I just blinked several times, looking at it, then moved closer to inspect it. I could see that it was clearly damaged; I could see a small entry hole of some kind of incredible armour-piercing weapon going through the entirety of the torso of the armour. What weapon would have that much penetration on an obviously armoured suit like this? A crew-served railgun, perhaps?
I shook my head, walked over and grabbed the plastic bag off the ground, pulling the papers out. There was no additional message like I was wondering or hoping for, but it did have the items listed in a rough order of rarity. Next to each item was a code word that I couldn't decipher as well as a date. The date acquired, perhaps?
The top of the list was "Scorpion-22 | IEC Dragoon borg, damaged (irreparable), 2030 model, Value unknown or zero | 21 FEB 2059."
Ah. It wasn't a mech or an armour suit. It was a full-body conversion. You could have your entire body replaced with cybernetics, and this was one of the military models. I was suddenly very curious about where Alt-Danny was located towards the end of February 2059.
I walked back over to the Dragoon and very curiously looked in the back. There should be an access panel around... There! I found it and heaved a sigh of relief. When they converted you to a full body borg, they put your brain and part of your spinal column inside what was called a biopod, and they'd just slot this biopod into whatever body you happened to be "wearing."
I was a little worried Alt-Danny hadn't removed the former... occupant from this thing, and if so, it would have been less a statue and more of a corpse.
I glanced down at the list of items stored in the unit, raising my eyebrows again. There were a number of pieces of cybernetics, but most of the things here were... obvious souvenirs? The item listed with the most possible value was a signed Kerry Eurodyne guitar that he supposedly used in a show in Europe after he went solo when Johnny Silverhand died.
Alt-Dad had always loved Kerry Eurodyne! The weirdest item was a broken wooden baseball bat, and I thought I could see some blood stains on it.
I was kind of sarcastic before when I thought Alt-Dad had been some kind of spy or on some black ops team, but it really looked like he had been. All of the cybernetics, a good half of which looked damaged or non-functional, were of the military variety that wouldn't be that useful to me at all. Were these taken from downed enemies?
I found one of the items I was interested in. It was a kerenzikov reflex boostware unit, listed in the manifest as "Kang Tao Kerenzikov, manufacture date 2057, value 5,000 to 10,000 eb." It was in a carefully packaged clear plastic bag. Not exactly what they were normally shipped in from the manufacturer at all.
I put on some nitrile gloves I kept in my purse, pulled the implant out of the plastic and inspected it close to my eyes.
I had finally Tinkered with some of the cybernetics in my body. My eyes, anyway. I realised I could take them out of my head one at a time, work on them and put them back. I wouldn't have to risk total blindness to adjust or add features to them, and I had been acquiring a lot more tools since I moved into the new apartment next to Clouds.
I had ventured into the black markets of Jig Jig street during the day to buy a set of somewhat sophisticated microwaldo tools and magnification equipment that were intended to be used to repair electronics. Not exactly intended for use in cybernetics, but ultimately cybernetics were electronics, too, and my Tinkering power let me cut a lot of corners that way.
Using these new tools and my good eye, I added additional features to my Kiroshis one eye at a time. They now had a low light vision mode, but more importantly, for my present purposes, they had a microscopic vision mode. I adjusted the zoom mechanism to also allow microscopic binocular vision, so long as what I was focusing on was somewhat near my eyes. I needed that to do the fine work necessary to replace the pigeon's cybernetic leg with a better one. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to see what I was doing at all during the surgery!
I inspected the kerenzikov closely and nodded. Definitely used. I could even detect the almost microscopic scarring of the unit when it was extracted from its previous owner. The idea that a lot of these cybernetics was from downed enemies my father met during his missions made sense. I didn't precisely know how I felt about that, though. I mean, both Alt-Taylor and I knew intellectually that Alt-Dad had to have killed people, but it was different from thinking that and staring at something he or one of his men extracted out of the spine of a fallen foe.
Placing the implant carefully back into its protective anti-static bag, I sat it down.
