I wasn't even sure what I would find or if anything I found would be useful. Right now, it was more for the revenge more than anything, which I understood wasn't really a rational reason to pursue and kidnap someone, not to mention spending a lot of money to do it. But sometimes, you couldn't be rational. I was done allowing bullies to do something to me with no response at all.
They had kidnapped me and invaded the privacy of my mind so I would do the same thing. That was pretty much all there was to it, when it came down to it. Maybe I would find a way to trace the ninja, but maybe not. I honestly wasn't really sure I wanted to track him down in the first place. Our first meeting didn't go that well, and I got the impression he was playing pattycake with me, not taking me seriously at all.
"Alright, well, you can call me when you 'find the guy'," she said, grinning as I showed her to the door. I nodded, and after she left, I glanced around.
Well, I should unpack everything, inventory what I was keeping and change it out with my old equipment; then maybe I'd open the clinic to see if there was anyone amongst the masses of people in the Megabuilding that needed my services. Usually, I would get a text asking for an appointment, but I sometimes had walk-ups too.
First, though, she grabbed David's wheapon and threw it in her living room.
My first real ping on the fly-o-meter came a week in and in Watson. I noticed a very large grouping of several thousand flies at a guarded corporate campus. I couldn't get inside. The campus was for a large Japanese medical research Corporation, which was made up of a number of Japanese corps banding together for this new venture in Night City.
They were all small corporations if you took them individually, but they formed together into a rough keiretsu that intended to take advantage of the market in Night City since the eight-hundred-pound gorilla known as Arasaka was not around.
I doubted very much that he lived there, so he must have a job there, which tracked when I saw flies swarming one of the guard shacks. I frowned, watching through binoculars as a man in a one-piece worker's outfit sprayed chemicals in and around the guard shack. I would stop placing as many flies here.
I had a vector on the streets of how my target approached his workplace, and that could be useful. I'd drive down that direction and place some more flies well away from this campus.
" Hai, I'd like to move onto the next topic, if that is okay," a middle-aged man of European descent said in Japanese in a small conference room, glancing around at four other people there.
The leader nodded, " Ah, the plague of insects. Dozo."
" Hai. We received complaints about an unusual attack of swarming insects by our security people a couple of days ago. At first, we just called the exterminators, as bugs and Night City are not exactly unusual," the first man said, getting slight smiles from his compatriots.
The leader nodded and indicated he should continue.
"Well, we probably would never have known if not for my subordinate, who is something of an..." he paused, searching for a word and then finally settling on the English, "dipterologist. It is his hobby. That is the study of insects, specifically flies. When the man told me I had to cancel my one o'clock to hear something about flies... well," he shook his head ruefully, slowly.
He then nodded and continued,but not before setting what looked like a small jam jar on the table, with air holes poked in the tin top, " Apparently, this is the intruder. One of the few survivors. My subordinate at first thought it was a brand new species of fly, so he was quite interested, but quickly felt that instead, it was an artificial construct."
The leader nodded, looking both interested and concerned, " Interesting."
"Yes, quite. Anyway, he had captured a few of the survivors that made their way into the main campus and had one of the lab techs sequence their genomes. They are all definitely modified house flies. Moreover, they are all sterile clones. Identical. Also, our machines could not decode the extraneous portions of its genome," the man concluded, sitting with his hands on his lap.
The leader was a scientist himself, although it had been years since he actually had time for it. Still, his eyebrows rose, " An obfuscated genome? Is this an espionage or sabotage attempt, then, with a novel chimaera?" His thoughts went to Arasaka, as their group was kind of stepping on its toes by trying to profit due to their lack of presence rather than playing nice and subserviently like most of the "competition" did in Japan.
The man that had given the briefing nodded, "Hai, we think so. Although with so few survivors — the spray those exterminators use is really, really effective — we can't precisely figure out why they were so interested in the campus or why they didn't penetrate deeper sooner."
