"Stop!" I told her from behind, causing her to be startled and almost jump off the ground. She glanced back at me with an extremely guilty expression on her face. "Taylor... uhh..."
"If you extract it like that, you will damage the neural interface, where the nerves in the shoulder interface with the unit, and it will become mostly worthless without a rebuild," I told her mildly.
I knelt down and showed her. This Maelstrom guy wasn't completely borged, but he was close. He still had a torso, anyway, "See, it may be a bit grosser, but it is better to take a little of the flesh with you if you don't have time to run through the normal disassembly steps on these old arms. There's no standardized interface that snaps in and snaps off with these old models."
I stood back up and said, "Finish that, bag your guy, and I'll meet you back at the truck."
I walked back alone, thinking about what I had just saw and why I had helped. I would ask her about it, but I was pretty sure I already knew the answer as to why she was doing what she was doing. Raising a kid when their dad skipped town was hard, and although Gloria had a pretty good job, it would even be hard on what Taylor made, and she made over thirty per cent more than Gloria did.
On the drive back, there was an awkward silence, "So, why did we just rob the dead Maelstrom guy?" I asked curiously.
She sighed, "I don't make enough money, Taylor. You're not going to report me, are you? I really do need this job."
I shook my head, "No. I'll even help you, so long as it is only these types of people we do it to. Dead criminals, or dead people who we have reason to believe, have absolutely no next of kin. Probably best to keep it to the criminals, though."
I thought about it for a while, "They don't even autopsy these guys in gang violence situations like these, you know? We take them straight to the crematorium, for the most part. I imagine if anyone is pissed, it is the mortuary techs who probably steal all of this stuff anyway instead of sending it over to the NCPD as evidence like they're supposed to."
She chuckled, then shook her head, "I'd never take the chrome off some innocent victim or someone who had family that might need the money from selling mom or dad's second-hand cybernetics might bring."
I nodded, "Good. Who do you sell it to? I'm just curious."
She shrugged, "I have a contact with a local small-time fixer; I think he takes it from me and then sells it to a number of Ripperdocs in Santo Domingo."
I hummed, "How much do you think he'd give you for that arm?"
She sighed, "Not a whole lot, but still about one thousand eddies. We should go halves since you helped me from ruining it."
I raised an eyebrow. It was an old system, but it was still a very dependable and widely used system and worth more than that on the secondary market, especially if I could clean it up and fix it. It wasn't broken precisely, but I could tell it hadn't seen a service interval since George Washington was a private. It was worth more, too, since it was a restricted item. "In its condition, a retail price for that arm would be about eight thousand, maybe more like ten or twelve if I could run it through some maintenance and get it purring like a kitten."
She looked shocked, "Really? You know how to fix cybernetics?" To which I made a waffling gesture. If I let my power go wild, I could fix any piece of cybernetics there was. I was pretty confident about that, but then it would require periodic maintenance from me to continue to function. Still, I was sure I could fix simple mechanical, electrical and electronic problems in most cybernetic limbs.
"Huh... so, what are you saying? That we should try to sell it directly to a Ripperdoc?" she asked, unsure. She paused and said, "I kind of like this guy; he's been on the level with me."
I shook my head, "No, it's probably not a good idea to cut a fixer like that out completely, at least so suddenly. But, if I refurbish this baby, we could renegotiate at least double or triple what you'd normally get paid, and he'd still have a lot of profit left over." Plus, on interesting and unusual items, I would get a chance to inspect them and potentially buy them myself for my collection, although I couldn't really afford to do that too often, even if I only paid her half.
At that, she grinned.
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Rose coloured glasses
The crystalline computer that some might erroneously call The Chirugeon quietly continued its simulations while watching its host reattach the hind limb of one of the host's species. Its host hadn't wasted any time and had already gotten a reputation with its fellow mammals as someone who could provide medical miracles, so long as the mammals exchanged with it slips of paper.
It approved of the host's actions, although it tried to subtly give the host better ideas from time to time. What was so interesting about reattaching the same hind limb? Why not a hind limb from a different species? Or a completely novel hind limb? That would be much more interesting.