As I sighed, I realised that my noodles would become cold very soon. I needed to prioritise that first; it would also give me time to think.
Living in Japantown, I learned how to eat with chopsticks pretty quickly. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to eat in half of the restaurants or stalls in my Megabuilding.
These noodles were quite good. A lot better than the noodles I had during my first excursion out of my old apartment.
Not everything here could have been acquired during missions. There was just too much, for one thing, and second, there was just too much that was eclectic. There was what looked like a Polynesian war club. Tongan? There was a thirty or forty-year-old, fried cyberdeck that was affixed to a faux-wooden plaque as if it was a trophy. The Dragoon... maybe Alt-Danny killed it in a mission with a railgun, as I thought. But it was an old, 32-year-old model. I was pretty sure they didn't just change the exterior appearance every year like many of the car companies.
If it was a current-year model in operable condition... well, its worth would be inestimable. IEC did not really sell a lot of these things. Certainly, you couldn't buy them with something as pedestrian as money. But it made sense for old versions to find themselves in less aristocratic hands over the years. Perhaps you bought this unit new but eventually decided to upgrade to the newer version? Did you care who you sold the old and obsolescent versions to?
Perhaps even criminals might have access to these decades-old models. My impression was that the value of this particular example was mostly sentimental unless it could be repaired since it looked pretty well wrecked.
Repaired? I hummed, stood up and walked around it. I often had ideas on how to repair or improve cybernetics. I had no desire at all to use any kind of full-conversion cyberware, but I let my power consider how it might fix this Dragoon suit.
I stood there for over a minute and got nothing, nothing at all. I nodded slowly. My power wasn't considering this to have anything to do with a person's biology at all. I got the weak impression that it thought of it as a vehicle rather than as a piece of cybernetics that integrated with your body.
I bet I would have had ideas about the biopod that stored the operator's brain, though.
I grabbed a different item off a shelf after recognising the brand name on the black carbon fibre case. It read "Kendachi," and I had already identified it as one of the higher-valued items on the manifest and apparently one of the few pieces of cybernetics that hadn't come out of some poor sod's body.
It was listed as "2 x Kendachi monowire, manufactured 2055, value 10,000 — 15,000ea." I opened the case and raised an eyebrow. I was wondering why the case looked so large, there were two small boxes inside, but there was room for four more that were empty.
If he had to share some of his souvenirs with the men he worked with, then that would explain the absence. Maybe if he was the CO, he could claim two. Rank hath privileges, sometimes.
Kendachi was a famous Japanese company that produced all manner of monofilament blades, knives and swords, and of course, this monofilament wire implant served as an incredibly deadly built-in weapons system. You could sometimes see these on television and BDs, as it was very cinematic. It was depicted as more often the weapon of a femme fatale agent or faceless ninja assassin in media, who would be able to slice and dice mooks left and right with preternatural skill.
Alt-Dad had built-in weapons himself; he preferred a mantis blade in each arm. I had wanted something like that myself, but I didn't really want to replace my entire limbs with cybernetic limbs. Not only had I already paid twenty thousand dollars to get advanced bioware that relied on me keeping my meaty bits, but I wasn't sure I was ready to take those steps yet or possibly at all.
Something like this monowire would work... except it was incredibly hazardous to use! I could see myself whipping it around and accidentally decapitating myself if I just installed it and went to town. I had gotten a bit better with my pistol, I went to an indoor pistol range at least once a week, but I wasn't some kind of... ninja.
Still, I took one of the boxes out of the larger box and opened it. All the parts to install the device were there, including the special monoresistant ceramic components you needed to install on your hands and fingers. And a... data shard?
I blinked and found the documentation. It was a VR training scenario that Kendachi guaranteed was over 99.5% congruent with reality for operators to practice.
I got an interested look on my face. How many months would it take before I could not decapitate myself if I practised with this thing every day? A year? Years? The documents said that an experienced operator could be proficient in as few as fifty hours of practice using the VR simulator. Perhaps I should treble that estimate, or more, for myself. No, definitely more. I didn't know how long it would take me to feel comfortable not decapitating myself.
