Sighing, I said, "A paralytic." There were times when you didn't have much more you could do, although it grated on me something fierce. It made me wish I had one of those giant cannons in my arms or something I could escalate to from what I actually had, something that would be a danger to this guy or similar guys if I met them in the future. The man had more or less threatened to kill me, and although I was still trying one more avenue of escape, it was one that required a fair bit more time to implement, if it would work at all.
I coughed and said, "I guess I'll just put this on then." That caused Mr Ninja to nod genially at me. I placed the cap on my head, moving my hair out of the way in places so that the electrodes could actually have contact with my scalp. I didn't want them to just shave my head like a sheep because then things would have become personal, and I would have to kill them all. As it stood, there was still a chance that that wouldn't be necessary.
"Alright, turn on the jammer while we open the door. Wouldn't want the princess here to get a transmission out. Trauma Team was looking for her for ten minutes before they left," one of the men outside the cage said, and the ninja man nodded. I did notice a jammer start-up, and it was collocated on the ninja's body, probably an implant of some sort, while the cage door opened, and one of the other men walked inside, dragging a similar metal chair which he sat next to the metal briefcase.
The ninja glanced at the new man and asked, "Status?"
"Connection is okay, but the neural map is marginal. We'll have to run a few known-unknown-known associations to firm it up," the second man, clearly a techie of some sort, replied. Wait. Who the fuck had a neural map of me? Nobody, not even Militech, as far as I could had a neural map of Alt-Taylor, to say nothing of her.
Maybe this was a neural map of Alt-Taylor? If so, it would explain why the match was marginal. But when was it taken, and by whom? I didn't have any memories of taking any machine-monitored neural, psychological profile test.
"Marginal, hn?" Asked the British ninja rhetorically, I assume, since the techie didn't reply. He then nodded and said, "Proceed, then."
The techie nodded and tapped a few keys on the machine in the briefcase, carefully turning the device on the table so the screen was concealed from my gaze. Finally he nodded and said, "Alright, association generated." He then looked at me and said a series of words, "Taylor. Daniel. Annette. Orange. Feline. Queen Victoria." Only the first three seemed to have anything to do with me, but he must have said words for about ten minutes, before he finished, "Alright, we're good to go now."
"Thank you," the polite ninja thanked the techie, before turning to me., "Who is your father? Who is your mother?" Those were weird questions.
"Are you Taylor Hebert?" He continued.
However, he was interrupted by the techie, "Ambiguous, complex response, rephrase."
"Was your name at your birth Taylor Hebert?" The ninja asked, which caused the techie to nod slowly.
He then proceeded to ask me a long series of questions about my life, which wasn't what I was expecting at all. After that, he started doing word associations, and while he was doing them, glancing from the screen on the machine to my face, I had finished with my plan, "Family. Mother. Relations. Chelsea. Westminster. Secret. Replacement. Taylor. Covert. Genuine. Taylor. Fake. Biosculpt. Bay. The Bay. Ocean. Monster. Monsters. Ocean. Ferries. Ocean. Graveyard. Dock. Dockworkers."
I didn't like the direction these word associations were going, and it was a good thing that I had begun carefully tossing behind me the small reprogramming tracking devices. They were very small. Small enough to fit through the grill on the faraday cage if I was lucky, and I had been tossing about a dozen for the past two dozen words. They were programmed to, as soon as they got a connection to the net, spam an internal Trauma Team net address with my name and location using an onboard GPS system. It had taken me so long to reprogram them, flash them over the air, and do as much testing as I could do without it being obvious what I was doing. I didn't know if they would work, but I thought it might be a good idea.
"Medicine. Cybernetics. Virus. Virology. Flu virus. Mouse virus. Genetics. Wealth factor. Self-improvement Pharmacology. Tuition. Intellectual property. Genius," he continued, glancing between the screen and my face, "Goals. Annette. Daniel. Astor. Mother. Father..."
As he was going through a number of words, someone from outside yelled, "Trauma Team is on the way! Their AV is landing on the roof right fucking now! I thought the transmitter couldn't make it through this fucking cage!"
