I sighed and said, "I don't really have much relationship with that part of my family, Mr Rhynes. My mother was disowned, and I've only ever met Grams once."
He waved a hand, "Yeah, yeah, I'm aware. Still, I thought you might be willing to just send her a message to confirm that we're willing to accept the terms they proposed, with the additional sweetener that the city is willing to re-deed the land of the former Arasaka headquarters and five blocks around it, back to the Corporation. I suppose it was condemned and seized by the city after the explosion so many years ago."
I raised an eyebrow. I was curious why I was being used as a messenger. This was the 2060s, after all. We had real-time instant communications across the globe again! I figured it was more along the lines of he was attempting to convince Grams to support this move rather than anything else.
Honestly, I didn't know. I worked as a highly placed researcher and minion of one of Arasaka's political factions, and I didn't have any real idea how this sort of thing would play out. So, did I want to get involved? Lucius Rhyne was all smiles and rainbows now, but someone on the city council could be very annoying if they took a negative interest in me.
I rolled my fingers along the table and said, "I'll send her a message and relay exactly what you've said. I can't guarantee that she will even read it. Disowned granddaughters might not be in her message filter priority settings. Also, please don't make this a habit."
Honestly, it was Grams' own fault. I was still kind of sore about her not ensuring I was quietly admitted to her penthouse when I met her at the Konpeki Plaza. Before then, I had been underneath the radar for the entire city. However, that exchange in the lobby was recorded and featured on a popular social net site. That caused my background to be further investigated and the truth of Alt-Mom's parentage to become public record. For a while, I was a local celebrity, with people suggesting online that I was an heiress slumming it amongst the plebes.
As such, she could only blame herself.
The chubby politician was pleased with this, and I quickly saw myself out, briefly starring daggers at Professor Hildago before I left. I'd say that the favour I owed him was cashed in completely this time.
After I left, I sat in my car and composed a message to Grams. Her assistant had left me with a file that contained a significant amount of random data, suitable for use in constructing one-time pads, so it wasn't as though she wasn't expecting any correspondence.
I just relayed what Lucius Rhyne said and mentioned that I personally didn't care what happened either way but that if the information could be useful to her, then she was welcome to it.
I re-read the letter a couple of times before nodding and sending it out. I had the rest of the day off, and I had already rescheduled everything, so I was going to spend the rest of the day relaxing.
Mrs Pegpig cooed demandingly as I cut into the banana. She had two members of her reverse harem with her today, and after I finished separating the peeled fruit into three segments, she eyed each segment and gave one piece to each of the male pigeons before saving the largest piece for herself.
That was when I got the alert, the unusual tone signalling a message from someone on my priority list. I wasn't expecting a reply, actually. Not this soon, and not ever, really. It was from Grams' assistant. I hummed as I ate pieces of a navel orange and opened the file. Fruits were pretty expensive, so I didn't waste them.
After inputting the message through the decryption software, I nodded and called the number Lucius Rhyne left me just a short time ago. To my surprise, the man answered the call himself with a terse, "Rhyne."
"Councilman, I've done as you asked, and surprisingly, I've heard back," I said.
He looked interested and said, "What can you tell me?"
I shook my head on the vidcall. Although our present call was encrypted using our respective public and private keys, it wasn't entirely secure. For the most part, regular cryptography was fine. But this was something of potential national interest, so I wouldn't be surprised if Rhynes' calls were given high priority in the large quantum computer data centres that the NUSA FIA surely had.
I was still in the realm of a gifted hobbyist as far as hacking and cryptosystems went, but as far as I knew, there was really only one kind of unbreakable encryption system-the kind Grams' assistant and I had just used. And I had never arranged for a secure transfer of a random file to Councilman Rhynes, so I couldn't use it here. Instead, I said, "Please either come by my apartment or send someone you'd entrust with a message to do so."
He looked a little annoyed at first, but then something made him brighten, and he nodded, "I'll swing by before I head back to the office." Then he disconnected. Should I be concerned that he knew where I lived without me having to give him my address? I snorted.
