I didn't do anything fancy; I just unlocked my unit, tossed the bodies in, and left immediately. I would come back the next day with some tools. It would have been easiest to bring the bodies back to my place as I had all of the equipment needed for a full pathological examination at home, but I didn't want a very amused Mr Jin to know what I was up to, so I would have to do some sort of dissection with rudimentary tools in a dusty storage unit.
For some reason, the sense I got from my power was delighted. Sometimes I felt my power would be happy if I became a serial killer, so long as I could dissect a lot of bodies. Was that the "evil" part of me, I wondered? Or was there really something to the theory that a parahuman's power was some external agent?
"Alright, Gloria... let's get back to it," I told her as I returned to the truck. She was driving, though. My arms hurt. I did seem to be getting stronger, though; carrying those three gonks must have been three fifty kilos easy. The two weren't that heavy, but that damn borg weighed one fifty if he weighed a kilo.
Bioware strength mods sort of acted as a multiplier, although only up to a point. The stronger you were naturally, the better. I didn't look like a body-building ab-girl, or anything, but I didn't have much fat left on my body, and my muscles were vaguely visible. It was kind of nice.
I brought several duffle bags with me back to my storage unit. It was more than necessary to just take back the implants from the three bodies, but I was taking back a number of other things as well.
I think I would have been a lot more upset at killing these four guys if I hadn't worked in an ambulance for several months. Although my patients almost always survived, at least until they got to the hospital, the amount of death I have seen in just my short time here blunted a lot of the anxiety and depression I probably would have felt otherwise. Especially considering a lot of it was caused by the gang these guys were in, possibly these guys specifically in some cases.
So, despite the idea still making me somewhat queasy, I wasn't that upset over it. It did make me think back about the way the PRT dealt with criminals back home with a bit of disdain. It seemed almost performative now. I had thought about that quite a bit in the ten months I had spent in this new world, with my handful of memories from Alt-Taylor helping me. She was a lot less naive than I had been.
The only conclusion I could draw was that the Endbringers were a lot bigger threat than what was portrayed in the media and by the authorities. I hadn't thought they downplayed them, either, but the fact that the people in power accepted murderous supervillains must mean that the situation was a lot more precarious than even I had thought.
I decided to work on the borg gentleman first; there were a number of cybernetics that would, for lack of a better word, go bad if they weren't removed from a body within a few days. Mostly replacement organ types and similar systems that needed a constant level of electrical charge to run continuous maintenance systems. I had everything needed to preserve these types of things back at my apartment, though.
Humming the tune to this Japanese girl group which I kind of hated, I disconnected each of his limbs and then carefully excised their interface sockets from what flesh he had on his torso before setting them aside. I had brought some containers from home to carry some of the more delicate implants in, so I carefully disconnected his Kiroshis and settled them into a small cylinder.
Flipping him over, I make certain to work cautiously, disconnecting his Sandevistan. It was a Militech model and fairly reliable. There were cheaper models that provided less of an advantage, with the lowest that I was aware of for Sandy's providing about a two times boost, but that was still on the level of something that regular non-boosted enemies could fight against. It would certainly be harder, but it was possible.
This was the first tier that most actual mercs, and not just gangers, would go for. Something that would provide the real and effective super speed that was very difficult for non-augmented people to really contend with. It was the first level that was "military grade," in other words.
Damn, that song was stuck in my head despite being really terrible. I used my deck to launch my music player. The net service I used to listen to music was fairly cheap, and it used machine learning to try to gauge what my tastes in music were.
"Now playing your favourite oldies," flashed before my eyes, which irritated me to no end.
It didn't take me too long to finish with the other two guys, and I was pretty stoked with the haul. Two sets of Kiroshis, one set of more generic Biodyne optics, a biomonitor, several replacement organs including a Syn-Lung setup, and two full sets of arms and legs between the three guys, including one set of generic Gorilla Arms. The borg's limbs had micro-rotors installed, as well as a heavy-duty ankle reinforcement, so those limbs were pretty valuable, but the rest were average. The Sandy was interesting, too. It was the first time I actually saw one up close, too.