The leader hummed, glanced around and came to a decision. One small jam jar would be getting a private plane ride back to Japan, where they collectively had a lot more resources and equipment. Sadly, these attempts at studying the contents would not go any better despite the expense, and eventually, the Fly Swarm of '64 would go into the annals as one of the Seven Mysteries of the Night City Biomed Campus.
It took me one more week and many thousands of total flies to 'find the guy.' Longer than I was expecting, by far, and long enough that my first generation was getting close to the end of their natural lifespan. I hadn't bothered trying to devise longer-living flies; that sounded like potentially a longer project in the first place because a number of the fly's limits were mechanical ones, and already the flies the FlyHive made were slightly different than one would expect, with a larger head and more area for the homing organ.
I wouldn't need Kiwi's help at first to find this first man's identity, either. He lived in a small apartment building, and its security was not the greatest. I had already used my exceptional beauty, grace and invisibility to penetrate into the small manager's office while my mark was at work and the manager was out. His computer system hadn't been updated since the time of the red skies, probably, so it was easy to hack even with my meagre skills.
"Albert? Who names their child Albert?" I mused as I perused the information on each tenant and homed in on my target after watching video recordings of the man going to and from his apartment. It was definitely the right guy, as he had been missing an arm until about a week ago. I wonder why it took him so long to get a replacement, but it didn't particularly matter.
Sneaking out of the office and out of the building, I casually gave a small pump-style aerosoliser a few squeezes on and around the door. It was a deactivation pheromone, which would cause rapid programmed apoptosis in the flies. I didn't need them anymore, and Mr Armess might have already noticed he was popular with them. If any came around the building and entered through the front door at least, they would quickly die.
I had his data now, but I would call Kiwi in to assist me in finding his comrades. All I could really do was pay background investigation sites myself, and I figured Kiwi might have more sources.
"He has a part-time job as a security guard in Watson, but most of his money comes from the fact that he's a regular member of a local merc team. I don't know them, and I'd say they're at least one tier above the boys and us as far as their reputation and the types of jobs they receive," Kiwi told me straight up over the phone a day later.
I said firmly, "My target is the leader of the mercenary team."
"That's Gabriel Blaze... I wonder if that is his real name... yeah, it looks like it. Kind of unusual sounds like a gimmick name," Kiwi told me, amused.
I nodded, "Well, that's him, then. Do I need to tell Ruslan about wanting to hire you guys?"
She shook her head on the vidcall, "Nah. I'll talk to him and get back to you with a friends and family price. I'm guessing it will be between ten and fifteen thousand total, depending on how long we need to watch him and how we plan on taking him." She paused and then asked, "You said you had some sort of drug to make him forget. Do you think you could provide an anaesthetic similar to that grenade? Maybe like in darts or something to add to a drink or meal? Taking people alive and uninjured is a real pain."
I clucked my tongue and nodded, "Possibly. You'll have to give me a list of his implants ahead of time, so I can dose one that will actually take him down. Also, I don't know anything about darts." I was pretty sure I could make one that would knock him out pretty much regardless, but I wanted to indicate my abilities were more modest.
"I can bring you an example, and don't worry — we'll definitely have his deets. Otherwise, we won't pull the trigger on the op if he is a total unknown," Kiwi said brightly.
Almost two weeks of off-and-on observations, mostly using cameras and analysed by automated tools, and the three of them had an operations plan, and I had timed it for my next hitch of five days off. I got a fairly good deal on the price I was paying because the surveillance didn't need to be in person, and they could take other gigs while waiting for the perfect time to strike on mine.
It was pretty simple; I had to admit. Originally they wanted to use a dart, like Kiwi had intimated, but they discovered an excellent opportunity after observing him for several days. He had a pretty set schedule on fridays and the weekends. He would get a burrito from his favourite place, and then each time, he would get a lemonade-flavoured carbonated drink at this one specific vending machine.
Instead of darting him, Kiwi hacked the vending machine. We had to take out all of the Diet Nicola Classic from its hopper, replacing it with one specially prepared drugged lemonade. Then, when he paid, he approached the vending machine, and Kiwi would reprogram it to dispense the drugged beverage to him.
