I nodded and said absently, "Yes. The Golden Duck does a really good job; it tastes almost indistinguishable from the time I had an actual Peking duck in the past. Not sure how they do it, but I don't think it involves actual ducks at all."
Wakako nodded, "I'm rather curious where you had actual Peking duck, but I suppose it could have been anywhere given your parents. I had to bring in the chefs directly from China, and I pay them more than Trauma Team pays you. But it's worth it."
Oh, she owned the place? Interesting. That explained why she thought it was fine to speak here. And I probably shouldn't have mentioned that the duck was so close to the real thing, as I doubted there were more than a few hundred places in North America that still served actual ducks in decades, although paradoxically, there were still rural people that might as often as not offer to pay you in chickens or a duck instead of currency.
I didn't know what she meant precisely with the quip about my parents, except Alt-Danny had often gone out of the country. Before he worked for Militech, he had been in the NUSA State Department, but that was when Alt-Taylor would have been a toddler.
Wait a second... if she owned the place, did that mean there was probably a claymore mine underneath my pillow or that the teacup was a grenade or something? I thought she was loosening up, inviting me to a meeting outside her strong place. Well, baby steps, I supposed.
I finished the rest of my tea, kind of wishing that I had ordered a Cirrus Cola to go along with my duck, but I didn't want to defile the "tea room" more than I already had.
"Is there anything else we need to go over?" I finally asked a little surprised she had budgeted so much time for the meeting in the first place. Although, I supposed she made time since she was looking at something in the neighbourhood of nine hundred to a million eurodollars profit on our joint venture if everything went well.
She shook her head, and we both stood up at the same time, which was a good thing because my legs were starting to get the pins and needles feeling from sitting with my legs folded underneath my body. I wondered why cats could loaf for hours with no appreciable effects but internally ignored my medical sense trying, happily, to tell me why, which mostly was the square-cube law. It was mostly a mathematics lesson, but in the specialised ways that a mathematical principle impacted biomechanics.
It was the same reason ants could lift ten times their body weight, elephants could not jump and why some larger dinosaurs would have probably died if they fell over from standing.
My power had always been very interested in dinosaurs and didn't understand the concept of a rhetorical question, not at all, so in some respects, it reminded me of the slightly autistic boy I used to play with in elementary school before his family wisened up and moved out of the Bay.
I used this to my advantage and kept a list of things I noticed it seemed interested in, and when the urge to tinker with things or people got especially strong, I'd conduct free-form research on one of the topics, although it was getting harder to avoid
"Thank you for the duck," I told her, despite the fact that I was probably the one essentially paying for it. However, now that I knew she owned this place, I was going to double-check the accounting and have a word if she tried to charge the venture retail price.
We both left the tea room, but I departed the front door, and she went further into the establishment. If I had to guess, she was killing two birds with one stone and had combined our meeting into a likely no-notice inspection of her business.
I awoke suddenly to my phone ringing. I had a simple "artificial stupid" social program screen my calls when I didn't recognise the number, but to interrupt and wake me from the middle of a sleep-inducer cycle meant that firstly, the person had to be someone I knew, and they had to tell the computer that answered my phone that it was urgent and time-critical that they speak to me immediately.
Fuck, I was going to be really upset if someone abused that privilege, as terminating a sleep cycle early caused me to be very drowsy and out of it for several minutes. It was very uncomfortable.
My vision was a little bleary, like I still needed glasses, except that the caller-ID was crisp and high-resolution as usual since it was drawn directly onto my optic nerve. It was Jin. I groaned but answered, "What is it, Jin? I am going to be most wroth with you if this isn't very important."
"Oh, you answered! It's literally life and death, Taylor. I know I told you we wouldn't ask you to chip random chrome in and out of random, sketchy people, but I am hoping, very much, that you will make an exception this time," Mr Jin said, and his tone was unusually intense and slightly emotional.
