As such, if I was going to be forced by necessity to occasionally use stimulants to keep myself awake, then I would be using the least damaging option available to me. A twenty-five-milligram dose of this stimulant would keep you alert and awake for forty-eight hours, plus or minus four hours. That was... too much. So the little press I had made had a die that was small, with the binders that comprised most of the pill, which was basically just sucrose; the small tablets would keep someone alert for eight to ten hours.
I stared at the pill press, rapidly chunking out small little tablets with a little apprehension. When I decided I might have to have this stimulant as an option at work, I very quickly decided that I didn't want to carry some baggy of loose powder; it didn't exactly send a professional message. My power was a little off and on about what it would actually help me make, but "medical tools" was definitely one of the things that it was more than happy to oblige with... however, I think it went a little all in this thing.
I had built it from a number of random parts that I had in my apartment, some of which came from the doctors' stock of cybernetics that I had been gifted, none of which was worth very much. I recognised the micro-rotor from a busted cybernetic leg being the main motor involved. I thought I would end up with a hand press or something, but this thing seemed a bit too industrious.
It was rapidly punching out little things that looked indistinguishable from peppermint Tic-Tacs, including the hard vanilla shell, somehow. Tic-Tacs did not, thankfully, exist in this world. The company that invented them, Ferrero, went out of business a long time ago, I had just conducted a few net searches to confirm that, so at least there wouldn't be any cases of accidental overdose if a bottle of these fell out of my pocket and someone picked them up.
"I... don't need this many..." I told the machine, unsure. Why did it seem like my power was always trying to get me involved with the drug trade?! I sighed, but thankfully after a few hundred pills were run out, the machine ran out of some of the ingredients, and the production came to a halt.
I eyed it, curious. The binders were made of simple dextrose or sucrose, and I had plenty of that, and two hundred Speed-Tacs hardly put a dent into the active ingredient hopper...
"Oh," I said, chagrined. It ran out of the vanilla extract. Or faux-vanilla extract, I assumed, since I didn't think it was actual vanilla.
I sighed, shrugged, and then used a small pill bottle to gather up the tic-tacs and carefully used a marker to write the drug name and dosage on the outside of the bottle, just in case I lost it.
Honestly, I thought the two hundred little tic-tacs would probably last my entire stint with this company, but I supposed I could buy some more vanilla extract and make some more later. If I just sold them to my co-workers, then I wasn't really a drug dealer, was I? No, that sounded like an excuse, even if they were much better than the company-provided stims.
Still, this would be better than the brain surgery on myself that I had considered to remove or reduce the need for sleep. Although the idea of being a "Noctis" cape, like Miss Militia, appealed to me, I wasn't yet at the point where I felt that implanting self-made brain implants was wise.
But I did have an idea for one that would supercharge the default mode network of the human brain. That was the operating mode of your brain when you weren't actually doing anything in particular. If you've ever found yourself daydreaming, then your brain was operating in the default mode network. My change would allow mental and psychological rest to be achieved a little bit at a time every day, every time your brain switched into this mode of thinking. It wouldn't be a complete replacement for sleep, as a lot of physical healing and important hormonal issues were conducted while you slept, but it would be a good first start.
But... I definitely wasn't ready to do elective self-brain surgery on myself. No how, no way. And I wasn't going to ask Dr Taylor to install some obviously custom implant, either. I was actually pretty leery of installing anything Tinkertech into my brain in the first place. But that just meant if I studied hard, hopefully, and eventually, I could get to the point where I understood the operating principles of such a device.
I shook my pill bottle of illicit tic-tacs. I really wondered what they tasted like. Were they mint? The outer "hard candy shell" ought to be vanilla flavoured, but... the diluted and minute amount of the drug I tasted for identification purposes was absolutely disgusting, even diluted, so I somehow very much doubted it would taste very good. It was probably best to swallow them whole if I ever needed to use them.
"So, you've had the implant for some time now. How do you feel with it? You seem remarkably well adjusted from what we can tell here, so this will be the last time you have to come in," Dr Taylor asked me.
