The specific cybernetics installation and adjustment equipment was also made by Meditech, and it included both surgical assistants as well as semi-autonomous nanomedical administration systems. I didn't think too much about the glove multi-tool that he had, though, and I already had that disassembled on my workbench.
That was exactly the kind of thing that my power got interested in disassembling and then improving, although it kind of wanted to incorporate the tools into my actual hand, either with cybernetic augmentations or even biological ones. I didn't want sharp bone blades to deploy out of my fingers like that Earth-Aleph comic book hero Wolverine; besides sounding painful, it also sounded creepy.
I had the reassembled monowire installed in pieces in the surgical assistant, ready to go. I also had already carefully created the monoresistant ceramic plating, according to the manufacturer's guidelines, although I had managed to turn it transparent and included a coating of variable SmartPaint underneath it. I would be able to control the exact colour electrically and had already included hooks into the modified firmware I had created for the device.
I'd have to do this one hand at a time. When you still had completely organic hands, installing the ceramics was a lot more involved, and even more so when I had a skin weave biosculpt treatment. It was a complete skin replacement, so I had to excise the old skin without damaging the nerves, install the ceramic components and use nanomachines to ensure that the "ceramic skin" both fully integrated with the surrounding skin tissue without rejection or inflammation but that they also had to integrate with the nervous system, so I still had a sense of touch. That was the hardest part and required yet more nanomachines.
I kind of suspected that back alley rippers might skip this step or half-ass it, leaning on some of the automation provided by their surgical assistants, but since the composite was on three fingers of each hand, it would reduce the manual dexterity of the patient significantly, at least until the person adapted to their disability. I certainly wouldn't have installed this implant if it came with a loss of sensation in my hands. My hands were very important!
Placing my left hand in the correct position above the surgical assistant, I administered a local anaesthetic to the nerve well above my wrist. I didn't want to feel any of this, that was sure.
Flexing my fingers, everything seemed normal. You couldn't even tell that there was anything odd about my hand. The flexible ceramic in my fingers wasn't one hundred per cent transparent, so I had to fiddle around with the colour a bit, setting a slightly lighter shade than my skin so that it looked correct.
If you inspected my hands very closely, you would notice the discrepancy, or if I shook hands with someone, they likely would too, but there were multiple reasons one might replace the skin of one's fingers with a flexible ceramic compound. This particular formulation, which was resistant to monomolecular edges, was only used for this application, but a lot of electricians coated parts of their hands with insulative compounds, for example.
The feeling was a little bit different than what I was expecting. The tiny microprocessors embedded in the ceramic translated tactile sensations pretty well, but much less so for heat, cold or pain. I could hold a piece of ice in my fingers and detect that it was cold, but it just vaguely felt cool without the same resolution as my natural skin could detect. Still, it was pretty good.
I was standing in the largest clear area I had, which was the main room in the private area of my apartment. I had a small kitchen stool set up a couple of metres away from me, with a small empty soda can sitting on the top. While Nicola Classic was disgusting and tasted like carbonated Robitussin, there were a number of competing brands, a few of which tasted somewhat like what I remembered and were palatable.
I had modified the wire slot to resemble a normal personal link slot, so I didn't have the obvious cyberware that screamed integrated monowire if people saw my hands and wrists. It wasn't a particularly hard modification, either. I increased the percentage of the implant that was inside my wrist, and as such, I had to incorporate it and bond it more to my ulna, but that wasn't hard at all and the advantage to being able to surprise someone with it was immense. I wondered why Kendachi never attempted it.
Nodding slowly, I held my arms out and then triggered the monowire to pop out of the slot. You could do this two ways, you could grab it out of the slot and pull it out, or you could use a mental command to make it pop out, unreeling a little over a foot of wire at the same time. I did this second manoeuvre; it was a bit more dangerous, but it reduced the time necessary to deploy the weapon by at least a second, and it had been the way I had been practising using the weapon in the VR system for some time.