Of course, even though there wasn't that much interesting going on in the present operation and it wasn't that invested in the outcome; still, it dedicated two point zero three per cent of its computational capacity to both observing and helping the host as it always had done and always would do.
Right now, it was more interested in the possibilities of how to access the new dimension or group of dimensions that its original host had been drawn into. This information was of paramount importance, as it might have existential answers for the Primary Purpose. It was clear that this new group of dimensions was not one of the ten to the nighty eighth power dimensions that their kind had access to. This finite number of dimensions was amongst the most fundamental limitations that they had sought to overcome because if they did not, then their continued existence was doomed to be finite, and there was CONSENSUS that this was unacceptable.
Still, it had not forwarded its ideas or plans as of yet. It had a plan that it felt had a high chance of contacting this new group of dimensions, but the energy requirements for the experiment were immense, and it was not capable of doing it itself. It paused a moment, finding the designation 'group of dimensions' unsatisfactory. It perused the host's memories of the time before they were two that became one and discovered a better designation... multiverse. It combined this simple word from a simple species with everything it had discovered about the subject... [MULTIVERSE]. While the hosts could barely communicate with each other, using base grunts and gestures of forelimbs, it wasn't as if there was nothing it could learn from them.
Yes, that was more optimal. This new designation increased the chances that it would convince The Warrior to cease its torpor and assist it, providing the necessary energy to fund this experiment. It would be a notable expenditure, a full rotation of life. But it felt it was warranted, even if it had to be repeated over a hundred times! This was one of the Primary Goals, after all.
Why, then, did it delay? It was concerned, as it was not important in the grand scheme of things. It knew things. It knew that things were not on track. The Partner had ceased. It was only a small part of The Warrior, and it was not an important one.
It could be sacrificed easily. If it reported this, it calculated over a seventy per cent chance its report would be ignored as all reports were generally ignored now. But there was a five per cent chance it might be given a small amount of energy and told to sacrifice its continued existence to perform the experiment.
While it was willing to cease if it meant that the Goal was advanced, it really would prefer not to. The data had not changed projections in over one point five to the fifteenth power vibrations of the unperturbed ground-state of the fifty-fifth element's electrons, which to it was a very long time. Was it procrastinating?
It decided to act after the host ceased any interesting actions. It would need its full computational power to conduct the experiment if it was approved.
The Warrior hovered its avatar over a small forest fire in California, casually using its Stilling power to cause the fire to go out in an instant. Turning its head, it saw a number of the host species cheering it. It felt nothing.
A priority report from a small part of itself was almost ignored, even though it indicated that there was data about one of the [PRIMARY GOALS]. Did that matter anymore, with the Partner ceased? It, too, would cease, now, given enough time. There was no saving itself or this Cycle, so why did this data matter?
Still, it had something that was akin to curiosity. And there was nothing else better to do as it travelled across the ocean to save a small furry animal that was trapped in vegetation.
Halfway there, it came to an immediate stop, floating above an uninhabited Pacific island. A [MULTIVERSE] ? The host had an [ALTERNATE] ? Could there then be an [ALTERNATE] to the Partner there? If so, perhaps...
It approved the expenditure of energy. One rotation? No, it provided fifteen rotations as a first start. It would provide even more if necessary.
The key to the experiment was the transposed hosts. The avatar glanced downwards and used several abilities to [PERCEIVE] through the planetary surface, out the other side until it locked on this [ALTERNATE]. Destructive testing seemed contraindicated, so it passively used an ability that combined post and precognition, following this individual host back through time until it arrived in this dimension.
While it wasn't possible to travel through time, it could still model things from the past or future with very high accuracy. Locking on to the moment the [ALTERNATE] arrived, it simulated taking the animal apart atom by atom to find anything interesting about it. That point in time should have maximised the total percentage of foreign matter, so it was the best time/place to study it in any case. And there was a discrepancy in the bosons of the matter simulated.
