Monitoring "disowned" and illegitimate family members was only one minor part of Edgecrusher's duties, so it wasn't until the imposter applied to Trauma Team that the AI backtracked and discovered these inconsistencies.
William had watched for about half a year before deciding that the only way he would know for sure was if he asked her himself. The operation was approved by Taylor's grandmother, and this was the result. He was now waiting, in VR, to brief his principal about what he had discovered.
His principal's ICON rezzed into the special, encrypted cybernetic space they inhabited. It wouldn't be wrong to say that this meeting was occurring inside the brain of Edgecrusher. It was certainly one of the most highly secure net sites in the world, anyway. Her avatar was a Gaelic woman with delicate features that were roughly based on her own, long hair and long ears, as a kind of aes sídhe.
"There were problems returning home?" she asked serenely.
William frowned a bit. His ICON was an idealised version of his body before it was blown to bits, "A little, mum. The private jet I was borrowing had an engineering casualty, so I am just going to wait for Orbital Air's suborbital six hours from now. I'll definitely get back faster this way, anyhow." Although the jet he borrowed was supersonic, it was barely so. There weren't daily suborbital flights from Night City to London, but there were usually a couple a week, and the timings worked out for him in this instance.
She shrugged her shoulders, "Such things happen. I read your preliminary report, although there were areas that seemed contradictory. Your report says the young woman doesn't consider herself to be Taylor Hebert, yet definitely is."
William winced slightly, internally, although he didn't show it. She would never be so crass as to order him to explain, but that was basically what she was doing, "Mum, a person's psychology changes as they have life events, especially traumatic ones. We verified her genome matched, and although I wasn't able to perform the full battery of tests under the cap, as we were interrupted, it was clear that she was born Taylor Hebert. She doesn't feel as though she belongs in this world and doesn't feel that she is "... and he made the air-quotes gesture, "... this world's Taylor Hebert, but that isn't uncommon with post-adolescent psychology. I suspect losing her father so soon after little Annette was very traumatic to her, and she has resolved to radically diverge from the path that she was on." He frowned a bit, "Although..."
"Although...?" she asked, with a smile.
He smiled, too, "Although... she has remarkable skills, and I don't mean in medicine." He shook his head, "I haven't had anyone detect me in over two decades. Maybe it was just a fluke or intuition, but she turned around at just the right time to spot me and almost was able to at least shoot at me before I closed with her. No hesitation. When I disarmed her, she shifted to using a Kendachi monowire to keep me at least a few metres away. With enough skill that she must have practised for hundreds and hundreds of hours; then, when she realised she was hopelessly outmatched, she just turned around and ran away. Again, zero hesitation. She shifted from attack to escape instantly. I would put her martial skills as comparable to a middling corporate black ops operator, at least with what I saw. She could be an Angel in five or ten years if she keeps at it. I was so depressed, so sure at that point that she was an imposter. I mean, she is only seventeen, mum." He shook his head.
"How interesting... if slightly uncouth. I suppose Annette's man must have been training her off and on since she was a child? We have no records of that, but that isn't surprising. That was his business, after all," the fairy woman mused.
William nodded, "It is really the only explanation. He got really jaded with both Militech and the NUSA after Annette's death; it is probable he advised her to avoid Militech after his death. Every year they intertwine more and more with the NUSA government after all, and he despised them."
"Mmm... anything else?" she asked.
William shrugged, "She might not be precisely psychologically stable. She is recovering from deep self-loathing, unknown why,... and uh... have you heard of the Japanese word 'c huunibyou' ? She is convinced that her special affinity for medicine and science is a superpower. Like, from a comic book. The confidence levels for this were off the charts."
A wistful expression crossed the woman's face, "Annette was like that too. Remember when she would approach the automatic doors?" The woman shifted to a more active stance and thrust out her palm, and recited, "By my power, I demand you open!" Then she grinned for a moment before settling back into her serene countenance. "Little Taylor might not be wrong, though. There is nothing more powerful than knowledge, expertise and the will to use it. That can be very super. You had to depart before you removed the memories of the interrogation and capture. That is traumatic. How do you suppose we should make it up to her?"
