Personally, I liked the way it thought. Hopefully, I would be working for this corp, but I didn't really trust them.
I had four of six of the customisable ICE slots utilised in the Zeta-Tech now, and my power managed to help me transfer some of the electronic warfare components from the Dragoon into Zetatech-compatiable ICE boards. One of them, the last resort, was exactly the kind of fatal black ICE that I built netrunner suits to protect against. Generally speaking, if someone was trying to use a quickhack against me, this ICE wouldn't have enough of a connection to retaliate, but it could if someone ever plugged their personal link, firewall or not, into one of my interface sockets or if they tried a deep personal hack while we were both deep diving.
I couldn't examine all of the code as a lot of it was black-boxed with integrated electronics, and a lot of it I didn't really understand yet anyway, but I was optimistic that the netrunner suits I had been making would offer protection.
It made me realise that I shouldn't highly publicise such inventions, though. I was sure that I wasn't the first to build such a thing. And if it became something everyone had, then people would just stop using that type of ICE and spend a little bit more money on the type that could broil a person's brain, which I couldn't protect against. A lot of people would be pissed off at me in that case, both a lot of serious netrunners and possibly even a bunch of companies that had to spend a lot of money updating their security systems. I'd have both the black and the white hats after me, then!
So long as I only made a few and was discreet to the people I sold them to, though, I should be fine.
I held back as we landed on top of the hospital roof, watching how they delivered the patient to a waiting trauma bay. Since they had radioed in the patient's likely diagnosis, his acuity had been upgraded, and they had a whole team of people ready to work on him by the time we got there.
After our flight back downtown, we went briefly out of service, both to restock and also as the six-hour period where we were going to have to be sitting in the AV continuously was approaching, so they gave you an opportunity to take a quick shower. These six hours were going to be annoying. I didn't trust them well enough to use the braindance wreath installed in the helmet, so I would just be working on my cyberdeck or watching videos the whole time, although I was really interested in that superhero game now that I thought about it. If I got hired and got assigned a permanent uniform, I would be able to discreetly make a couple of modifications to it to ensure the BD playbacks weren't subtly brainwashing me.
It had found it pretty common for commercially available BD streams, even some you paid for like films, to do that, mainly just to make you slightly want any of the products that they were advertising, though. But I was pretty sure it would be possible to make a BD that induced a psychotic break or possibly even cardiac arrest, too.
"Alright, we're up for our six-hour ready-five period. Does anyone need to use the head now, before we start?" the pilot asked everyone, probably to be polite, but he was specifically looking at me. I shook my head rapidly.
"Yo, Taylor. If you get hired, you should play World of Heroes like the rest of us. We have a Trauma Team guild, and we'll help power-level you," the very attractive blonde-haired security guy told me as we got into the AV. That was the game I was planning on playing, too.
I looked interested, "Oh? Are you a heroic guild?" I asked.
That caused both of the security guys to laugh, "Yeah, fuck that! We're the in the top 20 global villain guilds. The guild name is Total Terror; get it, TT? We're a PK guild. All the security guys and most of the medics play. Pilots are hit-and-miss."
I coughed, surprised. Well, maybe not. If you were involved in EMS for longer than a week, you tended to get both a macabre sense of humour and very jaded about humanity as a whole. That was the main reason I didn't have more of an emotional reaction when I had to kill those four Voodoo Boys. "Okay, I'll think about it," I told him, although unsure. I intended to play a hero, of course.
It made sense that if Trauma Team had an unofficial guild, they would be pretty effective. The game was touted to be very realistic, and with a virtual area larger than North America, complete with millions of interactive NPCs, they called it a virtual world. The physics were somewhat realistic, with superpowers grafted on. As such, there weren't really hardcoded stats and a lot of numbers like a lot of games. As such, a lot of real-life skills did translate into the game, especially if it involved, say, small unit tactics and marksmanship. Superpowers changed a lot of the game, but really a bullet to the face was still a bullet to the face.
I settled into a long wait, pulling up the current stream for the local propagandists.
