"Of course, I have a number of workers who have similar constraints. Really my job is merely to find the correct contractor and connect them to the requirements a client provides. I am just an insulative middle-man, providing a service to both sides," she said mildly and set her napkin aside on the table, signalling that the afternoon tea was probably coming to a close. It wasn't surprising; she was a busy woman.
The idea that I should keep promises if I made them was a very old-fashioned opinion for the world I found myself in, and perhaps, someday, it would bite me on the tush, and then I would have to change. However, there was no need to rush headlong into Perdition; around Night City, that was sure to find me in its own good time.
I, of course, had my long-running and tentative plan to potentially sell some of my intellectual property to a biotech or pharmaceutical company, but that was much, much higher risk than occasionally taking small jobs like this.
Plus, networking this way would be one way to mitigate the risk of that "big gig" in the future. I would definitely need a fixer I could trust. From what I could tell, Mrs Okada was on the top tier of fixers in the city, with perhaps only the famous owner of the Afterlife having a better reputation, and I didn't like the idea of returning to Mr Delgado for anything.
After he paid me the final payment for the drugs themselves, he offered another couple thousand eurodollars for my pill press. I spent an evening rebuilding it, trying my best to make it less Tinkertech by slowing its operation and giving it time to physically cool the vanilla coating mechanism, which was kind of hard because I didn't really know how it worked. I just replaced weak-looking parts with tougher-looking parts, though, and had the feeling that it might last months, maybe four or five, before totally breaking down.
I tried to get him to pay me for it in advance, but he would only agree to half up front. However, after picking up the machine, he did not leave the last half of the money in the location I demanded, claiming there were unstated difficulties and redirected me to a different locker at a location I had never used before. I never picked up the last payment, and as far as I was concerned, that anonymous identity was burned.
I wasn't a professional paranoid like Alt-Dad was, but I had been an avid hobbyist for years. With the benefit of hindsight, as well as a more natural neurotransmitter balance in my brain and not constantly being bullied, I realised that I had been working up a very large persecution complex in Brockton Bay. I had the feeling that everyone was out to get me, based on my experiences at school. However, thinking about it, I realised I never approached the teachers or even that witch Principal correctly.
I approached them with the assumption that they cared about their students and then used the fact that they didn't help me as evidence that they were out to get me when the truth was much more banal. It was the distinction between the Stasi dragging someone away for interrogation and a person who just watched it happen. They were the latter, although I still couldn't precisely understand their motivations, as they protected the Trio a little too thoroughly. My best guess was Emma's dad threatened them with lawsuits or something.
In any event, even though I no longer felt that everyone was out to get me, personally, I still thought that most people would stick a knife in if they had the opportunity and something to gain by doing so. So it was best to avoid giving them the opportunity.
I felt that if you had a continuing business relationship with someone that you did not trust, you should always be wary of being fucked over if they knew it was coming to a close. To me, it seemed like it was better to let such arrangements fizzle out rather than having a set end to them; that way, the untrusted party wouldn't be tempted to get one over on you when they no longer had a reason not to. You would know that this was the last deal with that person, but they wouldn't know.
However, I was tempted by twenty-five hundred eurodollars for my pill press, but in the end, I only got half that. Alt-Dad had told Alt-Taylor to always beware of the sunk cost fallacy and never second guess herself if her instincts were telling her to walk away, even if doing so was leaving something on the table. My instincts told me to run away and fuck the last half of the money, so I had.
Fizzling out the relationship was why Gloria still brought about half the cybernetics she came across to him, even though I had cultivated a few contacts with ripperdocs in Japantown, which we used for most of the better pieces. I didn't make as much as I did before from this venture because my only job was to refurbish the cybernetics Gloria brought me, but she was making more than she had in the past, to the point where she was putting a little money away every month to go to the same Paramedic school I went to, possibly in a year or two. NC Med Ambulance would pay part of the tuition if you agreed to work there for three years, but you still had to come up with about half yourself.
