He coughed a little bit, looking a bit down, "Well... you would have to sign a thirty-year loyalty contract, which would only commence after you finished med school, become fluent in Mandarin before enrolling in med school, and spend at least five years working in Taipei before returning to Night City..." He trailed off, "... honestly, probably they'd choose a Chinese medical school too. That's the only reason I can think of for the fluency requirement." That caused everyone to chuckle, but honestly, it wasn't that bad of a deal, as deals with corps went.
He actually blushed but then added, "But you would get to pick your own speciality, and all Kang Tao physicians are eligible for Gold tier Trauma Team contracts." That caused the Trauma Team contingent to wolf whistle.
I nodded at everyone, "Thanks for going out on a limb for me, everyone." I then chuckled, "Does anyone know the best company that handles 911 calls here in Night City?"
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Relics of a hard life
Getting my driver's license was one thing I didn't realise I would have to do. However, I found out that the required credentials for applying to an ambulance company included a driver's license and EVOC, which was an emergency vehicle operator's course.
It was similar to a driver's course but covered the additional things needed to know for anyone who drove a vehicle with red and blue flashing lights, namely ambulances and police vehicles. I discovered this when I was getting ready to apply to NC Med Ambulance, which was a medium-sized ambulance company in the city and one with a pretty good reputation for not being total dicks to either their workers or patients.
I had arranged for both classes at night about three months into my Paramedic course so that I would have everything completed in time to send my application for a job shortly before I graduated.
"Let's get on the highway, and we'll drive a few kilometres before returning to the office, where you can demonstrate parking. Then you can swap out with uhh..." he paused and glanced back behind him to the man in the back seat, who gave his name, "Jacob... and then sit in the back while he drives," said the man from the Night City motor vehicle division, seemingly bored.
Holding the car's wheel with a death grip at ten and two, I gritted my teeth and nodded. While unsure whether I believed it or not, I told myself, 'It's not that driving a car is scary; it's just that driving a car in this city is scary.'
I was surprised actual in-person vehicle training was still mandatory, even if it was only just for the test. I had done most of my "training" in braindances provided by the school remotely. In spite of that, I admit that they did a pretty good job of teaching me how to drive.
I didn't think my passing was in any doubt, as recommended by essentially everyone in my Paramedic course, I had already discreetly provided the requisite baksheesh, unasked, so I was pretty sure I was going to get my license so long as I didn't get us killed on the way back.
"Aahhhhhhh!" I cried from the passenger seat as the instructor demonstrated the latest in a long line of implausible and dangerous manoeuvres.
What the fuck was this? Fast and the Furious, Night City Drift?! I gripped the armrest of the car like I was an eighty-year-old lady as he pulled the vehicle in turn so tight two wheels seemingly came off the ground, briefly, before swinging it around the other way, one hand on the wheel, the other on the e-brake to slide the car almost sideways into a parking space, back in front of the office of the driving school.
In order to avoid being taken on another death race, I opened the door and jumped out when the car came to a complete stop. Despite my noodle legs, I patted myself down to ensure that I still had my pistol because I was considering shooting this man.
"Hey, what the fuck was that?" I yelled at him after he got out.
He chuckled and rubbed the back of his head, closing the car door and walking around the front of the car before saying, "Well, the course syllabus requires at least forty-five minutes of demonstrated manoeuvres at the instructor's discretion. It used to have a lot of specified things we had to go over, but all that got taken out except for operating the emergency lights, which I had you do in the beginning. See, this is a lot more fun, right?"
" No," I said firmly, shaking my head for emphasis.
He continued chuckling, as if that wasn't the first time he had heard that response, "But you'll remember it, I bet!" He then pulled out an actual honest to god paper business card. I hadn't seen one of those very often in Night City, and he handed it to me in the two-handed Japanese style.
Pissed as though I was, I accepted it two-handed as well and spent a moment inspecting it. It was a simple white card with the name "Yoshiaki Takeda (義光 武田)." There was a net address, and then below that, it said simply and in bold, "I drive the shit out of it."
