I ended up owing slightly less than ten thousand Eurodollars. Although that was a lot, it probably would have been three times as much for a regular Silver client. I paid it immediately; I was probably going to end up spending a lot more money, too if I wanted to increase the level of protection I had.
I took a cab back to Japantown, and on the cab ride there, I called Wakako on the phone. She had some questions to answer, and depending on what she said, I wouldn't feel safe returning back to my apartment, so it was important to get answers right away.
"Ah, Miss Hebert. What can I do for you today?" she asked with her slight Japanese accent.
I frowned, "Mrs Okada, perhaps you are not aware of this. However, at the conclusion of the gig you assigned me, as I was walking home, I was the victim of a targeted and sophisticated attack, which was successful. I was kidnapped, stuck in a literal faraday cage and only managed to escape due to my ingenuity and Trauma Team membership." I paused, "I do not intend to accuse you of anything at the moment, but the timing was such that I felt I needed to speak with you about it."
That was the first time I ever saw Wakako surprised, although I couldn't be sure it wasn't faked for my benefit. The woman was old and surely had been around the block.
After a moment, she raised a hand, "Just a moment; I'm blocking out more than a few minutes for this call. Can you tell me precisely what happened?"
I didn't feel the need to hide much, and I told her. Although I didn't go into specifics about the questions, the blonde ninja had asked me, informing her that they were mostly of a personal nature.
"Assaulted by a full-borg conversion utilising thermoptic camouflage, plus six well-kitted out mercs with non-lethal weapons..." she said and shook her head several times. Then she paused and said, "I can see why you were a bit suspicious, but this was clearly an attack targeting you, correct?"
I nodded, "Yes, definitely."
"In that case, do you believe it possible that you could have been under surveillance from the time you left your apartment? If so, did you speak to the client in public at all? He seemed the talkative sort, the type to blurt his business in front of God and everybody. Somebody could have been listening with a parabolic microphone, got his entire itinerary and then set up the ambush as soon as they knew which particular clinic you were taking him to," she finished reasonably.
That... was possible. She had talked to him right in front of the NCART terminal. She didn't notice anyone lurking around, but if they were good, she wouldn't have noticed. She told Wakako as much.
"I don't mean what I am going to say next as a threat, so please don't take it that way. However, if I wanted to sell you out to someone who wanted to kidnap you, then you would just wake up in their custody. Don't forget where you sleep," she said, raising an eyebrow.
I wasn't so sure about that. I had added a number of protections on my inner apartment door, including explosives. I had no doubt that the Tyger Claws could take me, but it wasn't as though it would be as simple as them grabbing me in my sleep without me putting up a fight. I would definitely at least be conscious of it and likely would take out a number of attackers; at least, I hoped so.
But her point remained. Mrs Okada didn't need to contrive a fake gig to do it. I hadn't thought she was responsible, but I had to speak to her about it. I nodded, "You make a lot of good points. I hadn't really thought you were behind it, but I needed to hear you say it. Now I come to you as a client. Can you look into this?"
She tilted her head to the side and then nodded, "Yes. Partly on my own dime, as if my own communication channels or clients were compromised — and that is a possibility, I need to know. We can speak about the price later if I don't find anything there."
I nodded and, with that, disconnected the call. Perhaps it wasn't wise to discuss such business in the back of a Delamain, but for some reason, I trusted the discretion of the bald SkyNet. Plus, it honestly wasn't anything I intended to keep a secret. What I was going to do in response definitely was going to be to kept at a much higher level of confidentiality, though.
I had the cab take me directly back to the clinic I left my previous client and retraced my steps back to the street I was attacked at. It had been hours, but I was hoping I could still find what I was looking for.
I found my expended gas grenade canister on the side of the road, nodded, picked it up and casually put it into my coat pocket. It was trash, but the residue inside could theoretically tell people about the chemical agent, even if it was mostly Tinkertech.
Then I found the area where I had "disarmed" the mercenary. What I was looking for was his blood, and I found a fair bit of it in a discoloured area that might have been a pool where he had been rendered unconscious. Frowning, the blood looked wrong.
