He paused, blinked and then nodded, "There's a few, and none of them are secret, really. But, the most famous and effective has to be the so-called Panzerfaust . Made somewhat famous by our own Adam Smasher, but there are plenty of people that have a higher degree of mastery than him, like the Kazekage. Smasher will only beat you to death with his hands as a last resort or if he finds it particularly amusing." He paused, shook his head, making a small hand gesture that might be one to ward off evil and said, " Better not to speak his name lest we summon him."
I nodded, and he walked off. How interesting; I wonder if that was what Gloria was learning. Cursory net searches didn't show very much information except what I had just learned. It was featured in a few films, but everyone was positive that the depiction in the film had no bearing at all on what the actual martial art looked like in practice.
After Tanaka left, Yuki and I returned back to my apartment on one of the upper floors. I quickly took a shower, declining Yuki's offer to wash my back. One very interesting invention that I didn't even know existed was a kind of drying field installed in my bathroom. It didn't dry precisely, but I thought it used gravity manipulation technology to quickly pull all of the water off your body. That was my guess based on my internal accelerometers registering constantly changing but tiny amounts of "acceleration" while I just stayed very still in the shower.
Walking back out in a towel, I glanced at the clothes Yuki had set out for me and nodded. I didn't feel that comfortable being completely naked in front of him, but I didn't mind walking around in a towel. While he waited outside my room, I donned my outfit for the day. Asking him through the door, "Is there anything pressing today on my schedule?"
There was a pause before Yuki said, "Not pressing, exactly, but there is a small matter you might want to know about, but I'm not sure how to solve it."
I replied, "Oh? How interesting, since I am pretty sure you were trained from a young age to be a problem solver." Amongst other things, I thought but kept his obvious other uses to myself.
"Well, there is this woman; she lives in the building with us. She was recently promoted as an executive in the Intelligence division," Yuki began, and I didn't need to ask him whose Intelligence Division. Basically, only Arasaka employees lived in this building. Yuki paused, "Long story short, your arrival was somewhat unexpected, and you snagged the last AV pad on this side of the building out from under her. She had been planning on purchasing or leasing an AV since his promotion."
"Ah... this is in the nature of etiquette then," I mused. Really, I didn't need to do anything, and it was her own fault for not leasing the open pad when he had the chance. If she had, I was sure I would be living in a different building because access to an AV was required in my employment contract, "But I don't want to make enemies when I don't have to or needlessly antagonise my neighbours."
Yuki walked in, as he had a pretty good idea of how long it took for me to get dressed by now and nodded, "Right! But there's not a whole lot we can do."
"We bought a new AV and leased a slightly older one as a maintenance spare, right?" I asked him.
He shook his head, "We ended up doing the opposite. It just so happened we got a sweetheart deal on financing to buy the two-year-old model, and we're leasing a newer one. They're both comparable, though. The spare is based in a hangar at the airport."
"How about this, then... We'll need to hire a second flight crew, maybe on a PRN basis, but offer the Intel lady a fractional ownership or sublease of one of the AVs. Whoever gets to the pad first will take the first AV, then the PRN crew can fly the second aircraft to the pad to service whoever is still in the building," I offered. It would cause a delay if we both left the building at the same time, but I didn't have any fixed hours per se, and given my body's presence in space which used the Greenwich Mean Time time zone, I had planned to work odd hours here in Japan in any event. It was also somewhat expected for genius researchers to have odd proclivities, such as working odd hours or being recluses.
Yuki frowned, probably because he didn't like the idea that this might inconvenience me slightly in some situations, but he then nodded, "Okay. I'll figure out what an appropriate fee would be and reach out to him."
"There's no reason to price it too aggressively; it's okay if I lose a little money on the arrangement. Sometimes favours, especially from those in Intel, are worth more than gold," I reasoned and then walked out of my apartment, the pretty boy trailing about one and a half steps behind me as we and my security team boarded the AV-8 and flew five minutes into the business district. A five-minute flight would have been a forty-five-minute ground transport, so I could see the benefits.