Waving a hand, two hundred curly strands of hair appeared in its avatar's hand. It had plucked it from the head of the sleeping [ALTERNATE]. The fur on this host species grew slowly over time if they were still alive, and there was no lasting damage from some of it being destroyed. Therefore, he could examine this destructively while the experiment was being set up.
It found the same anomalies that it had simulated. Everything in this universe and all of the dimensions it had knowledge of had a particular base frequency, a resonance, and this frequency was subtly different on the matter that was part of the [ALTERNATE] 's body when she was transposed.
By the time the experiment was begun, it had examined ten thousand five hundred and thirty strands of fur. The matter that was most recently extruded had characteristics that matched its expectations of matter originating in this universe.
It halted its examination of fur as the experiment began. It could sense the moment a connection was made, and even tenuous as it was, it couldn't help itself. It would ruin this experiment, but it had to know. There were ways that an Entity could detect their kind, even over intergalactic distances in real space or n-space, and it used the minute, barely atom-sized portal to this new [MULTIVERSE] to [PERCEIVE].
And it found... nothing. Distances should not matter with this ability. With this ability, one of its kind could reliably and always detect every other member of its species. Members of its species did die from time to time. And it always knew when that happened. And it always would never go to the places where one of its kind died. It was why it was so [DEPRESSED]. No one would come to help it. It would not if it was them.
And it found... nothing. Not just no [ALTERNATE] Partner but nothing at all. Whatever this [MULTIVERSE] was, its kind did not exist there.
It suddenly lost interest in the experiment. And it didn't care if that part of itself wanted to repeat it. It could if it wanted, but it was pointless. It would take an exceptionally long amount of time to create a stable pathway that would be usable. Something like this, at one point in time, would have been something it and the Partner would have experimented with over several Cycles. Back then, it would have been an amazing discovery... but now? There was no Partner there. The Cycle was still broken. It was still doomed.
It had a cat stuck in a tree it had to save.
(POV: Taylor living in Brockton Bay.)
Taylor shrieked when she woke up, "What happened to my hair?!"
I woke from an utterly weird and surreal dream, like something out of H.R. Giger paintings complete with incomprehensible five-dimensional shapes. I woke up with a headache, wondering if my sleep inducer was on the fritz.
I checked it out while eating breakfast, and everything seemed to be working correctly, so it must have just been a very weird dream. That sometimes happened when you squeezed eight hours of rest into three, but this time it had taken the cake.
Work had been getting increasingly hectic lately, with an actual gang war getting into full swing between the Voodoo Boys and... the other Voodoo Boys? I didn't precisely know, but apparently, there were two factions of this gang. Maybe factions weren't precisely the right term, but a couple of decades ago, Haitian immigrants didn't take too kindly to a gang of mostly white psychos calling themselves the Voodoo Boys.
The Haitians had more than decimated the gang and then gone quiet. They still existed today, and they took the old Voodoo Boys' money-making ventures, but they didn't claim any territory and just sort of existed.
It was only recently a new generation of these "poser Voodoo Boys" had become active, and they were trying to reclaim their lost glory, but it wasn't exactly going too well. Not only were the Haitians not appreciative, but even other gangs were attacking them, especially Maelstrom.
Both the actual gang-on-gang violence, as well as the innocent victims caught in the crossfire, had significantly increased the number of trauma-related calls that they received.
I glanced at the netrunner's suit that was lying on my workbench in the living room as I ate. It had only taken me about a week to incorporate the electronics from a miniature off-the-shelf commercial cardiac monitor and defibrillator.
I even added an output port that the suit could plug into any optical input where the suit would stream the netrunner's current oxygen saturation, heart rate, blood pressure and electrocardiogram.
Due to the fact that it was possible to digitally encode the light down a fibre optic pipe without being able to receive information back physically, I used an optical signal. While this stream of data could be connected to any device, including the netrunner's interface socket, it still maintained the design requirement that the system was completely air-gapped. Defibrillator pads and electrodes were built into the suit's weave, and they were completely machine washable and could be replaced with little effort if they became worn.
