I could modify it after receiving it to add an insulating layer, so I wouldn't be knocked unconscious by a taser again, too. But I'd have to get this installed by a Ripperdoc, for sure. I might be down for a little self-surgery, but not of this level.
As I started to consider how I could modify my brain to prevent a trainable brain image scanner from working, Wakako called me, so I answered on the second ring, "Hello, Mrs Okada."
"Hello, Taylor. I have some, perhaps, bad news. It's only been about six hours, but the client that you escorted around Japantown has dropped off the face of the Earth. I didn't mention this earlier, but one of the client's requests was that the merc should be a pretty girl, if possible. Honestly, that isn't an unusual request, especially with bodyguard jobs, and it doesn't have anything to do with your end of the job, so I don't generally tell my mercs. It tends to just alienate them, rightfully, from the client," the old woman told me, raising an eyebrow at the end.
I blinked. If someone had a profile on me and had me under surveillance, then they could have easily approached Wakako with a more or less custom gig tailored to me specifically. A tour of Japantown, where I lived as a bodyguard. A medical speciality and to introduce them to Ripperdocs, which I had business with. The pretty girl part didn't really fit, though.
I replied, "That is suspicious."
"It gets slightly weirder. I was curious, so I had a discussion with the doctor he saw. The implant he had installed was a high-end Faceless system," she said, with her tone indicating slight incredulity.
That was quite weird. A Faceless implant was a name for a type of implant of a similar class. It used to be the brand name, but the original manufacturer went out of business. Still, it had already reached the Vernacular and became a generic name for all types of implants of this type, like some people that called every carbonated beverage a Nicola.
They were, almost universally, illegal. Even more so than the thermoptical camouflage I wanted to buy. They were used to radically change facial structure and skin tone in an instant. A person could go from an old European man to a young Hindi girl more or less instantly, so long as their stature was the same. They were a staple of bad films and braindances, even more so than the monowire I used.
I nodded slowly, "Okay, that is very suspicious but weird and not definitive. Maybe it was a coincidence, and he created this whole identity with you just for the purpose of getting a Faceless installed. That sounds like something someone who would want a Faceless, without anyone knowing, would do."
"That's true. I just thought you should know," she came back.
I stretched back in my chair, "Speaking of high-end illegal implants. Do you have the contacts to get me a middle to high-end thermoptic subdermal system?"
That caused her to grin and ask, "Are you planning to broaden your horizons into assassinations, Miss I'm-Not-Interested-In-Edgerunning?"
"No! I just feel... it would be good to run away. Running away is a great tactical strategy," I told her, embarrassed.
She chuckled and said, "The old versions that only bend visible light, the pure optical camo, can be had pretty cheaply. Like five thousand or so. A middle-tier version of the current generation, which blocks infrared and bends light in the radar spectrum, would be four times that."
"Put me down for the latter version. I'm already going to be wrecking my savings with a bunch of other things," I sighed to her.
The doorbell rang, and I quickly ended my call with Wakako to check the cameras. It was RCS. I grabbed Alt-Dad's trusty Militech Crusher as well as two of the specimen samples from the freezer.
The courier was a bit taken aback to see a girl in her pyjamas with a shotgun, but he didn't comment about it and let me seal the two tubes into the small dry-ice-lined soft pack. I gave him the delivery instructions, having already paid the full balance online, and bid him a good day.
I considered asking Wakako for help tracking down armless after I got his genome sequenced, but I still wasn't one hundred per cent sure she wasn't behind my attack. I just thought it was much more likely that she wasn't, but in the event that she was and I asked her help to track someone down using their genome, that person would be out of town or at the bottom of the waterfront forthwith. Besides, I had a very Tinkery idea of how I could do it myself. In fact, I was itching to do it, having to hold my hands to avoid making a go of it right now, even when I knew I didn't have everything I needed. I had to make a few shopping trips first.
It was fortunate that I didn't have to go back to work for three more days because I awoke from my fugue to discover over twenty hours had passed.