I always had the Kerenzikov in one-hundred per cent mode when I came to visit Dr Taylor, as he took a number of readings from my biomonitor, which included information on all of my running cybernetics and a brain electrical map similar to a functional MRI and thought he'd notice otherwise. My speech was getting close to normal, and it was one of the things the doctor remarked favourably on. I was up to eighty-five per cent in my day-to-day life, but I had reached the realm of diminishing returns. I was getting used to the faster speeds slower, but I still thought I should be in full speed mode after another month or two at the most.
I coughed a little and said, "Pretty good. People hardly notice, or if they do, I am not speaking or acting at such a speed that they remark on it. Perhaps they're just being polite. I have to admit that it has been challenging to get used to, but it has been nowhere near the psychosis-inducing ordeal that I had been led to believe. It's just been vaguely annoying."
Dr Taylor made a humming and non-committal noise and said, "It's possible that you're just well suited to reflex-enhancing boostware. Two to four per cent of the population tolerate kerenzikov's pretty well, so it is quite rare but not unheard of." He glanced up in the corner of his vision, obviously consulting something he had displayed on his optics, "How about the interactions with your Biotech Sigma MkI? The combination of an integrated cyberdeck and boostware isn't seen too often."
I scrunched up my face, "I've decided to constrain my use of it to augmented reality mode, curtailing any deep dives until I am well and truly adapted to the higher subjective speed. When you deep dive, so long as your connection will allow it, the net provides whatever experience you can handle. The kerenzikov just acts as a time-dilation factor, I guess. But all the software interactions and VR environment seem to run at exactly the same speed you do unless you're interacting with another real person's ICON, so it was a big adjustment going back and forth. One thing I've actually enjoyed quite a bit is that it is almost like I have three times as much time in the day to read or study material at work."
That caused him to briefly cough and laugh a bit as if he was unexpecting that, "Sorry. I met someone a few years ago who had a similar implant, although his version wasn't quite as advanced as yours, and he said the same thing. He was definitely amongst that two per cent, or so that tolerate it well, as you are. I am wondering if that isn't a universal opinion amongst your cohort. I could see the attraction. It basically means you can live twice or three times as long, perhaps not objectively but subjectively, and that's mostly what people care about." He had an odd look on his face as he stared off into space, "Hmmm... both slightly introverted, too. A factor?"
Hey! I... resembled that remark! Before I could say anything, he stood up and nodded, "Well, I'd say we can call it a day... Oh, by the way. I called my supplier, and they can ship me one of the items you requested. The one I can get is the Zetatech ArcticPRO Legend series. This year's model. Uhh... unfortunately, that is one of the most expensive of the possibilities you requested; total fees would be over twenty thousand eurodollars. I'd need half up front to make the order. Sorry, with something as specialised as this, I'd sit on it forever if you backed out."
Fuck! I had been building back my bank balance slowly, but this would drop it below ninety thousand. As an entry-level paramedic, I didn't really make very much money, but I made enough to pay the rent, food and a little left over. I had been making a little bit of extra money from seeing any of the dolls of Clouds anytime they got ill, thought they got ill or had a question or concern about one of their implants, and then that shifted to the same thing for most of the workers on the twelfth and tenth-floor mall areas, but only on my days off.
There wasn't actually a doctor's office, legitimate or not, in the building, so I guess I was serving a bit of a niche. I didn't charge much, either and had actually been making most of my money selling pharmaceuticals. Legitimate pharmaceuticals! I had already started buying them wholesale straight from the manufacturers when I was setting up my own personal stash, and a few people asking if they could just buy the drugs from me instead of taking my recommendations to a pharmacy had me increase the scope of what I was ordering.
I didn't stock anything really interesting, just the normal things one might find over the counter at a pharmacy and about twenty of the most commonly prescribed prescription drugs. It was definitely illegal for me to sell them, but it was also illegal for me to provide any kind of medical advice or service. Nobody, even the NCPD officers that lived in the building, cared one whit.