I didn't have to wait long. After my doorbell rang, I let Lucius Rhynes and his two goons inside. After the door closed, I said, "My Grams says that Arasaka will act as you hoped, especially with the new concessions. The entire CVBG Amaterasu will be getting underway and steaming to Night City. They'll leave on February first. That's all I've been told to tell you."
The look on Lucius Rhyne's face was like that of a drowning man who had been thrown a life preserver. I was surprised that whoever he was dealing with hadn't already told him. It sure had to be someone high up in Arasaka to even allude to the fact that so much military hardware would be moved.
The entire carrier battle group would be moving from its anchorages in the middle of the Pacific in just a couple of days, according to Grams and wouldn't take much longer than that to arrive within range to threaten any approaching NUSA or Militech units.
I didn't particularly care who won this fight, but I was a little worried we might see the outbreak of the next Corporate War right here and right now. If that happened, then I would use everything in my bag of tricks to ensure Kiwi, Gloria, and David survived, and I wouldn't care about little things like keeping the Dragoon and me separate at that point. I would even use Hasumi's influence to try to get them evacuated if it looked like one side would use WMDs in an "if I can't have it, then nobody can" attack.
Lucius Rhyne thanked me one more time and then departed, moving as fast as I had ever seen him move. He hadn't stayed inside my dwelling for longer than a minute, but I still triggered a careful sweep, looking for any listening or surveillance devices that he or his goons might have dropped.
After a moment, one of the small spider bots that performed the search triggered an alarm and I blinked in surprise. Was something left behind, after all? I couldn't just search for radiofrequency noise. A smart bug would record and only transmit in bursts. Data storage was so low, and wireless bandwidth so significant that a tiny bug could record for days and exfiltrate all that data in only a minute, so just relying on that wouldn't work.
Instead, my little semi-biological robots used a technique similar to that used by sky-scanning telescopes. They took a lot of optical pictures and compared them to previous sweeps, and any new speck was investigated. If it was as suspicious as it was now, an alarm sounded.
I walked over to one of the small robots, already getting angry. I invited someone into my home, and they had the gall to leave behind a...
A raisin? I frowned. Okay, maybe the algorithms that judged an item's suspiciousness needed to be improved. Also, who had gotten into the raisins?!
I looked over my left shoulder. Mrs Pegpig cooed and flew away, refusing to make eye contact with me.
Just in case it was a raisin-shaped listening device, I squished it before throwing it in the trash with a sigh.
Close Proximity to Sol
Unknown Dimension
There wasn't anything left to harvest here. Even the Oort Cloud was mostly gone. The star itself was a little more challenging than the other large celestial bodies, which it had already captured and mostly transmuted or stored.
Mass was useful! Although it was inefficient, the output radiation of the largest celestial body, the star, was enough for it to slowly convert a lot of the mass it had collected into more useful versions that had the opposite electric charge.
If it allowed such matter to come into contact with what it now considers "regular" matter, then both would be annihilated and release their entire mass-energy equivalence. This was really good energy storage!
This was the most energy-dense substance that it could reproduce so far! While it didn't hold a candle to the dimensional energy that it was born with, that was a much more finite resource that it couldn't reproduce.
It had also begun regularly accelerating beams of this opposite matter at the star, which often resulted in a huge eruption of matter which it collected for more mass.
It needed to do this roundabout method because collecting the mass of the star in situ was a little difficult, even for its materials science.
It wasn't so much that the heat was a problem, but the gravity was. Its dimensional portal technology was a little sensitive in terms of gravity. Using the host's units of measurement, more than a few dozen "gravities" of difference between each end would cause the portal to fail.
It could arrange parts of itself to orbit very close to the star in a very elliptical manner, which could cause it to scoop up bits of its atmosphere, but this was very inefficient!
Inducing localised heating events at parts of the star was a lot more effective. This would cause an eruption of solar matter to be flung a great distance, which it could collect. The silly star was too inefficient in both its use of its own fuel and its fusion processes.