One nice thing about living three times as fast as everyone else was that I had a lot of time to think, and it didn't really look out of place even if I went on mental digressions for a while, as such I carefully and slowly dabbed my mouth with the napkin and sat it aside as well.
"So, how will this work? You call me when you have need of my special skills?" I asked her, which caused her to nod.
She told me, "Precisely. Some jobs are solo affairs, but I think most of the ones where you would fit the bill would be part of a support element for an existing team. You would have to trust me to some extent to assign you people that you could trust to watch your back, of course, but I definitely wouldn't pair you with random newbies."
I nodded. I didn't really think I would accept any kind of solo job unless it was something very simple and low risk, like perhaps accompanying a client to a black market ripperdoc for both bodyguard service and professional consultation. That would be right up my alley. There were any number of reasons an otherwise law-abiding person might not want to go to a legit clinic for work done, with privacy being the main one.
It was more polite for me to offer to end the tea than if she was to dismiss me, from what I could tell from Downton Abbey, so I said, "Well, I again appreciate your invitation, but I know that you are a busy woman and I shouldn't keep up any more of your time today."
"A young woman like yourself is always welcome. It is clear your mother taught you manners, as a mother ought to do," she said cryptically, rising from her desk as I did.
I smiled at her as she rose to her feet and said, "There's no need, ma'am. I'll show myself out." I wondered what she meant by that.
Before I left her office, she said, "Oh, and I have to thank you for helping my son with that matter at Clouds."
I sniffed delicately, "I'm sure I don't know what you're referring to." I didn't even admit I had anything to do with what happened at Clouds to other Tyger Claws; in fact, I wouldn't even admit it if Mr Inoue asked me again, and he knew for a fact I was involved! My statement caused her to smile even wider as I left her office. Secrets were for keeping.
As I stepped back onto Jig-Jig street, I considered. Although the grandma-seemingly lady had been unfailingly polite, the entire meeting had me feeling vaguely uneasy. As if I had spent twenty minutes petting a purring mountain lion. An enjoyable activity, so long as the mountain lion didn't decide it was hungry instead.
"Attacking a scav den? Ma'am, was I perhaps unclear when I told you that I didn't desire to become an edgerunner? Because, and please forgive my crassness in advance, but this sounds like edgerunner shit," I told Mrs Okada over a vidcall.
She had forwarded me a supposedly end-to-end encryption transport layer module for my phone app. It was an open-source module, so I could examine the source code, but I wasn't at the level of understanding of the mathematics involved in cryptography. So while I spent a few minutes looking through it, there were no obvious backdoors or malware. However, everything else looked Greek to me.
I did know enough about cryptosystems to know that it was theoretically possible to design, mathematically, a secret vulnerability into an encryption algorithm. Encryption systems almost always had a number of constants in their programming, and it was theoretically possible to precompute a compromised constant that would give the party who created the constant, but no other, the capability to crack the encryption with little effort.
I didn't know and couldn't tell if that had been done, but I verified the source code with the copies on the net from the developer and even asked a number of friends on the hacker BBS that I had become a frequent reader. The friend who bought my first netrunner suit replied and told me pretty much the same thing, that I couldn't really tell, but these were open encryption standards and were widely relied upon, even by corporations themselves, so they were probably good. She told me that most corporations and net runners don't attack cryptosystems themselves, anyway, but use malware and similar attacks to read the cleartext after it has already been decrypted or by stealing your private encryption key or similar methods.
That made sense; as such, I had begun to trust the encryption, at least a little.
"Well, it is a small scav den. And your partners on this mission, if you accept, are edgerunners. But you don't need to be just because you accept an occasional job with them. Despite their risk profile, they are professionals. They've completed a number of successful jobs for me over the past few months. You are here on this job less because they might be injured and more for the aftermath," she told me, "You see, this is a revenge gig. The client's grandson was one of these Scav's 'donors' and did not survive the experience. A previous gig traced those responsible to this location. However, the client is barely offering enough money to make this a worthwhile gig. He's just one man. But it is pretty well known that Trauma Team Med Techies, often very rapidly, make off with any cyberware in a downed enemy, time permitting."
