July 2067
Watson, Night City
Fuggedaboutit Storage
"How the fuck did you even get this thing?" asked Kiwi, staring at the Dragoon as she rolled in a somewhat large wheeled hoist into the storage locker. She took a moment to look at the giant Dragoon chassis from all directions, both to admire it and to try to figure out how to properly pick it up with the hoist, which I thought was the same kind used for taking the engine out of your car.
I shrugged, "I inherited it. Long story short, Dad was kind of a badass, and he took trophies. See, there is an ambiguously bloody baseball bat and one of Kerry Eurodyne's signed guitars."
I was pretty curious about what the story was behind the baseball bat, but I might never know. However... perhaps I could take scrapings from the dried blood? It was kind of difficult to get reliable DNA samples after all of this time, but it might tell me something. After a moment, I shook my head. I didn't particularly care. There was nothing for me to gain from it, and at worst, I could entangle myself in problems just searching for the genome if it was someone especially important.
Kiwi's eyes went wide at the mention of Kerry Eurodyne's guitar, which I had actually bought a nice glass case for. She ran over to it and hissed, "Oh, fucking preem. This is the axe he used on the Second Conflict tour in Barcelona! How the fuck did your dad get this? Second Conflict was one of his weaker-selling albums... but only at first! It was a new sound, very narrative, and people didn't respond well in the first month or two after release, but it became one of his masterpieces. It's without a doubt one of the most critically acclaimed albums, especially looking back. Classic Eurodyne."
I blinked at her. I hadn't expected her to be such a fan. Then, I grinned. I had some of NC-Taylor's memories, enough to know that NC-Dad was a pretty big fan, also. "I assume my dad stole it in one of his escapades. It's listed as stolen anyway on the manifest of stuff my dad left me. I considered selling it, but if it is so well known, it is probably more trouble than it's worth to go about it. I have no idea how to fence stolen... uhh.. memorabilia."
Kiwi let out a sigh of appreciation and glanced back and forth between me and the guitar before finally asking, "Say, can I have this?" She paused and then added, "I mean, I'll buy it! But it's just rotting away in here."
The edges of my mouth were twitching upwards. It was true. I wasn't any kind of Kerry Eurodyne or even SAMURAI fan. To be honest, I found their music pretentious and preachy. I felt the entire idea of so-called Rockerboys dreadfully self-unaware. The Corps still made money on SAMURAI albums to this day. Great job, Johnny. You really showed them in the end!
And I just felt Kerry Eurodyne's solo career was even worse. It was the music of someone who once, perhaps incorrectly, thought he was fighting the system but now knew he was just selling out to it. It had no soul, which at least Johnny Silverhand had put into SAMURAI, even as deluded as he had been. But that was just my opinion, and I certainly didn't have much room to throw stones from my glass house. Still, at least I had already changed the world. We'd see if it was for the better or the worse, though.
Years and years ago, when I first came into this storage locker, I had wanted to keep it as a sort of memento to NC-Dad, but I already had his photograph and military medals in a small butsudan-style cabinet-altar back at home. Neither he nor NC-Taylor were Buddhist or Shinto, obviously, but I felt that the Japanese style of remembering deceased close relatives was a nice one. Plus, this was a custom that actually had gotten fairly popular in Night City regardless of your ethnicity, so it was common and widely recognised. Even David would occasionally place his hands together and say something solemn when he was visiting. That was cute.
Finally, I nodded, "Sure. You don't have to pay anything, either. Consider it a birthday present, although I don't even know your birthday or even how old you are." I squinted at her, zooming in on some of her organic parts. Over thirty is all I could narrow it down to, as she has had significant alterations and biosculpt at least a couple of times.
Kiwi tried to look coy and said coquettishly, "A lady likes to keep some mysteries." I thought she ruined the effect she was going for by grabbing the guitar case and swinging it around like a five-year-old, though. She even paused to take the guitar case out to the large white-panelled truck we had arrived in and stowed it in the cab before returning.
We figured we better put a tarp over the thing just in case, although Kiwi claimed she had infiltrated the building's subnet and put all the cameras on a loop. Considering even I could hack this building, even years ago, I didn't doubt her. Thinking about that, I felt that NC-Danny probably searched around for a storage unit in that was clean but featured terribly cybersecurity as a feature, as how had the got most of this stuff in here, anyway?