So, here I was, sitting in the passenger seat of Ruslan's van while Kiwi was in the driver's seat. "He's approaching the vending machine as usual. Change! He got the special lemonade." With that, she put the van into gear to slowly creep forward, following along at a side street.
"Man, he can eat a burrito fast. He's gulped the lemonade," Ruslan said, then a few moments later, he yelled, "Come quick, he's about to keel over! That shit acts fast!" I nodded. It definitely did act a lot faster than most sedative drugs a person swallowed had a right to do.
Kiwi put the pedal to the metal and drove a full block before squealing to a halt, Ruslan and Jean dragging an unconscious man into the back of the van. Man, I always thought his van looked like it should have a "Free Candy" sign on the side, but this was really making it obvious. Also, that worked a lot simpler than I thought. I guessed not everything with these guys was a cluster fuck, just most things.
We drove to, amusingly enough, the same building they had interrogated me at. Nobody had taken down the faraday cage, and I felt it would be necessary. Plus, nobody looked at us weirdly for dragging a man into an abandoned building in Japantown.
Since I was going to be in the cage with him, I wasn't being as polite. He was shackled hand and feet with what would have been low-level Brute-level restraints back in Brockton Bay, along with the brain-scanning helmet that I had got working a couple of weeks ago. It began working right away. I couldn't download this man's memories, or anything, although that sounded like a pretty cool idea. But it didn't need the same interaction that the device used on me did.
Kiwi spent some time hacking his operating system thoroughly to disable it temporarily. It wouldn't do for him to trigger a contingency to begin transmitting right after we finished, record the entire interrogation, or even just takes notes on the Note app. He had a pair of Kiroshi Mk1s, so after she finished hacking his operating system, I casually disabled all user input with them with a small tool. He would be able to see but not use any of the Kiroshi-specific apps. He wouldn't even be able to move his eyeballs; he'd have to move his whole head to change what he was looking at.
Before he woke up, I also injected him with the tinkertech memory disconnector. It was unsure how much he would remember when he woke up. He might have forgotten everything since he woke up, or he might remember leaving his apartment. It depended on how much he has already put in his long-term memory as of right now.
"It's a shame he needs to be awake," Kiwi said as she watched me finish setting up by putting a set of headphones on him as well as carefully opening his eyelids so that he could stare at a screen. People often thought that when you slept, your visual senses were turned off, but this wasn't exactly the case. It would be sufficient for the brain scanner to run through the self-tests and get a sufficient baseline. Known sounds and visuals were piped into his ears and eyes, and the helmet used that to do most of the work.
I glanced at her. It was a shame that he had to be awake. I thought about it and couldn't think of any way that would work. Perhaps in subsequent versions.
After about five minutes, I took his headphones off and said, "Alright, I'm going to wake him up." They nodded and made sure all of their disguises were on, even if he couldn't turn in their direction.
Humming, I forced an inhaler into his mouth and triggered a puff. This was an antiagonist to the anaesthetic I used and had a half-life of about fifteen minutes, so I wouldn't be able to put this guy back to sleep for probably a little over a half hour or longer.
Stepping back, I sat in the same comfortable chair they had put me in. He got the metal one and was chained to the side of the cage. He glanced around groggily for a moment before saying, "What... the fuck... you're that girl."
"I'm that girl!" I agreed in a forced cheery tone. "You might or might not recognise what you have on your head, but you know what they say, right? What is good for the gander is good for the goose? I have some questions for you."
I paused, waiting to see if he would keel over dead or something. I didn't think he was anything but a mercenary, but from everything I've been told and the assumptions I have made, I felt that the standard "defence" to an interrogation under brain scan was an automated suicide implant.
Not only to prevent secrets from getting out, but I thought that the current state of the art in terrible things a person can be made to do against their will favoured, at present, conditioning over the capability to detect it right away, so it was possible to make double-agents with sufficient mental "coercion." I didn't want to know what was involved with that, but my medical sense gave me an idea anyway. Still, I thought that there likely was a degradation of utility on such prepared people, anyway, so I doubted they were useful for anything but sabotage or assassinations.