A few of the lower-level Tyger Claws had even started coming to me now and then, and these were the type of people that I was most worried about. They weren't good people. I mean, Mr Jin and Mr Inoue weren't good people either. But these low-level enforcer types were especially not good people, but they were very polite with me, so I supposed it was alright. I wasn't patching them up after gang wars or anything, but I had a few with regular maladies and one with an infected tattoo. Everyday things.
"Introversion sounds like a hard factor to quantify, although it does sounds like it would track. What about the extreme? Has there been any famous street samurais on the autistic spectrum?" I asked him, slightly amused.
He grumbled, "There was a rumour decades ago that Arasaka prized high-functioning children on the spectrum, earmarking them for some special service. I always figured if the rumour was true, it would have been for runners or some technical field. But I could have easily been stereotyping, and now I'm curious... there's no way to know, though."
"You want me to transfer the funds or pay at the counter?" I asked him after we both stood up.
He shrugged, "Go ahead and send it my way. I'll make the order right now. My rep will probably ship it, space available, on the next aero-zep from Cupertino, so it'll probably be here in just three or four days."
Seeing the large cargo zeppelins for the first time made me think of the Empire 88 from Brockton Bay, as I had a mental image that was no doubt wrong of the pilots speaking with a thick German accent and wildly gesticulating. The huge things were filled with tons and tons of hydrogen, like the Hindenburg, and powered mostly by solar panels or CHOO2 if it was windy. They didn't go particularly fast anywhere, but they were cheap to run and flew high enough to be safe from ground fire unless it was actual artillery.
It was a popular way to ship cargo between cities in California, just to keep the shipments safe from ground hazards. There was only the occasional report of air piracy to contend with. The very idea that there were actual, real air pirates made me feel conflicted; on the one hand, it sounded terrible, but on the other hand, it sounded cool.
I nodded and shifted my interface to direct a digital transfer to the doctor of ten thousand eddies, trying to avoid wincing as I did so.
I still commuted to work in my normal clothes and changed there in the locker room. Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to carry my pistol. I could have done so anyway, and I knew a few medtechs that did, but it was technically against the rules, and I would likely end up fired if I ever had to pull my gun or use it. Although my being in the uniform of a paramedic lessened the possibility of that actually happening, so it was a trade-off. But, the idea of trusting my life to that felt wrong to me.
This was going to be my first shift off third rider status, and I was about to meet my partner for the foreseeable future. Unless two people just didn't get along, the company preferred to keep people together for periods of months before potentially shifting their schedules. Sometimes that never happened. I thought it was mainly just laziness, as there were definitely some advantages to different perspectives from different clinicians, but I just worked here.
Jim had told me that he selected my partner because she and I were supposedly quite similar; we both were hired at the company when we were young, and we both were excellent clinicians and hard workers, and I had to admit I liked the sound of that. It would be really awful if I got stuck with a longtime partner that was lazy and I ended up doing most of the work.
Our shift change was at six in the morning, so I set out especially early this morning, figuring I would need some extra time to introduce myself and it was quite dark when I got off the train, and like many ambulance companies, NC Med was not based in the best part of the city. There were a number of stations, but the one I worked at was based in Heywood. However, the low-light mode in my Kiroshis just shifted things to a kind of grayscale when the light level was too low. It took the practical absence of any light whatsoever to make them completely useless.
So I wasn't completely surprised when I saw a man hiding next to a dumpster on the next street I had to take. I paused and didn't walk down the street. I wasn't stupid. I was going to continue on to the next intersection, then cut across and back around, however, just before I started moving again, I noticed something moving in my peripheral vision, and something told me to move out of the way, so I did and at full speed. I shifted to one hundred per cent on the boost and stepped out of the way. Glancing back, I saw another man swinging an honest to god blackjack and trying to cosh me in the head. He was moving kind of in slow motion to me, but his expression seemed like he was putting his all into the swing.
