"Thank you. This will help a lot. If you'll excuse me, I have to go beat our sys admin about the head and neck. He should have already been on top of this and had this recommendation for me after the last uhh.. incident," he told me in a friendly manner, but the way he popped his knuckles audibly and rotated his neck, limbering up, made me think he was actually being literal here.
I stood up as he did and said, "Of course. I'll send you the invoice. I run on a net30 billing schedule, of course." He waved that off, and we both exited his office, and I quickly departed Clouds before I had to hear some poor system administrator squeal as Mr Jin set upon him.
Mrs Okada has rented out one of the private rooms at The Golden Duck for the meeting she asked me to attend, and I took that as a good sign. I quite liked this restaurant, after all.
The pretty Chinese girl acting as a hostess ushered me into a back room, and I was surprised to see Wakako already in attendance, along with a few of her gorillas. Given how valuable her time was, I was expecting to have to wait a significant time for her and had already planned on what to order.
"Taylor, Taylor come here and have a seat," she said with a grin. I did as she asked, although I wasn't too comfortable in the room she had picked. Although The Golden Duck was a Chinese restaurant, this was clearly a Japanese-themed room which wasn't that surprising given that we were deep in Japantown. I had to sit seiza -style on the floor on a cushion in front of the table, which made me feel both slightly uncomfortable as well as underdressed. It was a room for tea ceremony more than eating, but I didn't care and planned to eat the most of a whole Peking duck here, no matter how uncouth it seemed. I was hungry.
Still, I smiled, "I take it by how pleased you sound that your own investigations bore fruit?"
"Yes! Not that I doubted you for a second," she lied smoothly, for politeness' sake.
I chuckled and nodded, "What did you do to confirm that the drug worked? Did you get some MRSA cases from local hospitals, as I suggested?"
She shook her head, "No. That was a nice but naive idea. The miraculous cure of a number of hard cases would have been noticed. Instead, I decided on the opposite approach." She slid over a few actual Manila folders on the table and then, as I leafed through them, started to make tea.
Opposite approach? Wouldn't that be infecting known-healthy people and then trying to cure them? I nodded; sure enough, that was what she had done, and she had used a number of bacterial infections to do it, from staph to VD to...
I gaped like a fish, "A fucking bioweapon, Wakako?!" First of all, how did she get weaponised anthrax? Did I want to know? No, I probably did not.
She shrugged, looking not at all upset, "You said it could cure any bacterial infection. Sure, the MRSA was pretty impressive, but I needed something to knock the socks off my Biotechnica contact."
I supposed that definitely would. And although weaponised Anthrax here was a lot more dangerous than even the weaponised Anthrax of my previous world, it was still fairly difficult to spread bioweapon. It wasn't like a virus that could spread out of control even under careful bio-safety security controls; bacteria just didn't work that way.
I sighed, "Were there any problems with the microfauna replacement therapy?" There didn't seem to be based on their file, but not much was mentioned except a private doctor administered the therapy and monitored the patients during recovery.
"Not at all; that went as normal. And yes, I definitely paid all of these volunteers well, or rather we did since we're partners in this venture," she said smugly.
That was true; the profit split was after expenses. I'd no doubt see exactly how much she paid them when I looked at the books.
I sipped my tea and then said after a while, "I want a Peking duck; I'm hungry."
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We're the Neon Angels!
Rather than look annoyed with me for wanting to turn the meeting into an actual dinner, Wakako just shrugged and called the petite hostess girl back into the room briefly and spoke with her quietly. The hostess nodded rapidly and departed the room.
Wakako sat back down and sipped her tea, and said, "So, for our next step, we will need a larger sample of the chemical, and I'll need to forward it to my contact at Biotechnica, but he's on temporary medical leave. Apparently, he was wounded in the line of duty recently and had to get a replacement arm."