An attractive woman said on the video, "Welcome to N54; it's time for your local news. Unexpected political drama today at city hall as council member Lucius Rhyne fired back on proposed legislation suggesting that birds in the city be culled. The freshman councilman had ammunition to back up his opposition in the form of a peer-reviewed white paper on the likely outcome of such a law that was published six months ago, written by one of our own in Night City. Phil, what's your read on these developments?"
She turned to her co-host, a studious-looking fellow, who shook his head, "Sara, I've read the paper written by Professor Hidalgo of Night City University that was cited by Councilman Rhynes, and it's exactly as the councilman says. Deaths by avian flu may be reduced, but only at the cost of trebling the number of deaths from Malaria, West Nile and other mosquito-born pathogens! To say nothing of the quality of life issues. The historical examination bares out too. China, last century, tried this same policy, and millions died!"
I was watching with interest and a little trepidation. Hidalgo had sent me a copy of the published article. They hadn't widely circulated it, hoping to catch their political opponents just like this. A few months later, he sent me an update stating that their opponents had learned something and had delayed their plans, but it looked like they had restarted them now. Professor Hidalgo's political friend must be this Lucius Rhynes. I pulled up data on him. He just got elected for the first time in 2060 and was a member of the Devolutionist Party, which was a political party that was highly antipathic towards the centralised North American government. Interesting.
Really, such politics were all the same to me. I figured they were all crooks. From my perspective as someone who wasn't born here, it was like watching a sporting event where I neither knew either of the teams playing nor any of the rules of the game.
I ended up being the fourth author on that paper, which suited me just fine. Honestly, I would have preferred to not be credited at all, as it was less of an academic paper and more of a political grenade. Still, anyone reviewing the paper would assume I was some dogsbody if they investigated me. Although Night City was a dystopia, it wasn't quite to the point where someone would deign to shoot their political enemy's taxi driver for giving them a ride.
I sat back and continued to watch videos, occasionally transitioning to reading a novel for a while.
Something woke me with a start, a loud klaxon with the digitised voice saying, "SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE. SCRAMBLE. PLATINUM." I glanced around, seeing everyone else emerging from whatever BD they were experiencing. Already the pilots were flipping switches to spool up the internal turbofans, using the shore power connection and starter motors to quickly bring them up to speed.
Before I even had a chance to figure out how to pull up the patient information out of curiosity, we were pushed into our seats as the pilots didn't so much take off as throw us off our perch on the roof, all of the engines roaring to full power in the descent.
"Shit, multiple GSWs, multiple organs perfed, severe haemorrhaging..." Mr Bear said gloomily.
Mercy got onto on net and said, "It's an active scene, a hot LZ. NCPD reporting as a possible charlie papa inside the Biotechnica Hotel. Intruder, maybe? MaxTac may respond if there are any more casualties, but we'll get there first for sure. Hopefully, it'll be an in-and-out sort of thing. We'll be landing on the roof; our client is on the twenty-ninth floor."
Dr Anno glanced at me, "Stay behind Mercy and Bandbox, Taylor." I nodded, wishing I had a gun, and my left wrist suddenly felt itchy around that damn bracelet. They said not to remove it in the Trauma Tower, well... I wasn't in that building now, was I? Still, I didn't do anything for the moment.
The AV sat down on the rooftop pad, and all five of us hopped out, and I made sure to walk closely behind the giant wall of a man that was Mercy. Everyone had their guns out, and I was carrying most of their medical equipment. At least I was being useful, I supposed.
We went downstairs two and three at a time before reaching the twenty-ninth floor and popping out of the stairwell. There were clearly gunshots actively occurring on this floor, which didn't put my mind at ease at all. Mercy's voice over the net, "Client in sight. Hostiles in sight. Negative on the charlie papa; this is a Maelstrom death squad."
I wondered what Biotechnica did to piss off Maelstrom. It could be anything, really. Maybe they hired the gang for some terrible deed and stiffed them, or who knows what. Six red chevrons appeared on the screen in my helmet. Whatever the reason, it looked like the gang of cyberpsychos was getting some revenge.
I was also curious how they had snuck up to the twenty-ninth floor. They weren't exactly known for their subtlety, but they were known for their electronic warfare capabilities, though.
