.
Plus, let's face it... I wanted to look at the old IEC body the most. As for the compensation, I shrugged. As Taylor Hebert, I had most of the liquid capital that Dr Hasumi made selling all of my sleep inducers. When I was kidnapped, I made sure to funnel most of it to Taylor through quite a lot of obfuscation layers since I felt that it might be difficult to send money from Hasumi to Taylor or Hana in the future.
It wouldn't be impossible, but it might be difficult; in fact, I was continuing to run the payment obfuscation service that Dr Hasumi set up. It was, by now, a trusted semi-legal service, and I took a percentage of all the transfers, but the main reason was the influx of money from a variety of sources allowed me to tumble all of Hasumi's money back to any place I wanted.
I could make use of that as Hasumi sending money to Taylor or Hana, and it would be challenging for Arasaka to trace the recipient, but it would be obvious I was sending money to someone, so that might be difficult to answer. As such, I had divested Hasumi of most of her money when she got kidnapped.
Right now, as Taylor, I had access to a little less than twenty million Eurodollars, which was enough to live a quiet life, as well as fund Hana's business prospects when she became more trusted in space. It would also be necessary to fund my "fourth body." That was going to be very special, and it was actually going to be wildly expensive for a number of reasons.
Now with Hasumi kidnapped, although I expected and even encouraged this outcome, I was again running into the issue of Taylor being a single point of failure. Neither Hasumi nor Hana, at the moment, could rapidly clone a replacement body if one part of me died. If Hana or Hasumi died, I, as Taylor, could easily clone a replacement body, but if "Taylor" died... well, I was shit out of luck unless I had Hana return to Earth. That had to change.
I talked to Gloria a little more about her request and agreed to see the Wingman guy in a week or two. Then, after their little group saw that I wasn't a risk, I would see the more physically dangerous ones. I grabbed the pug dog and asked Gloria, "What did David end up naming him, anyway?"
"The Honourable, Lord Percival Butterbutt the Fourth, Esquire," Gloria said with a straight face, "Butterbutt for short."
I stared into Lord Butterbutt's dumb but cunning eyes as he started panting and just shook my head.
May 2067
Aoyama (Special Ward of Tokyo)
Hasumi's Apartment Building
I panted as I returned the practice blade to a resting low-guard position, facing my instructor, who peered at me carefully before nodding. He said, " Alright, we're done for today. " In the corner of the room, Yuki clapped wildly and cheered before walking up and offering me a towel and a glass of water.
I wasn't wealthy enough to have a gym in my apartment, but there were two inside the apartment building that I was now living in, and one of them had a large open area that was mostly used for Yoga and Pilates classes that a lot of house-wives and some house-husbands partook in. But when it was empty, other people were free to use it.
An instructor, well, that was actually very easy. Perhaps not too surprising, but Arasaka had a lot of what would be called on the street "cyber ninjas." My Kendo instructor was actually one of the security team members that I paid for, so it was a pretty simple decision for him to work a few hours a week when he wasn't on duty for some extra money.
At first, I expected to get just a regular Kendo instructor from a regular dojo down the street, but this idea was nixed. I needed a specialised instructor who also had close to equivalent or superior boostware as I did. Being over three times faster than the average person hid a lot of sins in terms of technique-even barely trained, I could probably beat many historical swordmasters just because I could smack them with my sword faster than they could react to, even if I was using it as nothing more than a bludgeon or crude chopping implement.
Yuki glanced down at my practice sword and said, " That sword is kind of weird, though. It looks vaguely European. Where did you get the idea from?"
I blushed. I couldn't very well say that I got it from a series of Earth Aleph high-fantasy novels that my mom and I both enjoyed, but I tried to copy the Heron-marked sword when I found out that Kendachi would provide both a customised practice sword as well as an actual blade with a monomolecular edge, and relatively cheaply too.
My instructor walked up and nodded his head, " It kind of reminds me of a German kriegsmesser crossed with a Chinese dao or maybe even a katana. It's quite interesting... most of the common katana forms work, but due to the heavier hilt, with an actual crossguard and pommel, the balance point is much closer to the hilt. This changes the types of moves somewhat." He took my practice blade and balanced it with one finger close to the crossguard.
He flipped it around with that finger, grabbed it by the blade out of the air and handed it back to me, " All in all, it's quite good. Katanas are designed to be quite a bit blade-heavier, so this makes them a bit slower. Historically, the trade-off is that, in exchange, you get more cutting force due to the leverage. But, in this day and age of augmented strength, I could definitely see how being a bit faster might be advantageous."
I chuckled and rubbed the back of my neck, "I'm not sure I thought it through that much, Tanaka-dono, but I thought that the mono-resistant treatment on the crossguard might save my fingers." I called him sensei while he was teaching me, but he refused that at all other times, but his recitation of the relative merits of different swords reminded me of a historical samurai, so I thought to be cheeky.
He grinned at me, " -dono, eh? I always did think I would look good with a top-knot. Ahh... to a simpler time, eh? Well, if you'll excuse me, I have to get ready to go on duty in a couple of hours."
Before he walked off, I asked, " Tanaka-san, do you know about any secret martial arts designed for full-body replacement users? I was reading something online and found the premise interesting."