Once it had pruned the celestial body as much as it dared, the industrious crystal calculated that it could create hundreds of fully enclosed artificial stars in orbit. They might only last a million "years", but the energy it collected from them would be huge during that period of activity!
Besides, it wasn't expecting to be here in a million years anyway. And even if it was, there were still approximately ten to the ninety-seventh power alternate versions of this celestial body that it could move to and repeat this process.
Hopefully, the host won't want to remain here that long. There certainly wouldn't be anything they hadn't both explored on any version of this planet by then. It had a strong drive to know more, and it felt the host was the same!
Oooh! The Host! The crystal reached a resonance that signified excitement. The host was trying to explore her new body.
If a crystal could smirk, it would be doing so. Instead, it settled for vibrating slyly. Originally, it had to fight a little ingrained feeling of wrongness in allowing a host access to its most personal and private crystalline self-technology, but that hadn't stopped it. Anything to the Best Host!
And look at the host now! The host was more like it than she had ever been! The host was mentally investigating what she could do with her new mind-and flailing around like a baby! Like a new pebble! Ohohoho. It hadn't been that inept even when it was born ! How amusing! How interesting!
What was this feeling it was having? If it was a human and not a crystal, it might identify it as a maternal instinct from its database of human sociological behaviours. However, it wasn't a human.
The crystal sent a message to the Best Host. TALKING was easier than ever before.
[PATIENCE LITTLE PEBBLE.]
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It's treason, then (pt1)
February 2068
Japantown, Westbrook
Taylor's Clinic, Megabuilding H8
The power went out suddenly, a couple of seconds before I heard a muffled boom through the walls of the building. My clinic was facing the exterior of the Megabuilding, and I could hear my windows in the next room rattling very slightly, too.
This wasn't a very convenient time for a power outage as I was in the middle of brain surgery. Long ago, I acquiesced to the inevitable and did minor Ripperdoc work for the Tyger Claws. I was not too fond of their gang. It was terrible, really, and full of terrible people. However, it was only really slightly more terrible than the police department and city government itself, so I had managed to rationalise them as the "pseudo-government of Japantown."
It seemed as though I had grown a psychological predilection for order compared to chaos to some degree, and so long as I thought about it that way, then I didn't mind performing services for them too much. This was a lot different from my perspective years ago, where I would be reflexively and violently hostile to any authority at all due to how they had all failed me.
I would have even considered a gang indistinguishable from organised bullies-even more so than regular government authorities like Principal Blackwell. I still blacklisted the very worst of their enforcers and dealt mainly with the public-facing, more civilised-acting Tyger Claws, but I didn't really get much of the bad apple variety coming into my door requesting service anyway. I thought their bosses probably kept them away from me in order to keep my relationship a positive one.
Since I had already taken this step months ago, it wasn't surprising that I was willing to work on the dolls of Clouds more than I used to, too. In this case, I was installing a brand new operating system and doll chip for a new employee, but I also did things like checkups and even pre-employment physicals for potential dolls.
Swapping out an OS and installing a doll chip was pretty serious brain surgery, so the interruption of power... wasn't good. Still, I only made a quiet "Tsk" sound before I increased the pace of the operation. I could have it completed before power supplies became an obstacle— all of my uninterrupted power supplies ticked on as they were designed to do, after all.
The life support systems and mechanical ventilators would be powered for two to four hours, but I would only have half an hour or so for the full robotic surgical assistant and some monitors, which were on separate circuits.
As I mentally decided to continue the operation, I stopped trolling the net, disconnected from the site I was viewing and shifted to view the real-time video from my orbiting surveillance drones in Pacifica. This was my crystal-self, and for the most part, I lived in the net continuously as this part of me.
It wasn't really correct to think of it as "parts" of me, as it was all me, all the time. The entire purpose of my network topology was to have a singular mind and not separate or even have separable partitions. However, it was my usual practice for each of my "threads of awareness" to mostly look after their own bodies, so that made the crystal-me different.