William tilted his head to the side, "I didn't consider that we should, mum. Sure, that wasn't a pleasant experience, but it wasn't even a tenth of a per cent of what you or Annette had to go through growing up."
She waved a hand, "Yes, but the expectations, our own cages and torments were of our own design, William. Sparing her future children of things of this nature was part and parcel of the agreement Annette made. You expect she will continue to accumulate funds for medical school, then?"
William nodded, "Yes. She believes she has valuable intellectual property. Very valuable. I'm not sure if she actually does, she could be mistaken, but she is smart and knows if she sells it on the up and up, a corporation will rendition her. I believe she intends to sell it for a fraction of its worth on the black market, somehow. We could easily pay for her schooling, though, ourselves, though, so she doesn't have to take the risk."
She shook her head, "No. However, after she has accumulated the money and applied, we will arrange a full scholarship. I have been told by people who have made their own fortunes that the first million you make can be transformational. It's best to struggle a little, after all." She tilted her head to the side, "How valuable does she think her IP is?"
"Hard to say; that was around the time we were interrupted. But at least in the hundreds of millions or low billions per annum. Gross, not net. It's some kind of drug used to fight infections. She believes she already has it and has tested it," William said.
The fairy hummed, "Not that valuable then. Although, a billion here and a billion there, and pretty soon that adds up to real money, doesn't it? She's right. They'd black bag her and stick her in a gilded cage unless she's just delusional." There was a moment of silence, "Do you have any idea who she would approach to sell it?"
He shrugged, "It's a pharmaceutical of some kind, so possibly Biotechnica. Maybe Arasaka, as they have an up-and-coming life sciences division. Plus, she does live in the building run by and has a very good working relationship with one of Arasaka's cats' paws, a yakuza-style street gang."
The fairy made a moue of displeasure, "How distasteful. Well, we still have a board member in Arasaka, at least for the moment. I'll make a note to watch for any such operation. As for Biotechnica... we don't have an in with the Italians. Or any other Pharmcorp, for that matter... I suppose all we can do is watch. I'd like you to preposition a team in Night City that might be able to provide protection in the event she approaches one of these players. If they try to rendition her, they should be able to provide protection. I don't mind if they actually black bag her, but I just don't want them to kill her in the attempt; it would be an interesting perspective shift for her, and a couple of years working in the salt mines, so to speak, might do her some good."
William frowned a little. His principal was a bit too tough love at times, but at the same time, prepositioning a family team, not just hired mercs, for possibly years was an incredible outlay of funds. He had a team available, but if they couldn't be expected to take other missions? He'd have to onboard a new team and place both of them in Night City. Then they could alternate taking missions on the west coast so that one team was always ready.
She didn't want to spend a million right now to provide her granddaughter with an education unless the girl accumulated that much herself first, but she was willing to spend easily five times as much to provide protection for her in the shadows. Protection that wouldn't even protect her if all she was going to be was kidnapped. That was typical.
"Right away, mum," he replied.
She nodded, "Well, I'll see you tomorrow, William. Perhaps you'll let me win again at a game of tennis."
Let her win? Although the woman was almost completely biological, she was almost as fast and strong as he was. Every member of the Astor family was a miracle of modern genetics and biosculpting by the age of ten. And she was a lot better at tennis. He tried his best to beat her every single time, but he never let her win, not even when she was a child!
His principal's ICON derezzed, and he glanced around the endless white expanse. He shook his head ruefully and said aloud, "Alright, Edgecrusher. Send me out, bro." His accent shifted back to the American one he was born with when he was talking to the AI.
I spent several hours being debriefed by the Trauma Team counter-intelligence people, as at first, they suspected my kidnapping was because of my work; however, after a while, it became clear that they did not think that anymore, although they wouldn't really discuss why they came to that conclusion. I thought the same thing, but I was interested in why they thought so, too. The process was annoying, but the people interrogating me weren't as bad as that British guy. They didn't want to scan my brain, at least.