Then I sighed as I realised that someone, probably either the blonde ninja or some of his additional backup, had sprayed the blood pool with a DNA inhibitor, the cheapest was probably a solution of water and bleach, but there were specialised products too, which were used to destroy any traces DNA. What would Alt-Dad have called that? Tradecraft? That was better tradecraft than I was expecting, but I was pretty sure they couldn't have gotten all of it. I followed the blood trail, frowning as the entire thing was sprayed carefully.
The blonde ninja had to have additional helpers, as Trauma's AV would have been homing in on this location very rapidly. They had to have done all of this, plus get me into a bag and drag all of their unconscious compatriots out in a hurry. Perhaps, though, they had come back after the AV left to do this part, as they seemed to be pretty thorough.
I stepped back and found the location where I was when I attacked him and went through the same whipping and scything motions, sans having the monowire out, and nodded. I wasn't being merciful in that attack that took his arm; I was actually aiming to take his head clean off, but he partially dodged, and I only got his left arm.
As such, there had been mostly a horizontal component to the attack. When I aimed for people's necks, I liked coming in from the side so the wire wrapped around rapidly and then yanking their heads off like a cork in a Champagne bottle. I paused and realised that sounded really bad, even in my head. But that was how I usually practised in the VR simulator, not to mention I had actually done it in real life a couple of times.
I zeroed in on something a little to the side of where my attack would have connected and smiled widely as I saw a much smaller spot of red on the side of a steel dumpster. I wasn't a blood spatter analyst, as my expertise in blood was more when it was in the body, but I could tell it was fresh, and it was in about the right spot. It had to be the guy. I took several samples of his blood, stuffing the plastic tubes holding each q-tip in my pocket.
I glanced around and didn't think I was going to find anything more useful, so I nodded and walked back to my apartment like I had intended to do hours ago. This time nobody stopped me; in fact, people seemed to stay well out of my way for some reason.
The first thing I did when I returned to my apartment was shove the specimen tubes into my freezer, and the second thing I did was take a long, hot shower. It relaxed me, and I realised I was quite tense.
After the shower, wearing only a towel, I sighed when I realised I needed to do laundry. I was down to the themed panties that I didn't really like to wear.
I put them on anyway. It was some Militech swag that Alt-Dad got for Alt-Taylor. They both thought it was hilarious. They were black, with Militech's logo and the text printed: "Contents protected by Militech." I thought it was super cringe and I hated wearing them, but they were very comfortable. It was interesting to see how my tastes and preferences diverged wildly from Alt-Taylor in certain areas. I mean, she had a boyfriend before she left the Militech school, and I had memories of her getting to at least second base.
Although, she was considered rather frigid and old-fashioned by almost everyone in her grade level because that was as far as she would go.
After the pyjamas were donned, I sat in her comfortable chair and searched for the correct address in my contacts before nodding and starting a call.
The phone rang several times before a man answered, "Hello?"
"Professor Hildago, this is Taylor Hebert. I'm not sure if you remember me-"
The older man interrupted, "Of course I do! Hahaha, how have you been?"
"Well, pretty good, but I was hoping I could call in that marker if you were genuine about it," I told him.
That caused him to raise his eyebrows, "Well, I was, but I have to draw the line at most felonies." He then waggled his eyebrows, perhaps to suggest some felonies that he might be open to. On the other hand, I was probably too hard on him, as he likely thought I was in my twenties, given that he had last seen me at a University.
"Barely a misdemeanour, I assure you. I need two things sequenced, and I don't want anyone to know that I requested it," I told him.
This caused him to raise his eyebrows in interest, "Oooh... interesting. Cloak and dagger, huh? Yeah, that should be no problem. DNA?"
"One is DNA, for sure. Human, from a wet whole blood sample; the other is unknown proteins. Possibly DNA or possibly unknown proteins encoded to carry digital data or some combination of all of the above," I told him truthfully.
He nodded, "Like in a synthetic bioform?" Although he was an epidemiologist, he was still a real medical doctor, too, even if he probably hadn't practised in some time.
"Yes, precisely," I told him.
He hummed over the call and then nodded, "I'll have to stick the second one in the universal protein sequencer, but it shouldn't be an issue. Expect maybe a 4-hour turnaround time if you can get them to me tomorrow morning."
