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Skitterdoc 2077


Автор:
Опубликован:
09.07.2024 — 09.07.2024
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1
Аннотация:
Кроссовер Worm и вселенной Киберпанка. Действие происходит в Найтсити. MC - Альтернативная Тейлор (стриггерила с альтернативной силой, сила Костепилочки), но она прожила свою жизнь согласно канону, затем ее перебросили во вселенную Киберпанка, и она должна выжить. Медицинский (био)тинкер Тейлор в мире киберпанка. Не могу читать через переводчик на оригинальном сайте - https://www.fanfiction.net/s/14155507/1/Skitterdoc-2077. Так что, выкладываю здесь, чтобы спокойно читать. Текст не мой, права не мои, выкладываю без разрешения автора. Ссылка на произведение выше.
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Rubbing my face, I sighed. I might have, on accident or rather through negligence, tortured this man more effectively than the Tyger Claws had. Popping open the lid, I gathered some tools, including some sterile electrodes. I wanted to test his brain's activity to see if he was awake. Unfortunately, I couldn't perform an fMRI while he was in the hatbox, as the magnetic fields would wreck the hatbox and the little helmet-based military-surplus MRI machine I had, and while the man's data storage implant was still installed and it had brain imaging systems built in, it only scanned for physical changes and not ongoing electrical activity.

Humming, I looked at the current oxygen-usage rate of the hatbox and felt that, indeed, his brain was using enough oxygen to plausibly have higher-order brain functions being active. Then I dipped two of the sterile electrodes into the liquid, directly touching different parts of his brain with them briefly. The electrodes were thin and long, with a small electrical conductor tab on the end, and kind of looked like a dentist's mirror.

Glancing at the map of electrical activity I had built through this method on my deck, I sighed, "My bad." Backtracking the oxygen usage rate, I came to the conclusion that he was probably only conscious for a little over an hour. That's not too bad as these things go. In fact, perhaps he thought it was restful after his ordeal. I didn't believe that, though.

I had two basic options, I could try to render him unconscious while I put him into storage, for now, or I could kill him. I wanted his neural tissue as, essentially, a biological computer. I had ideas for using parts of his brain for different things, for example, the spider robot I had sketched out, and I also had ideas for using the entire thing for a robotic surgical assistant, which is what I thought I might proceed with for this first brain.

It was true that I had been itching to build a couple of the spider bots for ages, but this would help me more. But, for sure, the second brain I acquired would be destined for some cute arachnid robots.

The surgical assistant, however, would be installed in an overhead robotic assembly, with sensors and mechanical surgical tools looking down at my biobed, rather than in any kind of mobile robotiform. My idea was something like a cross between that bright light dentists use combined with an overhead pot rack that hung above an island in a kitchen, except instead of pots, it would be a half dozen small flexible armatures with surgical tools.

Now, there was no way I was going to place a psychopathic murderer's brain in charge of surgical tools that would be so near my head or be used to operate on myself, no matter how many novel mechanical overrides I could think of installed in it that would prevent it from hurting my patients or me.

And I had ideas for a lot of those! But that would be even worse than this. Trapping someone inside their mind, fully conscious, while they could see but not act so that I could use their brain as a squishy computer was not something that good girls did.

So this guy was going to die. Consciousness was an emergent property, and I might not be up to creating new conscious life (yet), but I certainly could end consciousness very easily while maintaining the vast majority of the brain still useful for my purposes.

However, I kind of wanted to figure out a way to rig this guy's brain into my brain imaging helmet, or rather to the guts inside the helmet. Rather than use the contact transdermal electrodes, I could directly connect electrodes used in deep brain stimulation directly to the computer of the device. I wanted to do this both because I was curious if it was possible and also because I thought he might have interesting information.

I had briefly reviewed the same data that the Tyger Claw netrunner had taken, but only for about ten minutes of objective time. Even in his secure storage, a lot of things were referenced by codes that I assumed he knew, and there were a number of numbered bank accounts listed, as well as addresses that I assumed were safe houses, although I didn't know. I presumed all of those addresses would have been hit by angry Yakuza by now, so they were useless.