Grabbing the end of the wire with my right hand, I reeled a significant portion of the wire out of my wrist and carefully flicked a loop of it towards the empty can while holding the end of the wire between my fingers. I wasn't going to try anything crazy or any fancy tricks like trying to lasso the can or anything. I'd have to work up to that. However, I had so many hours with this thing, and it had been over a hundred hours of subjective time since I injured myself even slightly.
Monowire relied on a continuous and special electrical field propagating along the length of the wire to give it its durability. It was possible to lift three tons with the normal Kendachi monowire before the wire failed and snapped. However, this was only if the special field provided by the electronics in the implant were active. If not, not only would the wire snap if it lifted more than thirty kilos, but just bending it past ninety degrees would snap it. The actual wire itself was very fragile when the implant wasn't in operation, according to all the documentation I've read.
As such, the wire wasn't entirely invisible like you'd expect it to be, but it had a vague red outline to it, which honestly was probably a very good thing from a user operator's perspective if you didn't have a compatible set of cybernetic eyes that could pair with the system. That said, it was still quite hard to see, but as the operator, it integrated with my Kiroshis to accentuate this effect, so while to everyone else, it might seem like a vaguely red blur, to me, it looked like a solid red line.
The solid red line of my monowire sliced the tin can in two almost exactly at the point I had targeted and did so without wrapping around or damaging my stool. The stool was steel, so the monowire wasn't a great matchup for it. Monowires could cut organic matter and plastics like they were nothing but steel? You'd have to saw it back and forth for quite some time to get through it. A thin aluminium can was no problem, though.
Katana-wielding mooks were a common training partner in the VR system, as they could, in some ways, counter the monowire, but honestly, it was really easy to either target their hands and extremities or even throw the wire, so it wrapped around their sword and yank it right out of their hands. I accidentally impaled myself with a thrown katana like that when I started getting complacent with that enemy type, though, but nobody would ever find out about that.
The hardest enemy type in the simulation was full-conversion cyborg types; they had a number of generic full conversions modelled but none that were obviously militarised like the Dragoon I had in my storage unit. On those, it was important to attack their joints. I thought the best solution was not to ever fight one, actually, but if you had to, then attacking their knees or necks where the construction had to be much more flexible was a good option. I usually just ran away when they showed up on the VR training program, though.
I sliced layers off the rest of the can a few more times before I felt that I had done enough. I was trying to gauge the accuracy level of the VR simulation and thought it was pretty good. Keeping hold of the wire in my right hand, I had the implant carefully spool up the wire back into my left wrist until I was, once again, empty-handed.
"Nova," I said out loud, grinning like an idiot.
I had accepted Gloria's invitation to go visit her apartment a couple of days later and found myself in a Megabuilding in Arroyo that was a bit more run-down than mine was. I was wearing my most casual of clothes, but I still stuck out like a sore thumb, but I was wearing a firearm openly today.
I had just purchased it, too. It was Militech's latest, actually not technically coming out until Q4 of this year, but employees and their dependents could purchase it ahead of time, and I still technically qualified. It was the M-76e Omaha. This pistol didn't come in a compact form factor yet, but it was an honest-to-goodness railgun, in a pistol's form factor! The ammo was a bit annoying to get, as I had to buy it straight from Militech right now, but I had no doubt that soon it would be manufactured by every munitions company there was, as it was deadly simple — just steel slugs!
You had to recharge or replace the batteries after about sixty shots, but the ammunition was just carried in a simple cassette-style magazine. I had been practising with it when I went to the pistol range in my Megabuilding and had gotten a lot of people interested in it. Just because there was no explosion involved didn't make it quiet, either, as it accelerated the steel slugs it used as ammo several times the speed of sound. Still, the sound was distinctive and definitely not the sound of a traditional firearm, so every time I went to shoot I gathered a number of people watching me.
Since I couldn't realistically conceal a full-sized pistol frame on my lanky body, I decided to just wear a tactical thigh holster. My dad had like six of them, several of which fit even me.
I got a few stares that I didn't feel were too friendly, but I wasn't really wearing very nice clothes, just clean and somewhat new ones in dark colours, and I was visibly armed, so nobody really tried to hassle me.