Well, that was certainly true. On the flip side of the card was his hourly or daily rates. What kind of job needed an insane driver by the hour? Bank robberies? I placed the business card in a compartment in my purse politely before giving him a stare and telling him, "I'm not exactly looking for getaway drivers for my next caper."
That causes him to grin, and he shrugs, "You never know. Not that I would ever do anything illegal, of course. Ha ha ha ha."
I didn't believe that last bit for a second, but you know what? There was no harm in keeping the card.
He continued, "Now let's go inside; there is actually a fair bit of material we need to go over, as well as a number of tech mockups that they didn't actually put in the car because they're cheap bastards."
There were a fair bit of regulations, but what was emphasised the most was the unwritten rules. Ambulances, even privately owned ones, had the same scanning equipment as NCPD patrol cars; they just didn't include the machine-gun turrets. Why? Well, it was important because certain vehicles, mostly corporate convoys, had the right to open fire immediately on other vehicles if they were "startled." So it was important to run all the plates and registrations of any nearby car before you hit the lights and sirens for your own sake.
In most cases, passing a convoy with lights and sirens wasn't a big deal because they could see you coming. But just turning them on when you were right behind them? He highly recommended I never do it.
I hated this city sometimes.
I stayed a little while longer than I usually did to help Fiona with some things for our upcoming tests. She was doing well on the big cardiology issues but needed a little help with pulmonology and endocrinology, which medics often see.
All of the Militech medics had some issues with these areas because they all were previous medtechs either in the NUSA Army or Militech itself, and they had a laser focus on trauma, pharmacology, cardiology, and neurology. And to some extent, that made sense, but they still had to pass the final exam, and all of the stuff they probably never will use again or need to know will be on it.
"Thanks, Taylor. That helps a lot," the older woman told me, and I nodded and gathered my things, getting ready to leave. I helped her with simple mnemonic devices and flash cards. It seemed like flashcards as a learning aid had gone out of style in the past seventy or eighty years. I wasn't sure if it was because the paper was expensive for a time, but I reintroduced the concept to the crew, even writing a very simple flashcard app for any Kiroshi-compatible cybereye system, which almost everyone had, even if they didn't have genuine Kiroshis.
Shockingly, the optics software toolkit they used was an open standard, which allowed competitors to use it. It wasn't clear to me why I thought open standards wouldn't exist in this world, but they most certainly did. In particular, expensive products seemed to play well with competitors' tech.
I would round a few existing corners on the simple app and maybe place the source code on my net site. I had started an anonymous one, Little_Owl's Roost. Although I wasn't sure exactly how anonymous it was, I paid for it a year in advance and used multiple proxies and strong encryption whenever I accessed it. Because NetWatch had backdoors in all public networks due to the Blackwall, they could probably trace me more or less in real-time, but it would be a nontrivial problem for others to do so, at least over a short period. I thought.
I said goodbye to the others that were still in the library and left campus, getting on the train at the nearby station. However, instead of getting off at my usual stop after the train travelled east into Japantown, I stayed on as it continued into Watson, past the medical district in what they were starting to call Kabuki due to its high percentage of Japanese businesses and into the industrial area to the north.
It was already the beginning of the new year, and thinking about the holidays made me think about my dad back in Brockton Bay. I caught myself feeling more or less happy about my life so far the other day. Well, if not happy, then at least optimistic. That realisation caused me to descend into a spiral of self-loathing as I felt I had just abandoned my actual dad.
The fact that there was no way to actually go back, and no one in this world even knew about the existence of alternate universes, didn't help my illogical feelings. It was clear, however, that my life was much better than what I was experiencing in Brockton Bay. Only the very strong feeling that I had swapped places with Night City's version of me kept me from breaking down.