Most of the bank account numbers were useless, too, as I was sure the Tyger Claws would hoover them up, but there were a couple that were of a type that required an additional passphrase to access to make any transactions, which was missing. Maybe his personal accounts, and he had the code memorised? These I could probably take if I could figure out his passcode.

Also, when I was sawing the top of his skull off, I had noticed that he had a seriously reinforced skull. This was considered a radical alteration, but by testing it for electrical conductance during the operation, I found that it would have been a remarkably effective defence against this type of brain imager. And it was a lot more effective than my insulative layer of skin and a lot less complicated than the one I had come up with before, using complicated neural-network-based software.

I was pretty sure my "solution" would work reasonably well, but compared to the simple elegance of a heavily armoured skull, it reminded me of a Rube Goldberg machine. The armoured skull obviously wouldn't stop someone from doing exactly what I had done and saw his skull off, but the number of people willing, capable and having the expertise to do that merely for interrogation was... limited.

There were plenty of other reasons someone might want to reinforce their skull, but combining this alteration with his brain drive and pain editor for torture resistance made me think the three implants were related. That meant he obviously knew interesting things that I could know them too if I was patient. I didn't expect a fortune or any shocking revelations, but every little bit helped, plus it was kind of interesting, like solving a puzzle.

So, he would "live", for some definitions of the word, for now. I knew a lot of ways to render someone reliably unconscious, and I would be utilising three of them as I carefully made alterations to my hatbox while it was in operation. I could briefly turn it off for a few minutes at a time with no ill effects, but not much longer than that.

The first change was electronics to induce a sleep-like state. It did the same thing as my sleep inducers but operated on a wildly different principle since this one worked via direct electrical stimulation and was a lot simpler to build. The second was a way to, without causing hypoxia-related brain injuries, limit the amount of oxygen the brain was consuming.

Obviously, if a brain didn't get enough oxygen, it would die, but it could receive enough oxygen to prevent cell death, but not really enough to fuel the energy that a fully active brain required. That would limit consciousness because there wouldn't be enough energy to run the energy-intensive high-computational areas of the brain that thought deep thoughts like, "Am I a brain in a jar? I don't like this! HELP!"

Lastly, I installed a metred drug dispenser in the oxygen-bubbler, stocking it with the special Tinkertech chemical I produced in the past that caused anterograde amnesia. Instead of guessing at the dosage, I just ended up using the standard correction factor for full-borgs for psychoactive chemicals, and it was stark — you barely needed any. The same amount of the chemical that I used on that mercenary leader for an afternoon would last Mr Jar for two weeks.

That made sense since he didn't have a complete metabolism anymore, only a simplified oxygen-glucose brain economy, and the only real losses were when some of it got filtered in the suspension fluid.

At the same time that I pulled out the same contact electrodes and started carefully placing them against several parts of his brain inside the hatbox, I called one of the little kids that lived in my Megabuilding. He was an entrepreneur of sorts and, for a small fee, would go, buy and deliver me meals if I didn't want to leave my apartment. Since I was mostly a homebody, and he charged fairly inexpensive rates I often had made use of his services. I believe he had a bunch of minions about his own age that also helped him with this business. He didn't only did food, either, as I had met him for the first time when he kept coming into my clinic to buy a variety of prescription drugs.

He even had different rates for how far away he had to travel and everything, although he would only deliver to Japantown. For a twelve-year-old, he was rather precocious, and I understood the irony of myself calling someone that.

I was ordering an omelette and French toast, and he confirmed my order before telling me it'd probably be about forty-five minutes since Hotcake Heaven was in the downtown area.

Glancing down at my modified hatbox, I nodded happily. "Sweet dreams, then," I told the brain inside before closing the top up again and carefully putting it on the bottom of one of my shelves in my shop, hiding it in plain sight. His brain activity was minimal now, similar to what one would see while a patient was in an induced coma. I could morally forget about him now until I was ready to start building something using his neural tissue. I'd need to order a bunch of things like heavy-duty servos and stepper motors first, anyway, as well as settle on the design of the flexible armatures.