Some of the things I left in the bodies because they were just too annoying to remove with the tools I had and weren't that expensive, such as the polymer arteries the borg had and the subdermal armour system one of the others had. It didn't appear to be a very good one, anyway. However, I was taking the borg's skull replacement back so I could remove it properly by the simple expedient of taking his entire head back home with me.
After that, I grabbed a few of the black market implants that my dad had left me; for example, there was another Projectile Launch System in here, which I had an avenue to sell now. Then I spent a little time disassembling part of the Dragoon. It was kind of difficult because the railgun shot made some panels really difficult or impossible to take off.
Before I had gotten my Zetatech Self-ICE if I had thought about Tinkering ICE, it would be very difficult. My power didn't seem to want to help me with it, thinking it was mainly computer related. However, so long as I kept firmly in mind that it was going to be installed in my body and kept in mind the specific format for the slots in my Zetatech system, it began helping me a lot more.
Keeping all that in mind, I disassembled parts until I got to what my power identified as the cyberwar subsystems. There were both ICE modules, although in a different slot format, as well as generalised ECM and jamming equipment. I wasn't sure what I could do with the latter, but I took it all and put it in one of the duffle bags.
Gloria's car was small, but we managed to fit in what was left of the three bodies in the back seat, as well as the duffle bags of loot. I asked her if she knew where we could dispose of the bodies without anyone being the wiser, and she looked at me oddly and just nodded.
We drove for a fair bit, even leaving the city to the east. I wondered if we would be attacked by the Nomads, but that probably was something that was more just depicted on television.
When we got to our destination, I blinked and then sighed, blushing slightly, "Oh." We were at the municipal landfill. I chuckled a little bit and then just quickly tossed the three guys into an area and tossed a bit of cardboard over them to conceal the obvious body bags. I wondered how many bodies were buried here in the dump. A lot, probably.
She followed me back to my apartment and was a bit shocked at my outer public area, which looked more like a Ripperdoc clinic than someone's apartment. She gaped, "Taylor, are you a ripperdoc?!"
"Uh, no," I told her, "I just happened to get all of this equipment... well... it's hard to explain. I can't really talk about it, but it's mine now."
She looked at me a little unbelieving, and I waved her off. "Okay, let's get some of these perishable items in the stock-keeping system."
She handed me items, and I placed them carefully in the cryogenic containers and then slid those containers into Dr Gerstatt's old stock system, carefully inputting the name and model number of each added implant into the computer as I did so.
I set one of the cylinders carrying one set of Kiroshis aside for a moment. The limbs I sat on my workbench; I would go through all of their maintenance later today. It shouldn't take too long.
After we were done, I asked her, "Do you want these Kiroshis? They're only a couple of years old, and they're a lot better than the trash you're currently seeing with. I'll update them with the latest firmware, including NCPD downlink and everything."
She looked interested but said, "I don't really have a regular doctor I go to."
I waved her off, "I may not be a ripperdoc, but you already have optics. Swapping in one set of another is one of the simplest procedures there is; it's mostly plug-and-play." That wasn't quite true, as Kiroshi made a lot better use of the optical nerve than most brands, so I would have to make a couple adjustments to the interface, but it really was simple.
She looked amused, "If you blind me, you're the one that's gonna have to walk me to an actual doctor and pay for them to fix me up. But, yeah, sure. I would like to see if the gonks I see are murderers, plus the resolution is supposed to be preem. These can't even do actual phone calls, you know?" She pulled out an actual cell phone, similar to the one I kept in my desk drawer these days.
I nodded and told her, "Okay, take a seat. I'm going to reflash these babies with the latest firmware."