When I mentioned that, one of them chuckled and laid it out for me with no prevaricating, "You can't just put people under the cap for no reason. Not only is it a lot of work and takes a special skill set to interpret the results, which are always in high demand, but it tends to make people think that we don't trust them. That has a marked impact on the quality of an employee's work product..." he trailed off and then shrugged, "Random interrogation under brain scan is basically a pre-requisite for service in the Intelligence or Counter-Intel divisions, though. That's pretty much the industry standard. Buuuut... If we suspected you were lying, I would probably instead be telling you that brain scan interviews are standard in this type of situation and quickly calling in one of the specialists." The last sentence, he said with a cocky grin.
I chuckled at that. After they cut me loose, I briefly went by the base. The crew was out on a flight, which suited me because I needed to embezzle something out of our medical supply room. I took a handful of specimen sample kits, which were nothing more than a long, optionally damp Q-tip and a plastic tube to place it in and sat down at a chair in the kitchen, humming. I carefully used a q-tip and rubbed it underneath my fingernails, specifically the fingernails I knew had penetrated pretty deeply into the ninja's hand.
I suspected he was a Gemini or similar, full-body replacement. The fact that he wasn't paralysed was a big clue, although there were certain other small signs. Gemini's were, reportedly, almost impossible to detect even at close inspection. Raven's website claimed that this included "intimate" inspections, as well. I found that probably to be true. There were only a few signs that they weren't biological. His infrared signature at high exertion was off, his breathing a bit off, and the way that his veins pulsed in time with a supposed heartbeat was off, now that I thought back about it. Hardly anyone in the world would notice that with their eyes, but I could. I could almost take someone's blood pressure just by staring at them for a while.
And while a Gemini was a full borg, it wasn't entirely mechanical. A lot of the features that tended to fool a person into believing they were human were biological. And with custom biological features came protein tagging. I wasn't entirely sure why, but I thought it might be for intellectual property reasons, but there was a good chance that there might be data encoded in the genome of the skin and fake blood that would tell me more about who this guy was. Maybe even a serial number for the body he was wearing, and if I had that, I could, eventually, track the sale down. Well... maybe.
It was a bit traumatising to be outclassed, beaten down, knocked unconscious, threatened, and interrogated. I did not want it to happen again if I could at all help it. For hours I had been thinking about how to stop it in the future, and honestly, I was coming up with a lot of ideas, but none of them was definitive. That guy was just better than me. I had the impression that he could have incapacitated me with the initial strike to my solar plexus and instead was playing around with me. Certainly, he hadn't used that electrical taser attack that must have been built into his hands when he struck or disarmed me. It felt almost like a spar, and that was humiliating.
After I was finished and was sure I had collected anything that was under my nails, I nodded and departed. I could ask the lab here to run a DNA sequence, but I definitely didn't want to. The results would be in the hands of those counter-intelligence guys before I ever saw them and worse, they might filter the results before I got them; that said, I didn't have a DNA sequencing machine.
Scowling at an e-mail from the company, which was an invoice for services rendered. I only had to pay the cost, but that still included a flat charge for each scramble and all the fuel expended, plus a charge for the depreciation, maintenance and insurance on the aircraft, which was billed by the minute. They had looked for me for over ten minutes. Jamming Trauma Team wasn't normally effective, because there was radio-direction finding equipment on all of the aircraft, and they could home in on the jammer, which was what they intended to do, but the jamming stopped quickly, with no further transmissions.
I had learned that they had placed me in what amounted to a wire-mesh lined body-bag after they knocked me out and then just carried me around like a sack of potatoes. The blonde ninja was kind enough to pick up my pistol, which was recovered at the scene. That was good because they weren't on sale yet, and I no longer counted as a Militech dependent. It would be a pain in the ass to replace, not to mention these first-generation beta-test models would probably be collectable!