There was a lot that was terrible about the world, but one of the cool things about it was you could easily make three-dimensional shapes on your computer and pay a small fee to have someone make plastic or metal objects that were to your specification really cheaply, shipped straight to your door. You could even buy your own "3d printer" and do it yourself, although those could be pricey, especially if they were built to fabricate metals.

I intended to purchase one of these systems eventually because customising the shape of many pieces of cybernetics, especially second-hand prosthetic limbs, to the body size and shape of a patient often necessitated the use of such technology.

Otherwise, you had just to have a bunch of different sizes and pick one that worked "well enough," and there was no way I would be satisfied with that level of mediocrity if I opened up my own practice years down the line.

Of course, most new cybernetics came with some proprietary, usually single-use, way to adjust things perfectly within a set range, or you ordered it from the manufacturer with the end-user in mind, and it came customised, but even high-end cybernetics clinics also had a pretty lively trade in used cybersystems, either stock they kept themselves or cybernetics a customer brought in to them, to say nothing of the necessity to repair cybernetics. For many people, a "Ripperdoc" was their primary care physician as well as their surgeon.

Only the most low-tier of Ripperdocs didn't have any capability for metal-shaping, even if it was an old school machine-shop that was attached to their clinic like I assumed some Scav doctors utilised, by way of seeing some of the ridiculously retro implants they had in some runs at work.

I took a quick shower, carefully setting the clothes I had been wearing on the bed I hardly used so I could put them back on, standing under the hot shower a lot longer than I normally did. That was another nicer thing about this world, but it probably was only a function of living in a large Megabuilding, but there was as much hot water as you could afford. The hot water at my house in Brockton Bay would run out after ten minutes, and it took forever to fill back the ancient and barely operating hot water heater in the basement. Like the broken step on our front porch, it was just another reminder that my dad had stopped caring about everything after mom died.

Then, I spent a little time putting the man's body in a body bag and hid it in a corner behind a table. I intended to take a few more things out of it before I dumped it as medical waste, but I didn't want the delivery boy to see a dead body minus a quarter of his head when he delivered my French toast. I had already cleaned up and disinfected my work area before I went to sleep last night, so there were no unsightly blood stains on my biobed or the smooth floor beneath it. For people in the healthcare sector, assuming you weren't a Scav or in Maelstrom, cleanliness was close to godliness.

I was in a much better mood by the time my doorbell rang. I had added additional cameras in addition to the normal door cam on the outside of my front door. The door cam only had a very narrow field of vision, and if you were about to be home-invaded the nar-do-wells could stand thirty degrees off to either side, waiting to rush in as soon as you opened the door. I didn't think that was particularly likely in this building, but I added two cameras that watched each end of the hallway.

The building management didn't mention it, despite the fact that it was a clear violation of my lease agreement. However, Mr Jin had asked me to make sure that neither camera could directly observe anyone walking into Clouds for their client's privacy, which I felt was a very reasonable request.

I buzzed the kid in but did a double-take when I saw him. He had new chrome, specifically some cybernetic optics, as well as a basic operating system. That was pretty normal. Kids were about twelve when most of them got their first set of optics. Any younger and you'd have to constantly be replacing the optics as the child's ocular cavity grew. Twelve was a pretty good age, so they could use a single "child size" set of optics, and then when they got too small, upgrade into adult sizes a few years later.

It did mean that, usually, child-sized optics were utter shit quality, though. I recognised the ones he was wearing as a BioDyne model called the FunColor™, using my own Kiroshis at max-zoom to inspect them briefly. They weren't the worst on the market and had all the base features that parents looked for in optics, such as automatic subtitles, speech-to-text transcription, the ability to pair with a phone and optical character recognition.

Plus, they also featured "cool" features that kids would like, such as the ability to change the iris patterns and colours, and Hiro had his set on the golden slit-eye of a cat. Although exotics weren't that common anymore, there were still some people who liked to use radical biosculpt to resemble anthropomorphised animals.

It was kind of like the opposite of what the boostergang the Animals did. They were more about turning their personalities (although they'd say spirit) into a primal, almost shamanistic totem caricature of an animal rather than putting cat or dog ears and a tail on their body, and as such, the Animals usually beat the crap out of exotics when they saw them.

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