I didn't particularly want to see what kind of media, images or videos a murderous borg kept in their Kiroshi's internal memory, even if there weren't any viruses or malware installed, so I just quickly reset the eyes to factory defaults and installed the latest manufacturer's software on it. It took me over an hour to do that when I did it to myself the first time, but now it barely took two or three minutes to accomplish.
I put on the rebuilt glove tool that I inherited from Dr Gerstatt. It was a little weird getting used to using it, but it really did make a lot of common operations very quick. I administered a local anaesthetic and powered down her optics before using the glove tool to carefully pop them out of her orbital cavity, setting them in a small cylinder one at a time. They weren't very good, but they were still worth a couple hundred eddies, maybe. Waste not, want not.
Rather than immediately installing the Kiroshis, I took a moment to update the optical nerve interface. In some ways, it was standard, but Kiroshi used a lot of semi-proprietary methods, so it would just generate a lot of pointless headaches and sub-optimal performance if I just installed them without making these adjustments.
One of the attachments on the glove hand was an articulable computer interface. I could switch out the tip with various plugs that would interface with a number of proprietary data formats, but the semi-generic optical interfaces always were programmed by a near-field communication system. There wasn't a lot of room for plugs inside your eyes, so I popped that onto the glove and held it close to the nerve interface in her optical cavity until the new Kiroshi software flashed onto it.
I had already reprogrammed the iris colour on the Kiroshis to more or less match her previous eyes instead of the blood-red colour Mr Edgy McEdgerson had selected. She could update it herself in the settings, but there was no point in giving her cringe-eyes to start with. Using the glove, I installed each eye one at a time, making sure it clicked into place properly and then testing its range of movement.
After that, I nodded and did the last few tests before saying, "Alright. That should do it. We'll just need to go through the visual calibration routine in a moment." I tapped a few keys on the Meditech biobed, which should reactivate Gloria's eyes. She blinked a few times and says, "Woah. Nova, everything looks awesome."
I hummed and nodded, asking her, "Hmmm... no glitches, blurred vision or low contrast?" After she shook her head, I rolled my chair back to glance at the read-out on the biobed's drop-down operator display. While she was sitting here, I had dual access to all of the output of her implants. One side of the screen showed a close-up of the iris and lens of each of the Kiroshis, while the other half of the screen was her perspective.
"Okay, activate the HUD and select the new user setup," I told her and then walked her through both the setup and calibration program. I then showed her all the options and how to download a phone app and pair it with her existing phone service, as well as the quality of life things like GPS mapping, taking photos and videos and other things.
"Okay, try the optical zoom mode. Take a look at that poster across the room," I told her, and she gaped, not even realising such a thing existed. "Lastly, the scanning system."
"Scanning system?" she asked, confused.
I hummed and nodded, "Yes, that's how you trigger some of the ancillary functions, like NCPD background checks. Focus on my face and kind of think hard about it. Like you did when you zoomed, but a little different. Instead of thinking about seeing distance, think about scanning or just focusing on my face hard." All Kiroshi models had a mental interface, integrating into the user's operating system more completely compared to a lot of the bargain basement optics that still used blink and eye-tracking systems that were decades old already.
"Ah! I see. Well, you don't have any criminal record, Tay," she said with a grin.
I nodded, "After a while, it should become second nature, syncing with your thought processes and reading your intention. This also includes a piece of simple machine learning software that will identify objects in the environment as well. It's not too useful if all you have are optics, but it is still the sort of thing that could win you a bet sometime. So, trigger it on, say... here, your old eyes." I handed her the open container, and she looked inside.
"Ah, preem. It gave me the manufacturer and model number," she said, excited.
I nodded, "You should consider taking the internal biomonitor we found too. It's not too old, but I'm not willing to put it in. But we could find you a good doctor that doesn't charge too much, especially if I go with you to put it in." Frankly, I was surprised that one of the guys had a biomonitor. Most gangers didn't really seem to care that much about their health.
She looked a little uneasy, "But we could probably sell that for... how much?"
I considered that. Retail price was probably six thousand, "One point five to two thousand eddies."
