I shrugged, "The entire population of the hab, citizens anyway, vote on it. That voting is probably concluding right now, in real time. I'm not yet a citizen, though, so I can't participate. They disagree with the sentiment that it is better for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be punished. They feel that if seventy-five per cent of the population, at least those voting, believes you are guilty of a capital crime, even if you're innocent, you probably should be killed anyway, just to be safe." I was about to say that it was kind of like what happened to Socrates, but Hana wasn't as educated enough to make that kind of reference.
He looked thoughtful and nodded, "You're pretty good with a right hook. Worth the money I paid."
I shrugged, "Normally, I work construction. Outside, you know? But I was in the service. What can I say? It pays the air bill."
His footfalls faltered for a moment before he said, cautiously, "I didn't see any air bill itemised on the hotel receipt. With how seriously you lot seem to take air, I'm not sure I want to be in arrears..." he trailed off, and I laughed.
"Don't worry, tourists don't have to pay," I said after I stopped laughing. We got him checked out and met the freighter heading back to the Crystal Palace with time to spare. This particular spacecraft had more room than the last one I remember, and we each had a stateroom, even if they were tiny with fold-out everything.
The trip was just as long as I remembered last time being, but at least it was uneventful. I bid the man farewell at his next hotel, which was more like a resort, and he asked, "Interested in a contract extension all the way down to Chicago? I'll pay for your return trip, obviously."
I pretended to consider it but shook my head, "No. There are a few people who might take umbrage at my returning to the North American continent, even if it is briefly. Sorry!" I was using the grudge a certain cartel had against Hana as my excuse, but the truth was that I had an appointment with the best geneticist in the Crystal Palace, and I had no desire to delay it. The payment I was getting was a pittance, anyway, but I had to have a good reason to decline it, as Hana wasn't supposed to be rolling in the money.
It was already going to be weird that I was seeing a geneticist, but at the same time, Hana had stolen a reasonably large amount of money. I'd be buying some mid-grade life extension at the same time just to give a plausible reason why I was there, although I didn't need it. The protectee took my turning him down with just a shrug and said, "Fair enough, I 'spose. I know a little bit about that myself, capiche?" He made a pinched-finger hand gesture and a terrible Italian accent.
"Something like that," I said, amused. If he was from Chicago, he probably wasn't lying, either. That was the mafia capital of America, these days after the Corps in New York cracked down hard on the mob. Without further adieu, I left him there and went directly to the clinic.
January 2068
Pacifica, Night City
Subbasement, Saint Cog's Home for Unwanted Borgs
I used the Dragoon to lower the glowing crystal cube into the hole I had cut out of the foundation and dug another two metres into the floor using a simple snatch block pulley system. The thing didn't need power, so I could theoretically stash it anywhere. However, it needed some periodic maintenance on its bank of Haywire comm devices, so I couldn't just throw it into the Ocean. While that might work, considering I intended to do the maintenance with a small telepresence robot, I wasn't that comfortable with it being totally inaccessible. So, I was just going to bury it and make it mostly inaccessible.
The crystal supercomputer had a number of traditional data ports, including a data bus that provided power as well, so the bot could be charged by whatever power source the system drew from some unknown dimension.
I had fed a direct fibreoptic data connection down there as well, digging in from the outside at an angle so it wouldn't be obvious from the sub-basement floor. I could use the FTL coms for data, and in fact, I did. However, in the extreme event that all of my physical bodies died and this location was compromised, I would have issues cloning a new body. While the crystal supercomputer didn't need Tinker maintenance, somehow, the FTL comms did. If I didn't have a hardwired connection, then I'd eventually get disconnected from the net when the FTL systems broke.
Being aware and entombed into the ground with no way to connect out, well... that was something out of a horror film. So, I included a hardwired connection so I could, in that case, act like some kind of AI. I was sure I would have been able to eventually convince someone to help me if I had access to the net. The connection included a direct fibreoptic connection, as well as an omnidirectional high-gain antenna I placed on the roof.