Getting the damaged body into the truck was awkward but, in the end, not difficult. I was really strong, after all, and the hoist was basically designed for tasks like this. On the drive back, Kiwi suddenly said, giving me a side eye, "One of those drug people just came back by the building in Pacifica but suddenly stopped across the street and then quickly ran away."
"Ah, good. The small little bombs have a tiny vibrating motor in them as well, and they'll vibrate inside their sinuses if they get close, increasing in intensity the closer they get until the bomb detonates. It is probably quite uncomfortable, plus it is impossible not to understand the message being conveyed. We would have likely had to shoot a few of them if not for this," I said, pleased with myself.
Kiwi asked, "So they'll just have a bomb in their head forever? I suppose that is slightly better than getting shot."
"I mean, the battery will draw down within a couple of months, and after that, it is safe, biologically inert and merely uncomfortable. A few months after that and even the explosive and battery will break down and be absorbed by the body, leaving only a tiny bit of electronic components. And it's not like they couldn't get it removed now . I'm not a monster; I didn't add any kind of anti-tampering features to it. Any ripperdoc or even most Med Techies can take them out," I said, slightly offended, or at least trying to pretend that I was somewhat offended.
From the side-eye that Kiwi gave me, I didn't know if I was fooling anyone. It was fine, and it wasn't like I had done what I had done, mainly because spending a couple of days sneaking through the building the gang had been squatting in had caused me to be incredibly annoyed at them. Ha-ha-ha. Of course, not. It really had been that I was sure I would have to shoot a few of them otherwise. Well, mostly. Well, more so than not.
After hitting the drive-through for breakfast, we drove into the back of the building, into the loading area and down the freight elevator to the subbasement. I put the Dragoon in the corner, for right now, pulling the tarp that we had used to conceal it. Kiwi peered at the entrance hole on the front of the chassis and asked, "What could have done this?"
"Clearly a kinetic penetrator of some kind," I mused, having wondered the same thing. "I thought it could be one of those three-man crew-served railguns, as I could see Dad setting one of those up..." I trailed off and then added another possibility, "... but I suppose it could also have been a kinetic round from a tank, the thin dart-shaped, discarding sabot kind."
It had hit the chassis right in the most armoured part of it, where the biopod was located in the chest. Not only had it, no doubt turned the pilot into a grey smear on whatever nearby wall, but it had also damaged the system electronics and both the main power cell as well as part of the hydrogen fuel cell system, specifically the fuel storage pressure vessel.
The Dragoon was too big and involved too much energy to be purely battery-powered like many bodies were, but at the same time, you couldn't very well run and exhaust most internal combustion engines inside a building, so a fancy hydrogen fuel cell was selected to run the body in high-exertion mode.
It was kind of a pain in the ass because very few people used hydrogen vehicles. I would be able to fuel it, but the fuel would be annoying to acquire. I'd probably have to source the hydrogen from an Airgas company at first, although I might be able to set up an electrolysis system to produce it myself if I could live with a ridiculous electricity bill.
Plus, I had to repair the pressure vessel. The vessels to store pressurised hydrogen had to be made of supermaterials, not only to withstand the many, many hundreds of bars of pressure but also to prevent hydrogen from leaking. There were very few things smaller than a hydrogen gas molecule, and it had a tendency to leak out of everything and then catch fire or explode when it did.
"Well, I got to go and get this truck back before they notice it is missing," Kiwi said, surprising me.
I blinked, "Wait... did you steal that-"
"Bye! I'll be back here in a bit!" she interrupted me and ran off before I could ask if we had been driving around Watson in a stolen truck with a highly restricted piece of military technology in the back. We had stopped for burritos on the way back, even!
Sighing, I finally decided that since nothing had happened, it probably wasn't a big deal.
Glancing at the time, I thought I had enough time to at least get the torso partially disassembled. My power didn't help me much with this at all, and the tools were more of the realm that you'd use to work on a car instead of a person's body, but eventually, I got the armoured plates off, even if I had to use the gentle yet insistent persuasion of a prybar at the end.
