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Skitterdoc 2077


Автор:
Опубликован:
09.07.2024 — 09.07.2024
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1
Аннотация:
Кроссовер Worm и вселенной Киберпанка. Действие происходит в Найтсити. MC - Альтернативная Тейлор (стриггерила с альтернативной силой, сила Костепилочки), но она прожила свою жизнь согласно канону, затем ее перебросили во вселенную Киберпанка, и она должна выжить. Медицинский (био)тинкер Тейлор в мире киберпанка. Не могу читать через переводчик на оригинальном сайте - https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14155507/1/Skitterdoc-2077. Так что, выкладываю здесь, чтобы спокойно читать. Текст не мой, права не мои, выкладываю без разрешения автора. Ссылка на произведение выше.
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I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked very neutral. Not quite like a corporate brat, but not like trash either. I was wearing clothes that were fashionable two or three seasons ago, judging from my online searches, so I hoped I looked comfortably middle-class. Someone that would be missed if I disappeared and who the police department would investigate if I disappeared.

I almost left the gun on the coffee table, but everything I took away from Alt-Taylor's memories was that I absolutely should not leave home unarmed, so it took me a bit longer to scrounge up a concealed holster for it.

Sighing, I patted myself down and unlocked the door and stepped out.

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A pussy cat with Claws

Walking through my floor of the Megabuilding was a bit odd. It was mainly set up with small residences, like my own. However, there were a number of small businesses as well. It was surreal, and I felt like I was living through that old Earth Aleph film Blade Runner . There was even a noodle stand like what I recalled in the film; the only exception was you couldn't sit there in the rain and eat your noodles, obviously.

It was a similar experience purchasing the noodles to what she remembered in the movie, too, as the noodle man didn't speak a word of English. Or if he did, he didn't want to speak it to the lanky anglo girl. However, I did end up with a bowl of noodles and a Nicola, which was apparently America's Favorite Cola. Personally, I doubted that. Perhaps it would be your favourite if you drank Robitussin for enjoyment, as it tasted vaguely like carbonated cough syrup.

I noticed I was dressed a little bit too good to smoothly fit in around there, so I finished my noodles, which were good and tossed the mostly-full can of Nicola Classic into the trash can. The can featured a minimalist line drawing of an Asian lady with a bare bottom. Honestly, the Cola probably would taste about the same if it came from her bottom. Ugh.

Another business was something like a convenience store. Although it was run by an older-looking man that looked like he might own it and live next door, did that mean it was a bodega? I wasn't entirely sure, but I made it my second stop. I'm not sure I'd see an actual grocery store for a long time, but I spent about a hundred and fifty eurodollars on buying a bunch of food that looked good and brought it back to my apartment. That would last me a couple of days.

After unloading the food in my kitchenette, next to my margarine tub of Super-Meth, I got ready to go back outside so I could go to the elevator. Speaking of the Super-Meth, I discovered it wasn't actually supernatural. I had the complete chemical compound structure and three synthesis methods for it in my head. But the interesting thing was, there was no way in hell that I could have made that drug in my kitchen.

All three of the synthesis methods that I knew require, at minimum, a vacuum distillation setup and a number of chemical precursors that are simply not found in kitchen cleaners of any kind as far as I knew.

Now, that wasn't actually that unusual when you considered Tinkertech. I heard of a Tinker that turned a spring from his mattress and two toasters into a perpetual motion device. However, what was unusual was that what she made wasn't tinkertech at all, as far as she could tell. Aside from the yoghurt, they were all actual, real chemicals.

I tried to think back on how I made it in the kitchen, and it was just a fog. That's kind of normal Tinker stuff, right? Then why can I not make it again? Thinking about trying to make it again pulls up the actual chemical compound and synthesis steps in my head, as if I was a chemist and not a Tinker. Shouldn't I just... you know... wham, take weird stuff, and bam, then it does something?

Thinking about the anti-depressants and anti-biotics yielded a similar result. However, I had to stop myself from starting to cook an anti-retroviral medicine in my kitchen when I came home when and thought about one as a test.

So, what does that mean? My power would give me one "freebie" where it would use heebie-jeebies to produce something out of all manners of implausible inputs, using implausible methods and tools. But after that, I had to do it the old-fashioned way?