Plus, I also included several kilos of plastique explosive so I could self-terminate in the most extreme situations. My intuition told me that the crystal computer would work for... many, many thousands of years. I didn't want to be aware but trapped for that long if absolutely everything went to shit. If I had no further bodies at all, I was sure I would be able to slow my perception of time so that a second felt like a year, like putting a computer into sleep mode, until someone dug me out... but just in case. I liked options, even if I didn't intend for any, much less all, of my current bodies to die.
I was almost done. I was here in person because neither the Dragoon nor the Arasaka robots had enough dexterity needed for some of this work, but he absolutely could mix concrete, so I just sat at one of the office chairs I brought down here and shifted my full awareness into it and got to work.
After I got the system in place, I lowered the steel lid. I had to provide a box for this thing to sit in. Otherwise, there would be no negative space for the little spiders to work and live in while inside, as I planned to fill this entire hole with dirt and concrete.
A few hours later, I was at a stopping point. The concrete needed to cure, and that would take a while, and then I'd need to sand it down so it looked, more or less, like the rest of the foundation. There was no reason to delay any longer. In fact, there was no reason not to have begun the upload earlier. I could have helped myself with the Dragoon, after all.
Sighing, I couldn't deny I was a bit more nervous this time. I had done the math, and my precious organic brains should be fine with the increased neural activity over the network, but this was still a lot different than just adding a new cloned brain.
Shaking my head, I decided not to think about it any more. I mentally triggered the upload process and sat there to wait. The FTL comms maxed out at about five hundred terabytes per second, as that was the limit for the tiny oscillators I used in their construction, so a full brain copy still took a reasonable amount of time. Like, a whole minute. There was a lot more data inside a person's brain than most people probably realised.
Once the upload was complete, the emulator started immediately, and a connection was established, causing me a brief wave of vertigo as I became more.
I just sat there and basked in it for a moment, my entire network and all of my bodies going slack in response, just staring up at the ceiling of wherever they were. The feeling of initial synchronicity and expansion was kind of like floating and not at all unpleasant.
"That's... that's special," I said, sighing out in a relaxed way, bonelessly relaxing as I shifted my entire focus inwards.
This was similar, yet different than last time. I was probably the most knowledgeable about how the human brain worked on the planet, but I didn't even think I had totally replicated a brain in software. Yet, anyway. Not only did you have to simulate how all of the neurons worked in a simulation, but you also had to simulate how neurotransmitters and other neuromodulatory chemicals interacted with the brain and replicate that virtually.
It was an incredibly difficult problem, and while I felt that I had succeeded in creating close to a ninety-eight to ninety-nine per cent flawless simulation, that couple per cent was exponentially harder to perfect. There were serious, serious diminishing returns in the attempt, too.
Still, I thought my simulation was the best in the world. I didn't know for sure, but I suspected that the emulation software used to run Soulkilled Pseudo-Intelligences had less than a ninety per cent fidelity, which might explain why even the AIs with human origins had a reputation for being foreign and inscrutable.
However, fortunately, and due to the fact that I was a network that included three organic nodes, I was able to create a system that was recursively self-correcting, at least as far as how the simulation brain matched my existing ones. The longer I lived, the more perfect my brain simulation technology would get.
Still, I felt odd for a moment. I wouldn't say that I felt more dispassionate now, and I verified that the new part of me was feeling emotions correctly, but there was a change. For example, I didn't think my new "brain" could panic easily since that was a function of an adrenaline feedback loop, and while I did program it to simulate the initial effects, it didn't simulate a whole body, so a feedback loop might be impossible.
The self-correcting system might correct this over time, but it might not. It wasn't really a defect, I thought. Plus, it would have to see many instances of me panicking for the simple machine learning algorithms to come into play, and I didn't really do that much anyway. Hopefully I wouldn't start, either.