That was true. It was one of the ways to get bonuses, in fact. Generally, it would only happen in rescue-type calls where the patient's acuity permitted it. We wouldn't delay patient care to do so if they were actually in any danger. However, it wasn't uncommon to give rescued and stable patients a little Vitamin A (Ativan) to relax them and then spend five minutes or so removing a few choice pieces of cybernetics from any downed enemies if there were any.
If the expected haul was large enough and the patient couldn't be delayed getting to the hospital, occasionally Trauma Team would dispatch a second aircraft to systematically scavenge all the cybernetics from every downed enemy. Other times they would redirect ground teams that only consisted of security specialists in vans to just grab the bodies and bring them back to the Tower, where an on-call med techie might be called in to work a few hours of overtime in the building's morgue.
"You want me along to Counter-Scav the Scavs?" I asked, flabbergasted. Then I thought about it for a while and nodded. It did make sense. Especially if they were raiding a scav den that already had some medical equipment in it, it might not take that long at all. A lot of cybernetics had a perishability period where they had to be extracted in a certain amount of time after their owner flatlined, or they'd be ruined. It was why Scav took down people alive, after all. Finally, I nodded, "Okay, yeah, that makes sense, I guess. And fuck those guys, really."
Everybody hated the Scavs. Yet there still seemed to be more every day. Not all of them were Eastern European immigrants, either. It was almost like we were living in a video game where they would just respawn every so often if you stopped looking in their direction.
"Excellent; I'll set up a meeting with the team you'll be working with this time. As an aside, there is a small bonus for each living Scav they deliver, compared to each one they flatline, and a moderate bonus if they deliver the leader of this den. All of that will be in the detes," she said, seemingly happily, "There is a time limit in that nobody really knows when a scav den will relocate, so I expect you not to drag your feet on this. I don't appreciate it if my contractors make me look bad in front of one of my clients."
Yeah, that was the old satin-covered iron fist routine. Mrs Okada didn't have the bearing of someone you'd want to come back with failure if you had already agreed to do a job for her. That last bit made me raise my eyebrows, "Do I want to know why the client wants some of them alive?"
"Probably not. But he is a very traditional old gentleman. Have you heard the word Língchí before?" asked Wakako in a conversational tone, pronouncing the tonal Chinese word differently from the rest of the English words in the sentence.
I shook my head at her in the vidcall, "I definitely don't want to do an image search on that, do I?" I asked her, aghast.
"Again, probably not. Sending you the location now," she agreed.
The Golden Duck restaurant was a pretty good Chinese place in Japantown. It was scop, like almost everything else, but they were real artists here. They not only got both the taste and texture somewhat similar to actual Peking duck, but even the appearance looked close to what I remembered from a few of the Chinese places in Brockton Bay.
There were only three places that my dad and I would regularly order from, and only one of them had Peking duck, so I only had it a handful of times, but I couldn't tell that much of a difference the couple of times I had tried The Golden Duck.
As such, the food here was actually on the pricier side, but I supposed a group of three edgerunners wouldn't care about that. Wakako had sent me details on three people, but there were no names attached. Just a portrait and a single paragraph that described their speciality. Two men and one woman.
That didn't stop me from running their likenesses through my gumshoe service, pulling up their full names and abbreviated life history, nor would it stop them from doing the same to me, so I suspected it was more along the lines of courtesy. I would allow them to introduce themselves as whatever they liked, and they would reciprocate the courtesy.
I found them right away; the two men were quite boisterous, laughing and drinking beer from glass bottles, while the blonde woman with the pageboy cut and pink lipstick held to the side, being more laid back.