I had often had fantasies of just vanishing when I was in Brockton Bay, being taken by the Sidhe into a faerie ring, and then maybe coming back out a hundred years later when all of my tormentors were dead. However, the only thing that kept those fantasies from being irresistible was how my disappearance would have crushed my father's spirit. He was barely hanging on after Mom died, and sure he hadn't been that great of a father for the past couple of years, but I hadn't been that great of a daughter, either.
However, if the faeries had indeed taken me, then they had replaced me with a changeling like in the stories, and I couldn't help but think that this was the best solution for all of those involved. But it still made me feel incredibly guilty at feeling such relief.
So, last night I resolved to check the storage unit Alt-Dad had left for me in Watson. I don't know if it was because I was starting to bleed the feelings I had for my actual dad with Alt-Dad, or if I was just curious and felt that seeing what was in there would distract me, but I decided to check it out after school.
Watson was, for the most part, a pretty safe area. There was a lot of business activity and a lot of money in the district, mostly from Japanese corporations that had taken advantage of the fact that one of their biggest 800-pound gorillas of a competitor, Arasaka, could not come into Night City or the continent of North America at all.
It was actually, overall, much safer than Japantown, where I lived. I would have much preferred to have been given an apartment in one of the few Megabuildings in Watson, actually. However, I've gotten used to living in Japantown now.
Although it was mainly safe, it was a highly industrial area, especially the north part of town where the self-storage unit was located, as well as the waterfront docks area, and those types of places always had a larger amount of crime than pure residential or retail areas of a city.
Getting off the train, I walked down the street, following well-lit areas. I still had an hour before the sun would set, but I didn't know precisely how long I would be inside the storage unit. In the event that it was dark when I was leaving, I would probably call the friendly robotic taxi Delamain for assistance. From my perspective, he was much safer than human drivers in this city as far as taxis went. He was cheaper, too.
My destination was about a hundred metres ahead and to the right, but I spotted a food truck sitting next to the corner and glanced at its wares. Food was one of the few things that were not better than Brockton Bay, although, in the 2060s, the food was a lot better than it was forty or sixty years ago when over seventy per cent of all produced food was kibble, made by actual dog food companies.
That still existed, and if you were poor, it was the main source of calories you would receive if you were on welfare, but cloned fruits and even cereal crops were getting much more common, even though since all fuels seemed to be a sort of biodiesel that every calorie had to be weighed against the insatiable desire of more energy. There was only so much arable land in the world, after all.
I wasn't entirely sure what this food truck was selling, it was noodles of some kind, but it smelled quite good, so I ordered an extra large with shrimp. I doubted they were shrimp at all. Most meats were scop, or single-celled organic protein, a kind of meat substitute, but honestly, they had over fifty years to perfect it, and it didn't really taste that bad.
I hadn't tried the shrimp flavour, though, but the beef flavour did taste like beef, even if the consistency was a little bit off.
I took my food to-go and walked to the well-lit Secur-Stor-It building across the street. I had already looked up this location on the net before I decided to come. If it was an outside storage unit, then I wouldn't have come so close to sunset and would have had to schedule it for Sunday, which was one of the only days I had any time off at all.
The door into their lobby wouldn't open until I physically keyed in the twenty-four-digit pass key that I had gotten from Alt-Dad, after which the lobby opened, and an automated voice welcomed me and asked if I needed any assistance.
"No, thank you," I told the chatbot politely. The unit my Alt-Dad had left me was on the ground floor, but it was all the way in the back, next to a side door to leave the facility. I found it without too much trouble and carefully keyed in the password again. This caused a loud clicking sound as the slide-up door was magnetically unlocked. I rolled the door up just enough to duck my head under it and closed it behind myself, tapping a locked padlock glyph on the wall to reengage the locking systems.
"Now... what do we have here?" I asked as I found the light switch, along with several sheets of paper taped inside a plastic bag next to it, just like the letter said.
As the lights flickered on, my fingers fumbled, and the plastic bag with the inventory of the things in the room slipped from my fingers to fall to the floor as my jaw hit the floor at what I saw. Was that a small mech or a large set of Tinker power armour?!