I had a small team and a small lab, at least for now, but I still had a dozen researchers working underneath me, not including two administrators or Yuki. Their specialities were a bit broad, as I had stated that I intended to research bio-engineering, cybernetics and genetics. There was some overlap in the first two, of course, but genetics was a bit of an outlier. Still, even the two geneticists in my lab said they had no problem working on other projects. I intended to work on two projects at once, as a rule. In the future, one of the projects would be one of my "hobby projects", but both were intended to be profitable at the moment. I had to make a name for myself, after all.
My team met me in the large conference room, and I didn't waste any time, " Gentlemen," I began, as I noticed I was the only lady on my team. It was a bit of a surprise, as while it was still the case that men outnumbered women in the physical sciences and engineering, there were more females than not in the field of life sciences, including genetics, " Our first project is multi-pronged. First, we will be researching the incorporation of biological neural tissue as a replacement for silicon processors, neural network chips and ASICs." I clicked a slide with a photograph of one of my little spider bots, followed by more that showed an internal view of its primary processing ganglia. Surprisingly, neither my kidnappers nor Arasaka had twinged that these machines were a new invention, too. There were hundreds of models of small robots like this, though. The construction units and programming jigs were destroyed, though, along with other sensitive electronics in my factory. But, it wasn't as though I had ever gotten to the point where I could really mass produce them, either, so my first project was to duplicate this effort without any obvious Tinkertech involved in the programming/training base stations or the fast-cloning of the neural tissue itself.
" If that proves successful, then we will move on to specialised cloning techniques to produce lots of suitable neural tissue quickly and cheaply," I finished. I didn't waste a lot of time, and I already had individualised work-plans for most of the people here. For now, we could get as much neural tissue as we wanted from the morgues in Tokyo. A lot of people donated their bodies to Science after their death, especially since it came with a small honorarium paid to their surviving families.
One of the researchers asked, frowning, " How long are we planning on spending on this project if it's not fruitful?"
I hummed. I knew it could be successful, but shrugged, " We will drop it if there are no promising developments, especially in the economies involved, in six months, I suspect."
That got everyone nodding, and I dismissed the meeting. I didn't like unnecessary meetings, but I was still new here, so a few had to be accomplished. As for my next project? I didn't know. I wanted to prioritise things I could get a handle on quickly, which was why my spider bots were chosen. I had already built them, granted, using a lot of Tinkertech in the construction process, but I knew they were at least possible. To give myself ideas, I asked to review recent failed Arasaka projects in my area of expertise. To do so, I had to access a SCIF in the basement of the research complex. This special area was the only place highly classified datalinks were permitted, for example, to the core Arasaka databases, where I could just browse projects that I had both a clearance to see and fell into my competencies.
I was searched rather thoroughly before being allowed into the SCIF, which resembled nothing more than a padded room from an old-fashioned mental asylum. Inside there was no wireless connection at all, just a small desk that featured a simple data retrieval system like a library might have. I could sit at the desk and access confidential files, but I could only view them. I couldn't take them with me, except in screenshots from my eyes or my memory of in a scrolled BD, I supposed. That was always the risk when viewing classified files, and unless you had total control over the OS of the employee, it would always be a risk.
I browsed the list of projects and paused, finger over an entry. They were listed chronologically, so one of the first was called 'PROJECT DEEP VALKYRIE', and I noticed it because it was listed as both defunct and physically located in Honduras. I selected it. As I thought, it was the project involved in Old Net research that Yuki offered to see if I could be read in on. Apparently, the security levels were much lower on defunct projects, as it was just included in my general request to see defunct projects. It was listed as defunct due to primarily the deaths of all key project employees and secondarily the loss of project "assets."
