Eventually, I received a number of what I considered application filters. Normally, my application would have been rejected out of hand because I didn't meet the three years in critical care experience requirements, but there was a notation that this was waived by the hiring manager in Night City. It was nice to see that he still remembered me.
I wondered how the friends I made in the class were doing; Fiona and Antonio were the only two that were destined to be working in Night City that I was really close with. Xiao Li was probably working for some Kang Tao-owned American subsidiary somewhere in the states. Otherwise, he wouldn't have needed to pass the American National Registry Paramedic examination, but I didn't know precisely where he was working.
The first filter was a net-based knowledge test and a simulated patient encounter. The latter was open-form, where it asked me what I would do, and I answered in natural language, and I was pretty sure I was partly graded by AIs and possibly reviewed by humans for edge cases.
After that came an interview with what was basically an AI chatbot, asking me about my background and family and getting permission from me to get my records both from my school and my current employer, permission for them to run a background investigation on me, of any scope that they liked, and a number of other things. The security questionnaire portion of the interview was comprehensive, invasive and very personal; for example, they knew that I was not yet sexually active at the end of it. It kind of reminded me of what I thought it might be like to get a James Bond-style Top Secret security clearance back in Earth Bet.
I figured honestly was the best policy here, at least for the most part, as I was definitely prepared to lie when and if the bot asked me if I was involved in any criminal activities. However, it only asked if I was ever charged or convicted of criminal activities. I felt the nuance was important, although the worst thing I had done was probably more along the lines of a tort.
Infringing on intellectual property was a criminal offence here, not just a civil tort like in Earth Bet, but technically that only applied to patent-protected IP. Biotechnica had never patented the stimulant I had inadvertently manufactured and was selling. I had thought they had at first, and the net searches on it were ambiguous and seemed to imply that they had, but the truth was they kept the entire process a trade secret, so I was actually totally in the clear criminally. The only other criminal thing I had done was stealing from dead gang members, and nobody cared about that. In fact, Trauma Team did it themselves when they flatlined people that were in the way of their clients, time permitting. They'd probably give me a thumbs-up on that.
Not that my technical innocence would matter, as solving problems with extrajudicial applications of violence was practically a prerequisite if you wanted to consider your organisation a corporation. Anyone could start a company, but you weren't really considered a corporation until you had a minimum amount of military force and people knew you would use it.
Forty years ago, a lot of people considered Biotechnica a "good" corporation, but they still manufactured and sold bioweapons to the highest bidder in the last Corporate War, to both sides as far as I could tell, and they hadn't really gotten better since then, so it was best if I could stay off their radar.
However, I had been wargaming, trying to sell them both samples of and the synthesis procedures for the super antibiotic that I had made. I had a lot of it remaining, stored in a cool, dry place, and I knew two ways to synthesise it, one of which would be suitable for industrial production.
I had discovered through messages sent through my dead drops to Gloria's fixer, Diego Delgado, that Biotechnica itself had approached him. At first, I was scared shitless! But, apparently, they were approaching him to sell him product directly when I ran out, and he wanted to know how much more I could sell him so he could plan the transition and if I would be willing to sell my pill press machine when it happened. That didn't make sense at all, and I was very confused until I realised that Biotechnica was playing the Filmshop marketing model.
In Earth Bet, there was a piece of professional photo manipulation software called Filmshop. It has existed since the early 1990s and was one of the most popular and widely used programs for artistically creative people and companies around. It was also one of the most widely pirated pieces of software in the world, and the company did not really seem to mind too much.
I had it explained to me by Mrs Knott in my computer class — by allowing their software to be pirated by people who didn't have enough money to buy it in the first place, they weren't losing any money but were gaining familiarity and market share instead. That familiarity would later then be transmuted into money when those same people, later in their life and career, went to work for an actual company that would, in fact, pay the licensing fees.
The employees who had been using pirated copies of Filmshop their entire lives would demand to use this same software that they were familiar with, and therefore they got sales. Market share was almost as significant as profitability, Alt-Taylor's memories told me and could be more significant for some products. Nobody thought the disgusting company Buck-A-Slice actually made any money on their eurodollar slices of pizza, but it was the extras you got when you went in for a slice that made them profitable.
Biotechnica was having its flagship stimulant be priced for a certain high-end demographic, complete with numerous anti-counterfeiting measures, and then the same stimulant sans those measures creating market share in the grey market. But it was doing it one better by actually profiting off the grey market sales directly in many cases. I got the impression that they weren't presently interested in me at all, but I bet that would change rapidly if I sold more than the half kilo or so of product that I had left.
But this gave me the idea to sell the antibiotic and its synthesis steps to them. I couldn't do it myself, not directly... the risk was too great, but perhaps six months or a year or so after our existing business arrangement was concluded, I could approach Diego again, in a new anonymous identity, and offer to sell that through him to Biotechnica.
At one point, I thought the antibiotic might exist and just be proprietary and secret, but I didn't think that anymore. It was so potent and had so many side effects that I thought there would definitely be signs, even obvious to everyday pre-hospital clinicians, that such a treatment was available, even if it was only kept for the very wealthy.
As such, I could offer it to them for a million eurodollars and have my money problems solved! It was a lot of money, but to them, it wasn't much at all for what they were getting. I'd have to give them samples up front for them to take my claims of the medicine's efficacy seriously. They'd have to test it themselves, and that meant that they'd put them under a mass spectrometer for sure and get the complete chemical composition. That meant that they would eventually be able to reproduce it, probably. They were a pharmaceutical company, after all. However, the synthesis wasn't obvious.
It wasn't just a slightly different synthetic antibiotic that they could draw decades of experience in synthesising similar compounds, and it might take a research laboratory multiple years to get an industrially useful synthesis method for it. So they would be spending a million dollars on getting several years early at introducing the product, which I thought they would go for.