Peering at them, I wondered how precisely I would replace them. They were fancy composite, laminated steel armour plates in a very distinctive pattern. I'd have to scan them, fix the damage in the CAD software and then I could possibly get them refabricated from steel and titanium at a prototyping shop. They wouldn't be quite as good as the OEM armour, but they'd still be pretty good. I'd probably have to do that for a number of things.
After that, I only had enough time to carefully pull out one of the system mainboards, which was catastrophically damaged. This was the reason that Danny and I both considered this thing irreparable. You couldn't go to IEC and buy spare parts anymore. However, I had an advantage now. While I performed maintenance on Gloria's friend's Wingman, I disassembled the entire thing and took careful scans and images of almost every electronic part of it, spending a whole day on the effort, including taking memory dumps from some of the accessible ROMs.
I was hoping that IEC wasn't the type of company to reinvent the wheel. The part of the Dragoon that was damaged was its mainboard, and while the Dragoon had a lot more peripherals and sensors, was there a reason that the architecture of the two boards would be much different? I hoped not, but I didn't have time to investigate it too much today.
I took the time, however, to carefully return my tools to the correct places. These were a brand new set of tools, including a large rolling toolbox that I had purchased, and I had even carefully set it up so that each tool had its own individual place where it would fit precisely in a foam shadowbox. There was nothing that annoyed me more than tools left lying around. That's how you would lose things, or worse, leave a tool or item inside the object you were working on. Since I mainly worked on people, this was especially unacceptable.
I thought a healthy dose of OCD was helpful as a surgeon or, more likely, in this case, a mechanic. I ducked into one of the empty rooms and changed into my work clothes. I had seven surgeries scheduled today, so I needed to get going.
Night City was, in many ways, the city that never slept of this world, but there were still lulls in the traffic, and I managed to cruise down the highway at a hundred and fifty.
September 2067
Aoyama, Tokyo
Hasumi Sakura's Apartment
It was the middle of the night, and I was working a little bit from home. Normally I would be in the office right now, but I had a meeting in "regular people hours" later this morning, so I decided to alter my sleep schedule and instead was making an early day of it today. Or a long night of it, depending on your perspective.
I had a home office, but I often just worked on the couch in the living room. I never worked with real physical objects at home, and if I needed a desk arrangement, I could rez a virtual one next to my couch. The virtual AR objects were so real that they even slightly hurt if you hit your bare toe on them. The only downside was I occasionally forgot that they weren't real, and on one occasion sat my hot drink down on it only to have it fall through like it wasn't there and strike my foot. Yuki had fussed over me, but I could tell he had been trying not to contain his laughter.
Speak of the devil, and he comes to give you a hot chocolate. I took the proferred drink and gave him a thumbs up, saying in English, "I am here to improve genomes and kick ass." I narrowed my eyes dangerously and qualified in a cinematic voice like you'd expect to hear in a film trailer, "And I am all out of ass!"
Yuki's eyes glanced down towards my pyjama-covered posterior. The look of utter disbelief on his face was enough to realise that perhaps I had mangled the idiom in an unintentionally amusing way. Coughing, I attempted to salvage things, " Thank you for the hot chocolate. We'll probably head to the office by six, I suppose? "
He opened his mouth as if to say something, paused and then closed then. Then, after another moment, he nodded and asked, " No breakfast, then?"
I shook my head. By my internal clock, it was evening, and I was just making an all-nighter of it, having skipped work "yesterday." My bodies were in three different time zones, from Japan to California to space, which used Greenwich Mean Time. Due to my residency program back in Night City, I had also kept mostly "California" hours and would until I was done.
I settled onto the large couch, pulling my feet under myself and getting comfortable, launching my handful of AR apps that I used to review and adjust genomes as virtual screens. In the corner, I pulled up my e-mail and team chat feed to see if one of my team members had said anything recently.
Yuki came back into the room, holding his pillow, and hopped up onto the couch next to me. He would have been perfectly happy to use my lap as a pillow, but I didn't often let him. Still, I did let him lounge next to me. Sometimes he slept; other times, he did a lot of his own work, which basically amounted to managing my schedule and my non-professional correspondence.