I thought about it while I unloaded all the food I had bought. Glancing at some of the individual servings of yoghurt, I shook my head. I had the feeling I could create more of that yoghurt medicine, and when I thought about it, the yoghurt stuff didn't seem to be a real, non-Tinkertech, chemical or formulation. That made sense; yoghurt certainly had a lot of beneficial bacteria in it, but not enough and not the varieties to completely replace a person's microfauna thirty minutes after taking some extremely powerful antibiotic.

It felt like my power was being stingy as hell. If I got inspired to create something, and I could do it through traditional chemistry, it would let me have that freebie, but if I wanted more, I had to create it like I was a scientist? That wasn't how Tinkering was supposed to work. It wasn't the first time that I felt that my power was a weird combination of Tinkering and Thinking. And I couldn't tell if I got ripped off by my power or if I won the lottery with it. One of the biggest problems with Tinkertech was that it wasn't reproducible by anybody except perhaps the best Tinkers in the world like Dragon, and it required the Tinker to maintain it.

The fact that some of what I made seemed to be reproducible and congruent with actual science seemed amazing, now that I thought of that. Amazingly awesome or amazingly dangerous, perhaps both. When I got inspired with something, if it was possible to accomplish what I wanted scientifically, then it seemed to default to giving me an actual scientific solution. Sure, it seemed to Tinker-bullshit it the first time, but if I wanted a repeat like if I wanted to make more of that neural stimulant, I had to actually get a chemistry lab. I had all of the academic knowledge of its synthesis, but none of the muscle memory, either.

The neural stimulant was a known drug in this world; I had looked it up by its composition online. It was a patented designer drug made by a European Pharmaceutical company. Patents didn't really mean a lot in this world, so what really gave them the edge was that their production method was a trade secret. It was expensive and was a commonly used drug by corporate executives, military pilots, astronauts and anyone who needed to stay up a long time with minimal side effects and low abuse potential.

It still wasn't great for your brain to use it chronically over a period of years, though, but it was the safest neural stimulant currently on the market and priced accordingly. I didn't know the ins and outs of macroeconomics of the drug trade, but I thought I could probably sell the six hundred grams of what I had for over twenty-five thousand eurodollars. Retail, it would cost over twenty times that.

However, it might not be a great idea to do so. Beyond any moral questions, the Pharmacorp sold this drug in distinctive, hard-to-counterfeit tablets. The shape, colour and texture of the tablets were trademarked, too and part of their marketing strategy. Similar to Pfizer marketing viagra as "the little blue pill." I doubted I could create such a similar tablet, especially since they were designed to be hard to counterfeit in the first place, so you knew people weren't tricking you with biker meth if you saw one of their pills.

If the Corp ever found out someone sold a whole bunch of their premiere moneymaker in powdered base form, they would either think someone diverted it from their manufacturing centre, they'd probably consider this most likely, or that someone had discovered their synthesis method. Both would trigger an investigation that I didn't want to be anywhere near.

I decided I wouldn't flush it after all, but I was definitely not interested in getting into the drug manufacturing business. Especially manufacturing a product that was supposed to be a firmly held trade secret by a Pharmacorp. Compared to other similarly sold drugs, it was practically good for you so, so I might have been able to rationalise selling it if I really needed the money someday, but the risks were too great to do so.

The other two drugs I could find no mention of. I got a little nervous after searching for the exact chemical composition of the first drug and instead decided to not do that for the last two. Chemicals were similar to other chemicals, though.

So, I browsed a chemistry encyclopedia online for nearby similar analogues, finding nothing. This told me either my power didn't only restrict me to chemicals that were already known in this world or that these two chemicals were even deeper secrets than the first one. The antibiotic was very useful but had a pretty big downside, but it was one that could definitely be mitigated if administered in a hospital setting.

The anti-depressant was the most magical of the bunch in that it worked very rapidly, seemed to have no side effects that her power warned her about and only had to be taken once a week. One of the biggest problems with anti-depressants was compliance in the patient taking them every day. It turned out that when you were suffering from severe enough depression, you didn't want to do anything, even if it was as simple as swallowing a pill that you knew would help you.