The polite British ninja blinked once and then said, "Alright. We're done here, then. Please secure that device, and follow me. Evacuate downstairs, everyone."
The techie quickly closed the briefcase and stood up as I tensed all of my muscles, ready to fight for my life for at least a few seconds, deciding to risk it and popping my monowire out of my wrist and getting a firm, " Stop," from the ninja-borg, who was pointing a rather large pistol at my head.
I didn't even see him fucking pull it out. He was at least as fast as me, and I thought he was probably a bit faster. I needed to do something to fix that. My eyes were fixed on his shoulders, so I could see with my peripheral vision if he started to squeeze the trigger. There wasn't a lot of room to dodge in this little cage, but I wasn't about to be shot like a dog without putting up a fight.
However, rather than shoot me, though, he just placed his body between the techie and me and backed out of the cage, slamming the door shut when he was clear. He tipped an imaginary hat at me and said, "Miss Hebert." And then he turned around and hurried the techie out of the room we were in, closing the door behind him.
Just... what the fuck? About half a minute later, the door was kicked off its hinges as a Trauma Team rescue team busted through the door. It was Charlie team, from the patches on their shoulders, and they each carefully cleared the room with their weapons out, me sighing and saying, "I don't think there's anyone left here."
It took them a moment to find the door to the cage, but after they opened it, they asked me, confusedly, "Just what the fuck happened, 'Breaker?"
"I don't fucking know, and I don't like it," I said, completely truthfully and completely sullenly.
"Thank you for your and your team's assistance. This bonus is both for the successful completion of the mission and as well as an additional sum to replace your man's arm," the polite blonde-haired man told the leader of the small team of mercenaries.
The leader of the mercenaries nodded, "Was nova, like always. We'll wait a couple of weeks before seeking that medical care, just in case."
The one-armed man growled, "That fucking bitch..."
However, before he said a single word more, the blonde-haired man's arm shot out like a striking snake, grabbing the one-arm man by the throat and easily lifting him into the air, causing him to gurgle. The polite man said, "You will keep a civil tongue in your head about her. Yes?"
When there was no obvious response, he continued, " I did not hear you ."
The man being held up in the air nodded rapidly and said something that might have been similar to "Yes" and was dropped back down. His compatriots were giving him the stink-eye, but the blonde man didn't seem to mind after that, nodding one last time at the group's leader before walking casually out of the alley where they were meeting, carrying a metallic silver briefcase.
Stepping into a waiting cab, he inspected the computer-generated avatar of the driver for a moment before making a decision and saying genially, "Night City international airport, private terminal, please."
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Crime against humanity and decency
AN: I only intended this first section that was in the blonde ninja's POV to be about 1,000 words, but it ended up catching hold of me and becoming over twice that amount.
William Davies had been a personal servant of the Astor family for many, many years. He was, in fact, a part of the family, from the wrong side of the sheets, so to speak. Most of the personal servants of his status were part of the family, actually. He had little contact with the family growing up, but he always had the feeling that someone was watching out for him a little bit. Things came a little easier for him; events seemed to occur to give him a little bit of a helping hand.
It could have been luck, but he later discovered it was at least half the family providing small benefits, such as securing his admission to one of the best schools in North America; specifically, he received an appointment to the US Military Academy at Westpoint. Some famous historical cadets, like Robert E. Lee, received no demerits in their entire four-year stint at the Academy, and others, like Ulysses S. Grant, received so many he was at one point almost tossed out. William was more in the middle.
He graduated, received his commission and was interested in combat arms. He figured that if he was going to be a soldier, then he was going to be a fucking soldier. He was an artilleryman, a redleg in US Army parlance.
After going through jump school and being selected for the 82nd Airborne Division, he got a tattoo on one arm that featured a historical cannon and the words " Ultima Ratio Regum." In English, that translated to "The Final Argument of Kings." The final argument of kings was, of course, canons.