"I'll courier them over to your office, and tomorrow will be fine," I told him, and then after a minute or so of small talk, we hung up. I considered. I could have sent the samples to a commercial lab, but I honestly felt my privacy of the request was in better hands with the Professor, despite his seeming interest in it.
Nodding, I called the RCS courier service and asked them for a pickup and to bring a small container with a half-kilo of dry ice inside. I probably didn't need to refrigerate the DNA samples. These days the sequencers could run a million sequences simultaneously on separate proteins in the sample, even if it was small, and get the correct genome even with minor degradation, but it was still better safe than sorry.
I pulled up the notes I had been taking, starting when the counter-intelligence guys had interviewed me. My best guess was this was something related to Alt-Dad. The first series of questions the blonde-haired man gave me seemed to imply he was verifying my identity.
I swear to god if one of Alt-Danny's friends beat the shit out of me and interrogated me as a favour to Alt-Dad's memory, thinking I was some kind of... identity thief? Pod person? Such crimes did happen in Night City. There was cheap enough body alteration technology so you could easily mimic someone if you had a similar build to them, but why the fuck couldn't they have just either knocked on my door or surreptitiously dug through my trash to get a DNA sample?
Altering your DNA to match your target was a much harder proposition. I could do it fairly easily if I had the correct DNA sample and equipment to fashion a vrius, but, generally speaking, that was something that only Corpo or government-level spies could hope to achieve. It wasn't a common thing at all. Even the cheapest and easiest to acquire version of the treatments, which only altered your epidural DNA and kept the rest the same, was not something even edgerunners with connections could usually hope to get.
It was included in my plan Z if things ever got too out of hand. I would alter my appearance and DNA and start over somewhere else. It would make me sad to give up the name of Hebert and my mom's hair, but it wouldn't kill me. I could do it, especially if it was temporary.
I glanced more at the notes, which were labelled under the header: "How to stop this from happening again."
The ideas were half more escape and defence oriented and half-oriented around making me more dangerous. Except for the first one listed, which was: "Find those responsible and make an example out of them." I frowned. Was I slowly becoming a cyber psycho after all? I had thought, especially with my power, that I would be more or less resistant to such things. That kind of thinking was kind of presumptuous, though.
I sat there for a while thinking. I didn't want to hurt anyone. I just wanted to be safe. Honestly, while I did want to find those responsible, I didn't precisely want to make an example out of them. I didn't think that would work in any event; if anything, it would just cause the danger level to increase wildly.
"Upgrading my Kerenzikov. Ninja man definitely had a Kerenzikov, I think, too. And his version was better than mine but not so better that it completely outclassed me. Unless he was just playing with me all along," I mused aloud.
I've had ideas of how to upgrade the Kerenzikov since I got it. I didn't include them in the minor changes I had made because it would cause me to have to do periodic maintenance on the device, which was implanted into my spine. But that was looking less and less important. I'd take sitting on my tummy while I used microwaldos on my back for an hour a month over getting murdered. I had been too overconfident, thinking myself special. I was, but not in a way that made me especially dangerous compared to the monsters of this world. There were stories that Adam Smasher one vee one'd a main battle tank, ripping it apart like it was nothing. And Morgan Blackhand, someone who was allegedly mostly biological, could one vee one Smasher.
It didn't make any sense, but I knew I was nowhere in their league, and I probably never would be unless I turned myself into a literal mech. The sense in the back of my head was telling me we could easily replace one of our arms with a giant canon, like the Earth game Megaman. I nixed that idea.
The thermoptical camouflage that the ninja was utilising made me want something similar. It wouldn't necessarily make me more dangerous, but it would make me a lot better at both running away and not being noticed. That was a highly restricted piece of cybernetics that was installed underneath the skin. Rather than early versions that would work similarly to a chameleon and therefore required you to be naked, modern thermoptic camouflage utilised a special field that warped light around the user. Not entirely, otherwise, the user would be blind, but enough that you could easily stand in front of someone and they not notice you if you didn't move. I didn't know how it worked at all, and my tinkering sense wasn't giving me very many ideas, although I was very interested in the concept. This, I would have to buy.