Clicking my tongue, I read over the synopsis and reports. I didn't have full access. For example, I couldn't read the research papers or see diagrams of technology invented, if any. I'd have to request that specifically in a project I wanted to pursue, but I could read the bullet points. Pinching my glabella, I sighed. I knew that no matter who grabbed me, I would be working for something akin to an amoral or even immoral company, but this was pretty bad. I actually didn't have that much of an issue with training children to be specialist net runners... it was not that much different than what Militech was doing with NC-Taylor, except they started younger here. It wasn't like they murdered the rejects; they just sent them back to the orphanages.
However... then throwing your child-runners against the horrors on the Old Net? Yes, that was something that was bad. That explained the identity of those four children I helped back in Honduras, and I felt a lot better about my decision, sitting there smiling for a long moment. Looking through a few more reports, I widened my eyes. Wow. They totally destroyed the research personnel on this project. I couldn't really blame them, but the surveillance videos just showed people keeling over dead, being electrocuted or one case where someone's head legitimately exploded. I didn't even know how that was possible.
I shook my head. It was stupid. Training a net runner was the same as training a soldier. If you created a cadre of child super soldiers, then convinced them that you were basically murdering them one after another by forcing them to face suicidal odds, of course, they would mutiny and frag you. I looked briefly at all of the data on the project I was able to access, including a small dossier on each of the missing "assets." That might be useful for later, but as far as anyone could tell they were well in the wings.
I found one project that I could easily accomplish, namely a failed but ongoing project to decrypt the genome of my fuel algae. Hell, I could do that one in one afternoon! But I wasn't stupid enough to do so, so I barely even looked at it before moving on. I found a number of options but picked one that looked both easy and was more on the genetics side. My two geneticists wouldn't be getting too much work on the Spiderbot project, and we could simultaneously work on this project.
Going back upstairs, I drew the two geneticists, who were PhDs in their own right, into my office and grinned, "Us three will be working on a separate project. That's not to say you won't be possibly assisting on Project Alpha, but Project Bravo will be..." I made a silly da-da-da-daaah noise and finished with, in English, "Biometals!"
One of the geneticists tilted his head to the side and asked, " Like... calcium? "
I shook my head, " No, no... except that that is a metal that our bodies have evolved to process. What we will be researching are non-evolutionary biometals and possibly organometallic alloys. Specifically, the creation of novel organisms, perhaps bacteria, to process these metals."
The other geneticist made an 'Ahhh' of understanding, "Like a biological process of refining metals. I believe there was a research project along those lines a decade ago, but it didn't produce any useful results."
I grinned and nodded, " Yes! But I think that they almost did. A lot of money was put into this project, and several novel bacteria were created. I won't know for sure until the secure courier arrives with all their research data on a data shard, but I believe we can succeed where they failed. Sometimes all it takes is a new person looking at a problem to finish pushing the stone up the hill, eh?" Incidentally, this was one of the major weaknesses of the hyper-competitive world we were in. Results, even negative results like this project, were very rarely shared between Corporations, at least not for a long time.
Funnily enough, successful research projects would be more likely to be shared decades later, but a negative one where Arasaka wasted a lot of money? No. If they don't publicise it, not only will nobody know the money was wasted, but hopefully, some competitor will make the same mistake and waste a ton of their money! And if they did publish, the worst could happen-the competitor might make it work where they failed! Exactly what I had planned, in other words, except I wasn't a competitor, except for internal funding, I supposed.
The first one nodded, but the second one hedged, " As long as they don't start calling us Team Sisyphus, Hasumi-sama ."
I chortled. That was a good reference. But I picked this rock to smash because I was almost certain it wouldn't be able to roll over me Indiana Jones-style... or Sisyphus-style, I supposed. I grinned, " We'll start with a thorough codon-by-codon examination of their novel additions to the bacteria in virtual. That may take a few weeks or even months. It took them years and years to build them, after all. Then, we'll brainstorm adjustments. Only when we're pretty sure will I send copies to be printed and tested in the BSL facility."