You were depressed, so you needed to take a pill, but your depression made you not want to take it. A kind of a Catch-22. The Tinker part of her was suggesting, mildly, a implanted personal pharmacopoeia inside a patient's body, that would administer appropriate drugs on an appropriate schedule. Something like that had to already exist in this world, as I thought they were working in that direction in my old world for insulin.

It kind of made me feel bad to keep such a wonder drug to myself, but I definitely didn't want to lose what little freedom I had in this world. Perhaps it would come to that, and I might end up in someone's gilded cage. Definitely, worse things could happen, but who would choose that first? I might be able to release the synthesis procedures anonymously online, but then again, there wasn't a lot of anonymity to be had. I definitely wasn't a good enough "hacker," or a hacker at all, to ensure anything wouldn't be traced back to me.

While walking from my apartment towards the elevator at the centre of the block I suddenly had the feeling that I was being watched and perhaps followed. It was a feeling that I had honed over the years, and I trusted my instincts in this manner. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to dodge Sophia and the Trio as often as I did. Rather than accelerate and try to lose them, I stayed with a group of about ten others who were also headed towards one of the elevators. This strategy of hiding with the herd would have been folly back in Winslow, as I had already been excommunicated from the herd, and nobody would have protected me.

Here, though, it seemed to work. In the corner of my eye, I saw the man, no wait... it was a boy, younger than me even, that was trailing me. Thankfully, the boy didn't look too dangerous, but thirteen-year-olds could do some ultraviolence in this world, so I wouldn't make any assumptions.

I only had two things of value on me, my phone, which I could absolutely not lose and my pistol, which I didn't want to lose either, mostly because I read people who take your gun often shoot you with it first thing. A lot of others on the elevator were going to the tenth floor also, as there was a built-in NCART station to get on the maglev on that floor, and it was one of the larger commercial floors, with very few residential housing available. It was like a large mall, so I supposed it made sense to have the Tyger Claws office on the same floor.

I could either confront the kid following me, implying that I had a gun by having my hand near it or just try to avoid whatever he was trying to do until I got to the Tyger Claws. I was never one for confrontation, and honestly, I was surprised that I even gave myself that option. This couldn't be entirely the result of the anti-depressants. Were the here-and-there memories of Alt-Taylor playing a role? She would have confronted the kid right away.

Questions like that had the potential to spiral into existential questions that didn't do me any good to even consider, so I ignored them and just tried to keep the kid in sight as I stepped off the elevator.

The Tyger Claws site said their office was just in front of the train terminal, and I found that very quickly. I managed to stay with a herd of a few people the entire way, but instead of following them through the NCART pylons, I darted away and walked straight with a purpose to the Tyger Claw office. I saw the kid notice me change directions, and he moved to follow me again until he saw where I was headed, and I think I saw a look of panic on his face before he made a quick ninety-degree turn to the left and walked off, perpendicular to the direction I was going, fast.

The Tyger Claws "community office" was pretty small, at least the public front area. It kind of reminded me of a post office or a bank, but there was just one "clerk" behind the counter. He was in his thirties, and although he was covered with tattoos, he seemed to have a mild temperament. He smiled at me in a friendly manner and asked, in perfect English, "Hello, there, little lady. I am called Jin, by some. How can the Tyger Claws help you today?"

What good customer service for a murderous booster gang. He just out and out admitted it, like I walked through the door at Fugly Bobs. It threw me for a loop for a moment but then I came to my senses. I decided not to try to use Japanese honorifics in English. Mainly because I once heard that Lung set a person on fire who did that, and figured that maybe it was offensive?

"Ah, Mr Jin?" I asked, and he nodded with a friendly smile, "It is a pleasure to meet you, my name is Taylor Hebert, and I recently moved into the Megablock. This is my first time away from home, so I was not sure of the correct procedures but all of my Uncles told me that it would be in my best interests to pay for some services your organisation provides to the tenants here."

That caused him to smile widely and even in a more friendly matter. I could briefly see his eyes change colours slightly, and I didn't realise what was happening until he said, "Ah, of course. Miss Hebert, of apartment 29-221. I'd like to offer my condolences about the recent passing of your father. Your Uncles? You must mean all of his comrades-in-arms in the NUSA or Militech's military? They have given you good advice; I wish more people had people they trust to tell them this."

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