I fumbled with the sleep inducer on my head and settled for tossing it in the chair as I stood uneasily on my feet. Life and death? I wasn't expecting it to be quite that serious. As I talked, I walked into my bathroom, disrobing as I went and turning on a cold shower to wake me up, "I'm not a Ripperdoc, Mr Jin, so I don't see how I will agree to this, nor how it could be possibly life or death. There are a couple of twenty-four-hour cybernetics clinics in town."
"Just listen. One of my friends and peers in the organisation has had his daughter kidnapped. We don't know where they've taken her, but we've found the... I guess you could say the facilitator that was responsible. However, he has proven somewhat resistant to interrogation. We did get enough info that the data we want is on an embedded data storage nexus, and thankfully our netrunners had already disabled all of his cybernetics, so he couldn't delete it. We are very sure that if we don't find her by sometime this morning, we won't ever find her," he said, speaking very rapidly.
Standing under the cold shower, I woke up more completely as I listened to his plea, "And you think I can dig it out of his skull?" That explained why they didn't go to one of the reputable twenty-four-hour clinics. I could, of course, do exactly that, but there had to be at least one Ripperdoc on Jig-Jig street awake, "There's got to be at least one Ripper available in Japantown that won't ask questions. Dr Tanaka?"
"There really aren't. It's two thirty in the morning on a Sunday, Taylor. The only Ripperdoc we really know is available gives that german Doctor we had issues with in the past a good name. I vastly trust your expertise more than that — we would stick a gun under the nose of one of the docs downtown before we did that. That is, in fact, our next step, but that is asking for all kinds of other issues if we have to do that," Mr Jin said in a more patient tone.
Turning the shower off I towelled off. I didn't want a real shower to clean myself, just enough to wake myself up. I was quiet on the phone for a long moment, and finally, I said, "If things are as you say, I'll help you. But I don't precisely trust your organisation. It's clear that this is important to you, but it just occurred to me that someone with a psychological profile of me might come up with a story very similar to this to get my help. You need to send me info right now so that I can verify through someone that isn't you that this guy you're going to drag into my clinic is a Very Bad Man. Otherwise, no deal."
He blinked for a moment before nodding, "That won't be an issue. I can send you his dossier right now; it includes all biometrics which you can no doubt confirm when he gets to your place. Do you have access to any kind of background investigation site? Any of them will pull up his record, and it will be very obvious that he is, as you say, A Very Bad Man."
I quickly approved a file transfer, my Zetatech ICE quarantining the file in an isolated virtual machine just in case. It did have everything he said, and as I started to gather something to put on, using my toes to grab my pyjamas and toss them into the hamper, I paid for a simple background on my gumshoe site, using the attached name and biometric data.
The information came back, and it was more or less the same but much less detailed. Even the cheap background I had paid for included a rap sheet that was longer than my arm, including a number of pending charges that included kidnapping and murder in a number of jurisdictions on this coast ranging from LA here to Seattle.
"Why are you so sure you won't be able to recover her? Is this guy a Scav?" I asked as I wiggled into a pair of pants.
I heard Mr Jin make an ambiguous noise and say, "Ano... not probably like you are thinking. It's more a human trafficking type of operation, we believe. If we can't get her before they transport her out of the city... well, it will become very hard, and I personally would rather just be disassembled if I was a pretty fourteen-year-old girl." That was the first time I had ever heard Mr Jin use the common Japanese disfluency "ano." It was kind of like the Japanese version of the English "uhmm." Also, ugh. It did sort of match the guy's rap sheet, though.
"Okay, so long as this is the guy your men drag into my clinic, I'll do it," I reiterated, downloading both versions of the man's dossier I had onto my non-emulated drive after scanning it six ways from Sunday for malware. Both versions included some biometric data. I couldn't do rapid genome sequencing, but the fingerprints would be good enough. My optics had enough resolution to take a person's fingerprints just by staring at their fingers, and I had an app to compare someone's fingers to a provided exemplar set.
There was no way they could have gone to the complicated nanosurgical process of faking the guy's fingerprints and then be on a time crunch for me to remove data from his cybernetics.