I nearly snorted my tea, which caused Wakako to raise an eyebrow at me. Anything I saw at work was to be confidential, and I could be terminated for disclosing anything, but I figured that Wakako was the type to not throw intelligence sources under the bus, "I responded to that call at work. There was some kind of an organised and disciplined mercenary force attacking a Biotechnica convoy. The mercs had three Soviet armoured vehicles, which we demolished. His boss, I assume, was DoA when we got there, but I ended up transporting, I presume, your guy with a severed arm below the elbow. He was quite lucky, actually, was hit by one of the HMGs and not the fifty-seven-millimetre high-explosive shell firing autocannon like his boss."
Still, now, by chance, I knew her contact's full name. I didn't know if that would be useful, but I expected Wakako to insulate both sides of the transaction as much as possible, but now I knew at least one side of it. If her guy tried to fuck me over, I could try to get some sort of revenge. That was defeatist talk, though.
Our order arrived so quickly that I was very sure that they had redirected some other person's duck to our table, and it was the same girl bringing it in. She smiled at me as she leaned down and practically bent over to place the duck on the very low table, and my eyes were briefly drawn, inexorably, to the gap in her kimono that was on display and the smooth pale skin hiding underneath it. It seems like it was true, and you weren't supposed to wear foundational garments while wearing a kimono. I had read that online, but I didn't know that I believed it. I spent a moment thinking about that while she walked off, half-staring at her retreating form as she departed.
In any other neighbourhood, it would be kind of weird for a hostess at a Chinese restaurant to wear a kimono, I thought, but in Japantown, it was pretty common at all of the higher-end places, regardless of what kind of food was served. It was the same at Famous Linh's Pizza, which was nearby, too.
"... so what do you think?" Wakako's voice brought me out of my reverie.
I blinked, "Uh... what? I'm sorry; something distracted me. What did you say?"
I'm not sure if Wakako's smug smirk was excessively smug or not because, honestly, she always had that sort of expression on her face, but she said, "Somethings, clearly. I was saying that due to my contact recovering and his new responsibilities, it might take two or three months at the minimum before we hear back. Is that going to be a problem?"
I hummed. I didn't want to give them an infinite amount of time because it was theoretically possible that they could try to string us along while attempting to engineer a novel synthesis for it. I wasn't under any illusions; the very first thing they'd do would be to put the sample under a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer to get its chemical composition and start working backwards from there.
But I nodded, "That probably is fine, but we're going to have to think about number two or three choices if it's much longer than that. Do you think your contact got a promotion, then?" I wondered if he was behind the attack; a dangerous-looking but ultimately simple-to-repair wound like losing an arm would be the perfect way to make people believe you weren't involved.
She snorted, "I doubt it. He'll have, for a while, an increased responsibility but without any of the power his predecessor had. A terrible position for him, and I doubt that he'll get his boss' job, which for our purposes is ideal, I think." I tilted my head to the side curiously at that, and Wakako noticed and shrugged, "We'll ask a small enough sum that he could have financed it before this; I'll ask for five million but might allow myself to be negotiated down to four or four and a quarter. That is a deal that he could have authorised before his boss died, and with no boss to take the credit, he will be definitely motivated to seal the deal with alacrity. It'll be a shot in the arm. His precarious position will entice him to make a swift conclusion to our deal once he is in a position to realise the worth of the transaction."
I nodded slowly, taking a bite of some of the crispy skin of the Peking duck. A lot of people made a mistake and tried to eat the skin and the meat at the same time, but it was really a better experience to eat them separately. They were a different experience, and it was better not to comingle them too much. The Golden Duck were artists in making what was undoubtedly scop mimic the taste and texture of actual Peking duck, as it tasted very close to what I remembered the one time my parents and I had eaten it in Brockton Bay.
An increase in responsibility without the increase in pay or power to ensure such responsibilities were performed adequately was a perennial nightmare for middle management at most corporations. It was a fairly common situation to find oneself in, actually and the most common analogy I could think of was if you were a line supervisor at a burger joint and your boss quit without notice. For a time, you'd be responsible for the times your employees called out of work, but you didn't have the power to either punish the ones who needed discipline or reward the good workers. You were responsible for staffing the shifts but couldn't do anything to actually ensure the workers came in.