They would also try to offer me a job I couldn't refuse, too. So I would have to make sure that the trade was conducted anonymously, somehow. And I would have to make sure that they knew I had contingencies in place to release the drug to its competitors if I were to vanish, as killing me to recover the one million dollars would be quite tempting too. Probably not to the real executives who would greenlight such a deal who shat larger dollar amounts on a weekly basis, but my memories from Alt-Taylor told me it was exactly what a mid-level ops manager in their Intel department might do. Possibly so he or she could pocket the money themselves, or if that wasn't feasible, then to look a little better on their quarterly evaluations.
It would be extremely risky, and I hadn't settled on dealing with this Diego gentleman again even if I did take up the idea, which I very well might not. It might be better for me to have a clean break with him, and then I could approach one of the better-known Fixers in the city to run as a middle-man to the deal. There were ones that were famous for sticking to their agreements, and it would be much less likely I would be stabbed in the back by one of them than by a small-time name. I might have to approach these people in person, though, for them to give me the time of day, so there were drawbacks with that as well.
I wasn't in a rush, and I would be sure to wait as long as I needed for my brief stint as a drug seller to be completely forgotten as I didn't want to connect any lines to any people, even if those people were fictional personas I only used to sell drugs for nine months or so.
Selling him the pill press would make sense and be one way to further disconnect me from that business, as I doubt he is crediting some random anonymous person selling him product in the first place. The machine was heavily Tinkerised, but I thought I could get it into shape so that it worked at least for a few months, maybe even longer. After that, I wouldn't care, anyway, and he would have no way to contact me to complain!
Let him hire a Techie and watch him be perplexed at how the machine worked at all in the first place. It was a shame I couldn't see the look on the techie's face when he inspected it. I didn't build it out of bubblegum and shoestrings, it looked properly industrial, but I was pretty sure some of its operation principles didn't line up with reality, especially with how quickly it solidified the candy coating on the pills.
It wasn't like pill press machines were rare or hard to find, even ones similar to mine that put on a "candy shell" were available for purchase, and I figured he just wanted to keep a single brand in his product going forward, which might be possible if he cannibalised my die into a commercially available press.
I would have to weigh my options carefully. I would make a bit over sixty-five thousand eurodollars, altogether, on selling these tic-tacs, but I was pretty sure I would be tracked down if I continued that business much further into the future. If I were to start a new, similar business selling some other chemical with an existing market, it would pose similar risks, too. Or greater. The stimulant I made wasn't strictly speaking a recreational substance, so it was on a weird place where the market in it was a lot gentler than if it was a quasi-legal or outright illegal substance.
I definitely didn't want to start competing with the Tyger Claws in one of their core competencies and money-making industries, which was illegal drugs, either. Not just because I lived in their building but I found the illegal drug trade in Night City to be very despicable. I had managed to study some of the drugs the Tyger Claws sold, and most of them caused rapid addiction and very serious medical complications, as a matter of course, almost as though they were designed to do so.
If some shadowy force was intentionally spreading highly addictive and dangerous drugs for some unknown purpose, then I certainly didn't want to pop my head up and offer less addictive and safer alternatives. I mean, ideally, that would be great, but I wanted to stay alive.
I could continue as I was, finding random ways to make money over time, but each scheme wasn't that much less of a risk than trying to sell my IP. It was just dealing with smaller amounts of money; therefore, I thought it was less likely to be noticed, but that was just chance, really.
One of the fast sprint segments caused me to stop thinking entirely, and I could only run and pant until it was over, and I jogged slowly in the cool-down segment until my workout was complete.
Nodding at the machine after I wiped it off, I headed back to my apartment to hit the showers. I still didn't quite trust getting naked around other people. It took me a week of living in this world to stop taking a pistol into the bathroom when I took a shower in my own apartment.
It wasn't like anybody would be interested to see my body, anyway.
I survived two rounds of in-person interviews. Rather than be conducted at Trauma Team tower as I thought, they were conducted off-premises in a nearby hotel's conference room, both times, including a very strenuous and highly technical one conducted by one of Trauma Team's local medical directors, which was a doctor.
Today I was heading to Trauma Team Tower itself for what was called a "base visit." Trauma Team had a similar schedule as NC Med Ambulance, twenty-four hours on if you were a clinician. I understood the pilots worked shorter hours daily but ended up working more days a week to make up for it, and frankly, I approved of that arrangement. I didn't want the pilot flying an AV I was in to be fatigued, even if stims and much better ones than MC Med Ambulance used were available.
Trauma Team had a pretty good corporate culture as corporations in this dystopia went, which meant that they at least pretended to care about their employees. All employees got a Trauma Team subscription, and the fees they responded to you were said to be billed at cost. And I'm sure they'd be more than happy to set up some kind of payment plan arrangement where they would take a little out of your check every week if you weren't able to pay upfront.
As such, a base visit was from what I could tell about online at forums for people who had or wanted to work there was an "asshole test." As in, could you be around three other people for a whole day without them wanting to shoot you?
This was especially important because six out of the twenty-four hours of your working day were on a "ready 5" status, as in you were loaded up in the AV and waiting. Apparently, the Trauma Team's armoured helmets included a built-in BD wreath, and Trauma Team would pay a monthly subscription for every pilot and clinician to an interactive BD MMO game of their choice.
I had never actually played one, but there was one that was set in the early 2000s where all the players had superpowers, and you had to pick whether or not you wanted to be a hero or villain; that looked very amusing to me. It was famous for having an artificial intelligence examine your playstyle and disposition in the introduction and selecting a superpower for you; you couldn't pick yourself on the first character you made, although they definitely offered that service for a fee, of course.