My work area looked completely wrecked, but there were two things on my table. The first looked like something out of an HR Giger painting and was alive. It looked like a throbbing, pulsating cyst suspended in a mysterious-looking semi-gel-like liquid, with a small, narrowing flesh tube protruding out into a dryer area.
It looked completely, utterly disgusting, and I had a moment where I was questioning all of my life choices. I didn't entirely know how I made it, but I did know what it did. It gave birth to flies, basically. Fuck, I would totally have a kill order on myself if I was back in Brockton Bay; although each fly was sterile, this entire setup looked so creepy they'd do it anyway.
A bloodhound didn't actually detect blood but scents. And it could detect individual particles in the air at utterly inconceivably small concentrations. These flies were similar, except they were created only to be attracted to a specific person. One side of the cyst already had one of the specimen Q-tips with the armless guy's blood jammed into an open orifice.
These guys didn't have a long range, but I could make thousands of them and deposit them in various parts of the city. Not only would they tend to concentrate on any, even microscopic, levels of the blood of the target in the surroundings, but they would find the person himself, even if he wasn't bleeding anymore if they were close enough
The second thing was a small handheld tablet of some kind. The flies emitted a bio-electrical radio signal that this device could detect and track. Again, not over long distances but within a kilometre or a kilometre and a half. After releasing a suitably large swarm, I would have to drive over large parts of the city with the tracking device. However, if the man was still in Night City, I would definitely find him.
I was tired but not sleepy. I saw a bottle of tic-tacs and realised I must have dosed myself with the stimulant during my fugue. Sighing, I spent two hours cleaning up my work area as the... hive mother-thing laid egg after egg. They wouldn't hatch until they received a suitably large dose of UV light, so I needed to keep them inside and only transport them in an enclosed, dark space.
A text message from Professor Hildago sent over twelve hours ago had an attachment which I downloaded. The first was the sequenced genome of Armless. The second was the sequenced proteins on the Gemini.
Raven didn't publish their data-encoding schemas, but there were only so many different ways you could encode digital data with DNA and RNA, and I decoded it only after fifteen minutes of attempts.
Most of the data was the genome of the skin replacement. Still, there was a header with binary data encoded within. It was a Raven Gemini, after all; it was manufactured a little more than eighteen months ago in the United Kingdom. And it was listed as "CUSTOM." However, the data fields where the serial number should be were completely blank.
Slurping up some instant yakisoba, I couldn't help but be a little disappointed. I was hoping for more data, at least a serial number. But I suppose I got some data. It was a relatively new model and custom, and that meant it probably cost a fortune. Plus, the owner paid Raven enough to obfuscate the serial number, too.
Anyway, I looked at it; it looked like the blonde ninja man was bad news. The type of person who could buy and sell me with his pocket change.
Perhaps it was stupid to try to track the mercenaries he hired down. I couldn't exactly stop, but caution was definitely in order.
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Walls closing in
AN: I had written a small section that was in the POV of Taylor in Brockton Bay, but the word count got too large to be included in this chapter so I am releasing it as a sidestory, which will be the next "chapter" here on
"Mrs Pegpig! STOP! " I yelled, getting a glance over the shoulder from the pigeon criminal as she casually ate another fly. Her consort grabbed one, too and flew away from me, out the window and landing in their nest that they had made on the side of my wall. He was always the scaredy-bird of the two.
She grabbed and ate another fly while watching me. The bitch! I had moved the FlyHive into my private apartment as I had a few patients from the Megabuilding I had to see, and I didn't want anybody to see my crime against nature. I thought it would be fine, as all my windows had a very effective UV polarisation filter installed on them. However, I forgot that Mrs Pegpig and her consort came in and out of one of them. I left the window unlocked, and they just pecked it open when they wanted to come inside, and the sunlight from their window cracked open was enough to hatch a few flies.