Artillery was killing by the numbers. In historical conflicts, over sixty per cent of casualties could be attributed to artillery, although in modern conflicts, that dropped a little but only because air strikes accomplished a similar task. There was something that was just ultimately demoralising about being shelled by an enemy you couldn't see and couldn't fight against.
William's luck ran out in Colombia during the Second Central American War. What a shit show that was. Half of the time, he didn't even have a battery of guns but instead led a platoon of infantry. On one such mission, ironically, his life was altered radically by... artillery.
Looking back on it, he couldn't help but admire the skills of the Neo-Soviet gun team. The indigenous people they were fighting were never as good with an artillery barrage, so he instantly knew it was the Soviet "advisors" that blew him and his platoon to bits.
Somehow, though, he managed to survive. He woke up in America, paralysed and with half his body missing. That was when the family came to offer assistance. Not for free; he wouldn't really have trusted them if they offered something for free. But he had a certain set of skills, and if they gave him a new body, he would certainly be content to exercise them for them instead of the US Army.
It was discovered, amidst the Cyberware Revolution of the 2010s, that he had an incredible ability to integrate with cybernetics. He was one of the very first people to receive one of Raven Microcybernetics' full conversion systems. Even at this time, cyberpsychosis wasn't unknown, but he never had any issues with mental instability, no matter the amount of cybernetics he received.
Behind his back, people gossiped that he was just crazy to begin with, and perhaps that was true, but he never felt crazy. Certainly, he wasn't unpredictable and a hazard to everyone around him. But would a crazy person ever consider that they were crazy? He certainly wasn't going around randomly murdering people like some famous up-and-coming solos that also were highly augmented, like Adam Smasher.
Honestly, he was once told that the main symptom of cyber psychosis was the belief, reinforced after every additional augmentation, that you were better, more than regular people. But he already felt that way before he ever got any cybernetics!
He operated, for the family, discreetly in the same area that Adam Smasher did, the eastern seaboard of the USA, although he never met the man. During the Fourth Corporate War, the family brought him back to protect their strong places, and he occasionally provided bodyguard services to family members, who lived mostly in low earth orbit. The family didn't really have a stake in the conflict; in fact, their holdings were so diversified that they had a board member on both Militech and Arasaka's boards, at least until the NUSA government forced out their board member on Militech's board.
The corporation was in some ways indistinguishable from the NUSA government, and the Astor family was very much an international family, with most of their hard assets and real property in the United Kingdom and the European Community.
Ever since the Fourth Corporate War ended, he had shifted from less traditional military work and more of what the family called a personal servant, which included that but much more. He had been one of the primary servants for the Astor-Armstrong branch of the family, since then. If the Astor family mostly lived in space, then the Astor-Armstrongs were the ones that ran most of their businesses on Earth.
William remembered Annette well; she was a favourite of his. Her mom had many children, but she was always one to stand out. Always pushing the boundaries, so he wasn't surprised when she got the freedom that her mother never had. He had personally tracked down the NUSA direct action team that was responsible for her death and eliminated them all with extreme prejudice. For Annette's sake, he had brought in her husband on the op, and he had gotten his share of revenge. The fact that it was against the former agency he used to work for before he shifted to the private sector infuriated the man, William thought.
She had died during a joint Militech-Arasaka delegation, negotiating some aspect of each corporation's involvement in the Pacific Islands so as not to step on each other's toes. Remarkable, and the NUSA thought, dangerous. They didn't like the idea of a world where Militech and Arasaka routinely cooperated, so they used a giant truck bomb to blow up both sides. Neither William nor Danny cared about the reason, though.
When the Astor family AI, Edgecrusher, alerted him and Annette's mom that Annette's daughter might have been murdered, with someone stealing her identity, he volunteered to personally execute the person walking around with Annette's daughter's face.
Edgecrusher wasn't one hundred per cent confident, although the evidence was damning. Taylor Anne Hebert not only had a radical change in behaviour and interests but, more importantly, sought medical services. She had, under a false name, approached a biosculpt clinic and requested a number of modifications. Modifications she should have already had. Additionally, she became a patient of a cybernetics clinic and received cybernetics that she should also already had — including a basic operating system.