"Okay, they're on their way. You just have to promise not to destroy the data. If you think you can't handle it, tell the guys, and we'll move to plan B," he said very seriously. I supposed plan B was putting a gun under the nose of a real, certified Ripperdoc.
I was not too concerned, but I tried to express that I was humble, "Don't worry. I'm not going to let some little girl be sold off to some brothel in Timbuktu or something."
"Probably Dubai, given this guy's previous work," Mr Jin said angrily. That wouldn't be very good. It wasn't exactly surprising, but when oil dried up in the Middle East in the late nineties, the region quickly spiralled into madness, with regional nuclear exchanges by multiple sides turning most of the Middle East into an impoverished, uninhabitable hellscape.
Some people, like the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis, had long ago diversified enough that they weren't rendered into paupers when it happened. Still, it had only been in the last ten years that the former gleaming jewel of the Arabian Peninsula had been widely resettled, but it was still considered kind of a lawless zone where anything and everything could be traded. There had to be more than a single girl taken if Mr Jin thought that they'd actually ship them that far. It wasn't like there wasn't a market for such things closer to home.
They were polite enough to ring her doorbell at least, and I said, "They're here. I'll tell you how it goes." Then I hung up, switched to the intercom and said, "Come on in. I'll be out in just a moment," before triggering the door to open.
Drying my hair, I grabbed a scrunchie and tied it up in a simple curly ponytail to keep it out of my way before I stepped out into the clinic. They had dumped my "patient" into the combination operating chair and biobed, and I blinked at him as he was missing both of his legs, some of his fingers, and his eyes. And he was unconscious, although I thought it was likely not from anaesthesia.
Well, clearly, the Tyger Claws had not gotten the memo that torture was not really an effective way to extract information. I'd have to stabilise him before I could operate. At least he had enough fingers that I could actually check his fingerprints. Otherwise, I didn't know what I would have done. I mean, he sort of looked like the guy but not enough that I would have said with any amount of certainty that he was.
There were three Tyger Claws in here with me; two were of the dumb brute variety, but the third... I glanced at him, noticing the cyberdeck installed at the base of his skull, "Were you the netrunner that disabled all of his cybernetics? If so, please send me everything you have about his system and what software you installed."
The skinny man of Japanese descent stood straighter as if I was his Drill Sergeant and said, "Hai!" and immediately started transferring me a number of large files over wireless. My Zetatech started blaring as it heuristically identified several of them as malware, and I narrowed my eyes until I realised he was sending me exact copies of the deployable attack programs he had used, not their malware payloads. Well, that was interesting. I'd keep those after I made sure it wasn't some kind of double fake-out with extra malware installed on the executables. For now, though, they could stay quarantined.
Gloria often told me I was one of the most paranoid people she knew when it came to system security, and it was because the idea of something directly connected to and possibly affecting my brain would have been incomprehensible to me three years ago. I didn't think I was paranoid; I thought everyone else was too used to the risks that cybernetics, especially the type I had, posed and weren't cognisant enough of the risk, but that was just a difference of opinion. There were people that thought as I did, but they were either all netrunners themselves or a particular type of doomsday prepper.
The type that might have called themselves a "Sovereign Citizen" back in my old world, but, surprisingly, that subculture didn't precisely exist here, at least anymore. It had in the past, but the NUSA once publically declared that anyone who called themselves such, well, the NUSA would accede to their demands and treat them as Sovereign and deal with them the way that two Sovereign entities always settled disagreements since time immemorial: armed conflict.
There was famous footage of the government using cluster bombs filled with napalm and white phosphorous on a compound filled with several dozen so-called Sovereign Citizens and their families. It was horrifying. When journalists claimed, stupefied, that such actions were war crimes, the White House Press Secretary, appearing perplexed, had simply stated that the Sovereigns in that compound were not signatories of the Geneva convention or any other convention that covered the ethical restraint in War, and, therefore, the NUSA government did not need to conduct hostilities against them as it would against treaty signatories.