I didn't have enough time to wait around for the larvae and pupa life stages of a fly, so my monstrosity made extra large eggs and out popped a more or less fully-grown adolescent fly. They still lived for about the same period of time, a little less than a month, but I didn't expect I would need them all that long.
I ran over to the FlyHive and glanced at it, sighing. Thankfully, I had already moved most of the eggs into small plastic containers, so I hadn't lost the full production of the past evening. But these hundred or so eggs would have to be placed outside, as I didn't fancy my apartment having a lot of flies in it.
Many people expected that pigeons were herbivores, subsisting off seeds and such, but the truth was that they'd eat insects, too, gratefully if they could find them. This thing must have looked like a free buffet to Mrs Pegpig. "How many did you eat? You're going to get fat!" I scolded her as I scooped the rest of the eggs into a small plastic container.
How should I dispose of these, then? I may as well get some use out of them. My apartment was on a corner, so I actually had a number of windows. I shifted over to the living room and opened a separate window, far away from the Pegpig nest, and taped the plastic to the side of the wall. The sun would cause the eggs to hatch shortly, and they'd fly away. Problem solved. I'd look at the tracking device later and see how they moved. I didn't particularly know a lot about fly behaviour, but I expected them to stick around the same area they hatched in the absence of detecting Armless' blood or person.
After that, I shoved the FlyHive into my sock drawer. It was empty right now because most of my clothes were in a hamper or even strewn across the floor near my bed. Sighing, I resolved to do laundry tonight. Adulting was hard.
As I worked, I quietly sang along to an utterly ridiculous girl band from Korea, whose lyrics were a mish-mash of English and Korean. When they shifted to a section with Korean lyrics, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, I would just hum awkwardly instead of making a fool out of myself in trying to make my mouth pronounce the unusual phonemes.
The microscopic binocular vision I had added into my cybernetic eyes, combined with a set of fast-moving microwaldoes allowed me to make nearly microscopic changes to anything I was working on, although I didn't quite have enough expertise to use the system on anything but cybernetics at the moment.
The delivery from Wakako arrived before I had to return to work, and after looking it over, it appeared to be direct from the factory, so I had no complaints at all and quickly got to work making adjustments to it.
For any kind of subdermal implant, there was some customisation necessary. With a newly bought implant, the kit included its own customisation and microfabrication system that the cybernetic surgeon would load with data, usually 3D scans, from the patient in order to have a correctly fitted implant system.
It wasn't that second-hand subdermal systems couldn't be reused or reinstalled in other people, but it took a lot more artistry without the included factory fabrication system, which was, of course, specifically designed to be single-use.
At the very least, I wanted to protect myself from all the threats that I experienced in my kidnapping incident. Although there wasn't a lot I could do against super-fast super-skilled ninja assassins that weren't susceptible to traditional chemical or biological threat vectors, I could do something about that electrical taser-like attack, as well as the brain scanner.
My changes to the thermoptical system would protect me from both, although only slightly for the brain scan. Adding an insulative layer and incorporating it with the thermoptical system was slightly challenging, but I had accomplished most of it after about eight hours of work, including time for taking breaks. I had to test three different potential materials, only one of which would work with the implant's microfabrication system.
I still had probably at least that much more work rewriting both the automated installation code as well as the installation instructions for the surgeon. As much as eighty to ninety per cent of most cybernetics implantations were handled by a doctor's automated tools, but there was definitely additional care to be taken when the doctor installed this in me.
There was a saying: jack of all trades, master of none. That somewhat described the additional insulative layers I was adding to the thermoptical system. It wouldn't actually impair the stealth features of the system at all, so perhaps saying master of none wasn't appropriate, but I couldn't get a top-down super effective insulative layer when adding on to an existing product. The stealth field emitters were already taking up a lot of space, after all.
For one, it would always be kind of difficult to reach total electrical insulation when my real skin was still going to be retained and attached to my body. I could add insulative layers below the skin, but the skin was still connected to my vasculature, and through that, an electrical current could access the rest of my body. So it was more correct to call the addition to the implant a high form of resistance.