I didn't know, but I was going to find out. I carefully packed a few things I was taking back home with me. The kerenzikov, one of the monowires, an assortment of broken cybernetics, a fancy-looking Kang Tao submachine gun and an antique and fried-looking cyberdeck. I kind of wanted to take Kerry Eurodyne's guitar, but I didn't have a guitar case, and I didn't want to damage it, so it could stay there on its guitar rack for now.
I called Delamain and carefully locked up behind myself. Sitting in the back of the cab, I considered what I had found. There were a lot more things in there than I thought, but a lot of them were completely worthless.
I supposed they could be broken down into four categories, worthless things like the baseball bat, easily salable things, things I would have to sell on the black market and then things I couldn't sell no matter what, which might as well make them worthless. That last category was mainly the Dragoon full-body conversion, even if it was broken. Its weapon systems were intact, and surely there was some salvage value, but how would I sell any of it without being murdered?
I could maybe get thirty or forty thousand eurodollars if I sold all of the easily salable things. That would get me back up to the amount of money I had after I received Militech's settlement. Almost. As for the black market items? That would be more difficult, but my takeaway altogether might get me half again as much because I doubted I would get even a fraction of the value for any of it. I didn't have those kinds of connections, and I was sure some of the names on the list my dad left would charge a fee.
The stuff was worth a lot of money, but it seemed like a big pain to liquidate it. Honestly, I was hoping there would be vast wealth in there. Maybe giant bags full of blood diamonds, or the original Mona Lisa painting or something.
I wasn't going to look at an entire storage unit full of free items worth tens of thousands of eurodollars askance, but in my fantastical heart, I was hoping I would have found something that would have solved my money problems entirely, allowing me to enrol in four years of medical school and live happily ever after.
Sadly, that wasn't the case. The more I thought about it, the more I thought I shouldn't even bother to sell the black market items unless I got desperate, even if they were to names Alt-Dad left behind. At least a third were military cybernetics that I would find interesting to study, like the boostware I was bringing home. The rest were just dangerous things neither the government nor the corps wanted people to have, like half of a Soviet-manufactured man-portable surface-to-air missile launcher.
I nodded. I'd get rid of the easily salable stuff quietly over the next few months and keep the rest in the storage unit for now. The unit was paid up till 2068, after all. There was no rush.
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I inspected every centimetre of the Kereznikov over the next couple of days, using all the magnification equipment I had available to me. It would have been nice to have an example of a Sandevistan as well, but I didn't. Still, I knew the theories behind both of their operations from reading journal articles in the library at school.
They were similar implants for similar purposes, but the way they went about them was different. Both systems were a combination nervous system and brain implant. However, the kereznikov went about increasing your reflexes by mostly replacing a large portion of the efferent neurons and spinal interneurons with electrical replacements. It would then provide an electrical interface between its systems, the medulla oblongata and the motor neurons in your limbs.
Its philosophy was that not only was the transmission synapse speed between neurons slow but the reflex arcs of a human's somatic nervous system were not optimised and wasted a lot of time.
Their philosophy, I felt, was a pretty good one, as evolution very rarely optimised anything, I felt. As soon as it arrived at the point where it was "good enough", evolution would stop unless some additional survival adaptation pressure could be found.
The philosophy of the Sandevistan, which was designed after Kereznikovs was introduced, was that overall, the spine and central nervous system was a pretty well-designed system and that permanent alterations to it should be avoided as they tended to have negative side effects. And certainly, they appeared to be right in a lot of cases. The first-generation kereznikov boostware had a horrible reputation for inducing psychosis. Even the current generation had a bad reputation, but it was terrible decades ago.
The designers of the Sandy system also felt that they could get much higher, if momentary, boosts of speed if they didn't have to design in all of the factors for a person to withstand a continuous operation. As such, a Sandevistan kept the patient's normal motor and somatic nervous system, but when activated, it would be bypassed to connect the brain almost directly to the nerve cluster closest to the desired movement.