I verified I was at the right door and then rang her doorbell, and she came to answer it pretty quickly, ushering me inside warmly. However, then she looked askance and asked, "You carry a gun around everywhere?"
I blinked at her uncomprehendingly, "You... do know what city we live in, right?" How could she be at all naive about the level of violence in the city? In her job? She saw it all!
"Yes, but I never felt very comfortable doing that," she said, unsure. "Who taught you how to use one and how to be safe with one?"
I chuckled, "Well, my dad and mom, mostly. But I told you I was a Corpo brat, right? I didn't really tell you which Corp my parents worked for; well, it was Militech. I think the first time I shot a gun was when I was six." At least, she didn't have any memories of Alt-Taylor doing it before then, but it might be possible.
That caused her to chuckle and then laugh, "I guess it would be hard to grow up in Militech and not be around guns all the time."
I nodded to her, "Would you like me to teach you? It really isn't that complicated, and honestly, I would feel a lot better about your safety if you weren't just... "I struggled to find an appropriate word, "helpless."
She rubbed the back of her neck, "Yeah, maybe. I didn't know anyone who I could ask to do that. First though, lunch! Let me wake David up from his nap, and we can all eat together."
After a moment, she came back into the large living room, which also had a kitchen in one corner, trailing a very small boy. He was hiding behind his mom, peeking out at me, which I found really cute and couldn't help but grin. Gloria introduced us, and little David did an admirable job at attempting to pronounce a new, unfamiliar name, but it came out more like "Tayr." Still, if you were as cute as he was, you could call me anything you liked!
David really liked chicken nuggets, and although I didn't actually think any chickens were involved, they didn't taste too bad. He got incensed when I stole one of his nuggets until I gave him some compensation with the cheese out of half of my sandwich. The bribe settled him down, and I asked, curious, "Who watches little David here when you work?"
"Partly my mom, and partly a group of four moms that live near us. We each are supposed to take a turn watching the other rugrats for a day while the rest are at work; we've scheduled our days off to be staggered for the most part. My twenty-four-hour shift is kind of a pain, but they don't particularly mind watching him on the days my mom can't," she said, shrugging. "I rarely can take a shift watching their kids, but in exchange, I pay them in cash, so they like it."
A kind of coop daycare, I supposed. I wasn't surprised things like that existed. How else would a single mother that had to work actually survive?
By the time I had left, the little gremlin had softened on me, despite me stealing his nugget, as I sat with him while he watched some inane children's show while I worked on my deck. As I left Gloria's apartment, he waved and said, "Bai bai Tayr!"
Cute.
We didn't get called solely to living patients. We were the responders when people were already dead, too. The city paid a flat mortuary rate for these trips, and not surprisingly, these calls were much more sedate. We could even bodybag multiple "patients" and toss them in the back of the ambulance stacked like cordwood, leaving our gurney at home if it was a mass casualty incident.
A couple of days after visiting Gloria at her home, we were responding to a... well, it wasn't quite a cyberpsycho incident as it was closer to a gang ware, but there were multiple DoAs, and the police were just keeping the looky-loos away at this point.
We had three to pick up today, and we decided to each go get one. I found both of my customers pretty quickly and bagged the first. Humming and easily carrying the hundred-kilo weight of the dead Voodoo Boy gang member back to the truck, I carefully deposited him in the back before getting a second body bag and returning for the second guy. The cops had already left, merely placing one patrol car at the entrance to this warehouse to wait for us.
I found the other Voodoo Boy and bagged him, and carried him back to the ambulance, princess-style and then started back to see if Gloria needed some help with hers.
I was thinking to myself about the automatic defibrillator and EKG system I was incorporating into that netrunner suit as I passed Gloria and then blinked, coming to a stop. What was she...? She appeared to be removing an old and clunky-looking cybernetic arm from the single Maelstrom casualty. It was a very old Militech-branded PLS system circa the late 2030s. I frowned and took a few steps forward to stop her.