The nirvana of a Corporate manager was power without responsibility, and it was an aspiration that almost none of them would ever achieve. If that was their nirvana, then their hell was responsibility without power. I said carefully, "Just so long as he isn't so precarious that he sees it a better idea to make a swift conclusion to us. " Specifically, me. I didn't think that, regardless of what happened, Wakako herself would risk anything personally. That wasn't how she did business, certainly not for so little a sum.
She sighed and nodded, "That isn't an impossible scenario, even if it is an unlikely one. We will just have to show enough strength to make it seem an unwinning proposition if an in-person meeting is ever required. Also, I'd definitely have him murdered if he tried to betray us."
That last bit would have shocked me a year and a half ago, but now it just seemed obvious. I did believe her, too, not that it really filled me with that much security. I did believe that if he betrayed us that she would have contingencies for it. She'd have to in order to keep her reputation. But that wouldn't prevent me from dying, even if I was "avenged."
These days, if I had the choice between revenge and living a long life, I would pick the latter every day. Sometimes it pained me to admit, but I was no longer Edmond Dantès, even if Winslow High School had been my Château d'If. I felt that if I hadn't been transported bodily into a brand new world with a brand new start, things might have been a lot different, though. I would have definitely tried to throw myself into a heroic identity using my power to try to prove all of them wrong. But here, I had nothing to prove. It, once again, made me feel bad for Alt-Taylor stuck there in Brockton Bay.
I had dreams of changing the world, of course, but I wanted to selfishly prioritise my own freedom, first of all, and that meant I had to live as long as possible. I was such a shitty person sometimes. I knew that I could probably revolutionise parts of the world, and If I really was that interested in improving things, then I should be hoping a Corporation with a very large budget kidnapped me. It'd do more than anything else to accelerate my plans, even if I didn't get much of the benefit of it.
I had ideas about carbon-sequestering, oxygen-producing cyanobacteria that you could release into the ocean that could slowly, over a decade or two, bring the atmospheric conditions back to somewhere close to what they had been before the last Corporate War. That would cause an increase in arable land in the range of a hundred million hectares or more globally. Biotechnica would be the ideal place to set such plans into motion, but I definitely, absolutely did not want to go down that path if I could avoid it.
I tried to rationalise it away because I also had ideas that could see true bio-indefinite mortality be achieved, even if only on a small scale initially, a true halting of senescence instead of the rejuvenation treatments that were the current state of the art, so I could afford longer-term plans. However, that ignored all of the people whose lives could have been immeasurably improved in the interim.
Still, if there was one thing that has changed more than any other about myself since arriving in this world, it would have been my selfishness. If you weren't at least a little bit selfish, I didn't think you'd survive here.
Finishing my duck, I pushed the plate forward slightly and fished a small clear baggy of off-white powder out of my pocket and tossed it in an arc over my decimated duck to plop next to Wakako's tea. I was suddenly glad that I had sealed this bag extra well, as it would have been really embarrassing if the baggy popped open and discharged a cloud of the drug into Wakako's face. She might have had me killed if she didn't make it to a private and sound-proof toilet in time.
I said, "That's two and a half grams. Considering that the normal dose is about three hundred and fifty micrograms to the kilogram of body weight, this should be enough for almost a hundred uses. More than enough for Biotechnica to run an abbreviated RCT."
Although I said RCT, I dearly hoped that they wouldn't utilise an actual control group if they followed Wakako's idea of infecting known-healthy people with various bacterium. Since they'd no doubt test using known, standard bacteria, it is very unlikely that they'd need a control group. There are multiple ways to verify infection took place, and it wasn't like they didn't know what the infection process looked like.
If they duplicated the anthrax infection in a standard clinical double-blind, well, that would just be murder. They likely wouldn't. Corporations were amoral, but they weren't wasteful, but honestly, nothing would surprise me.
Wakako smiled at me and slid the sample into her pocket. She glanced at the duck that I had decimated, "Did you like it?"