I tested both of the drones that I would be using, the Dragoon and one of the Arasaka robots, refitted with a telepresence control board. The latter was for use down here in the subbasement, for the most part. It would be my main technician if I needed to clone myself, and my Taylor body wasn't around for some reason.
I wasn't sure what I was expecting since I already knew both worked... but at the same time, it did seem a little bit different controlling them using only the thread of awareness that was entirely digitised. I wasn't sure precisely how to describe the difference. Smoother, perhaps.
This subbasement was my secret resurrection centre, and I would be the one doing the actual work if I had to create a clone-through robot hands, anyway. I had genetic samples of all three organic bodies, and I could fast-clone a new one at the correct maturation in just a couple of days.
I only had two sets of modified cyberbrain systems in stock, though. Not only were they expensive and time-consuming to modify, but I didn't have the same credentials to easily buy them as Hasumi did, at least not yet. My surgical residency as Taylor would probably take a whole two years, so there were still long months of drudgery and scut work that I was still looking forward to.
I glanced at my HUD, pulled up the console I had installed on the crystal computer, and saw the "CPU" usage flicking between 0.005% and 0.01%. I could run hundreds of node instances of myself on that beast or possibly increase my sole instance's "framerate" by a thousand, but that would instantly fry my squishy brains unless I significantly changed my network topology. I could make the crystalline computer a hub, but I had intentionally decided against such a network design.
I hadn't wanted any one node to be any more important than the other. However, perhaps it might be workable if my organic brains all had a failover mode. I'd have to think about it. I specifically avoided making decisions like this until I had already added it to my network, though.
I was psychologically incapable of making a decision that would, in ways, benefit something that wasn't yet me over the rest of me that was. However, now that the crystalline computer was a part of me, I didn't feel so bad about possibly giving it a more central role. I didn't know, though. There were reasons why I had chosen the topology I had gone with.
Nodding, I let out a long breath that I had been holding in. It seemed like things were finally coming together.
That was, of course, when the alarms sounded. Kiwi called me a couple of seconds later. The alarm was keyed into a kludge-together system that ran the building's security systems as well as the few surveillance drones that I had been delivered. I was still waiting for both most of my drones as well as the actual battle management computer to be delivered.
I used a couple of seconds while I was answering the phone to look at the alert from the drones. It showed a fairly large group of well-armed people firing automatic weapons into the front of the largest apartment building that was inside the radius of my protection. It was also where Kiwi's men posted up most of the time and where they centralised patrols on my ongoing "law enforcement" contract.
It wasn't really law enforcement. It was more like shooting everyone that looked suspicious, but the people living around me considered it policing and highly approved of it. When there was no law at all, people were quick to hide behind the firm hand of a barely twenty-year-old girl pretending to be a warlord. Although, actually, wasn't I really a lot older than that? I had been living with a Kerenzikov for years, so I should get credit for my subjective lifespan, I figured.
Shaking my head, I answered the call while simultaneously sending a text message to Mr Shadow asking him to meet me upstairs. The sound of automatic weapons fire could be heard in the background of the call as Kiwi opened with, "A group of borged out fucks just opened up on the main housing block. I've got two people down, I think not dead, at least... hold on a second..."
I saw text running down her eyes as she focused on something else, and then a moment later, in the overhead drone view, I saw one of the attackers freeze and then casually turn and shoot one of his friends in the back. That was amusing but didn't last long as one of the other attackers smashed him about the head and neck with a pipe. He seemed to realise that he had been controlled, as otherwise I imagined he would have just shot him.
I walked both my bodies up the stairs to meet with the old ninja man that I called Mr Shadow, as well as a few others who had heard the alerts. A couple of them started to glare at my Taylor body until they noticed who it was. We all were a bit prejudiced against regular humans here, but they tolerated Kiwi. The only exception was my Taylor body, since I provided more or less free cybernetics services to this group of maladjusted Borgs.