The group paused, but only for a moment. Mercy continued speaking. He must be in command of the ground team, "Verify AP ammunition is loaded, SmartLink connection active, break, flight two lift off and prepare to provide fire support. Floor two niner, east side. The cafe. We are going to be approaching from the south to the north." Everyone glanced at their weapons briefly.
"Roger, lifting now. Twenty seconds" came the voice from the pilot.
The twenty-ninth floor was only half apartments. What we were approaching was a combined indoor restaurant with large glass windows to appreciate the Night City skyline for the patrons dining inside.
"Targets selected in priority based on proximity to the client. They're strom, so go for headshots. Go, go, go." Mercy said, and the team as a whole turned the corner, everyone but me firing. I felt pretty out of place, but I felt one of the safest places to be was probably behind the mostly bullet-resistant giant man.
Mercy and Bandbox killed the two Maelstrom guys next to the client, who was down on the ground and looking unresponsive. They were then using lots of automatic fire to keep the rest of the Maelstrom suppressed. A red flashing indicator in my helmet indicated the client had just flatlined, which wasn't good. Anno said over the radio, "Taylor, hold up. We're going to grab the guy and pull him around the corner so the AV can open up on them, stay there with the equipment and wait for us.
Ah, that made sense. I was wondering why the AV that I could see already descending and beginning to hover outside the large glass windows hadn't done anything. If the client became collateral damage, it kind of ruined the point of even coming out here. I worriedly looked at a few of the other people lying on the floor, but everyone I saw looked pretty dead already. In fact, the client, even after Mr Bear grabbed him and pulled him back behind the two security guys who kept firing at Maelstrom, looked pretty dead. Mercy's voice on the radio said, "Package secured; light them up."
Immediately there was a cacophony of noise as the AV began firing its 7.62mm rotary chaingun on a small cluster of the Maelstrom guys, then sweeping it left to right to get the rest. I had dropped all the equipment I was carrying for Mr Bear and Dr Anno, who started working on the man.
I had pulled up my electronic warfare menu on my deck and was in the middle of establishing a connection to the biggest, most borged-out-looking of the Maelstrom guys, but he was turned into chunky salsa just like that. It was gross.
Anno reported, only briefly glancing at the state of the cafe, "Massive internal haemorrhage, death state one. Hey, Mercy. The boys pretty much wrecked this cafe; the windows are all shot out. See if they can hover outside, and we can transfer the patient directly onto the AV on this floor."
Mercy nodded, his weapon still ready for any of the Maelstrom, but they all appeared to be dead. "Roger. You hear that, guys?"
"Affirmative. We can," the pilots reported.
I watched both of them work on the guy, and they had managed to restart his heart already, but he hardly had any blood to pump through it. They were rapidly pinching off lacerated blood vessels and arteries while simultaneously introducing high-oxygenating synthetic blood replacement and trauma-based nanomeds, "Alright, we need to get him into stasis, stat." They were really quite good.
They picked the gurney up and started walking to the AV hovering on the exterior of the building, with the two security guys covering the rear. As they carefully loaded the guy in, I thought things were pretty much done and glanced back to see Mercy and Bandbox turning around to come to join us. However, just after they turned around, I saw one of the Maelstrom guys, who was not much more than a torso, start to move; he must have been playing dead.
"Behind you!" I said quickly, and both security guys started to turn, but it wasn't in time. The torso extended a hand, carrying an absolutely massive-looking revolver and had time to pull the trigger once before having its skull blown apart by a three-round burst from Mercy's small carbine.
Unfortunately, the slightly more diminutive security guy took a hit directly on the chest, the round so large it entered, penetrated completely, exited Bandbox's back and still pinged off the armour of the AV-4 next to us, with Bandbox falling over like a sack of potatoes and a number of medical alerts about a downed teammate.
"Fuck!" just about everyone yelled. Anno and Mr Bear glanced down at their own patient, then at Bandbox before Mercy growled, "You know SOPs. Fuck!"
They had already mentioned if one of their team was injured, then if it was a choice between the client and the teammate, they had to choose the client. I glanced around and said, "Go on without me. Maybe I can stabilise him for the follow-on team." Although they would leave a team member, they would treat them as a Platinum patient themselves for the follow-on team.
