He grinned, obviously having expected my answer, "For as intelligent as you seem to be, you have a pretty big streak of naivety, Taylor. Our biggest competitor is the same as the Valentino's biggest competitor— the government. That's all a gang is, a group of people illegally offering the same services that a government might." He then tilted his head in the same way as I had, staring at me, "Ryuichi has told me about you. Do you suppose your dad felt bad about being associated with the NUSA government? I assure you our organisation doesn't hold a candle to all the terrible things they have done. Part of downtown is still a radioactive hole in the ground thanks to them, and that is not even close to the worst of what they've done." That was true; although it was supposedly Militech that had done that, there wasn't all that much difference.
Honestly, I did think Alt-Danny felt that way, as he had conversations with Alt-Taylor about how she should definitely not trust anyone, especially Militech or the NUSA government, although he wouldn't tell her precisely why. I thought that was why Militech or the NUSA didn't feature more prominently in his post-death plans, "I see what you're trying to say, but yes, actually. I happen to know that he detested a lot of the people he used to work for. You're saying that at least you're doing a better job than the NUSA government, but that is a pretty low bar, isn't it?"
He smiled and nodded, "That's true, I suppose. My own father explained all this to me when I was a little younger than your age, but it was stated a bit differently, but a lot of the conflict between our organisation and the government is just competition, not involving morality at all. I can guarantee you that the Tyger Claws give you better odds of winning at our casinos than the state does in the various lottery systems that have been set up."
What was he, some kind of libertarian gangster? It still felt like excuses to me, as I was pretty sure some branches of the Tyger Claws engaged in similar human trafficking that his daughter just recently escaped from, but I had to admit that the Tyger Claws did act as kind of a local government in Japantown and one that was more effective and more approachable too.
Perhaps I would have scoffed at this idea if I thought that the voters, either in Night City or the NUSA, had anything to say at all about what the government would decide to do. I didn't think that, and Alt-Taylor would have laughed in my face if I asked her if she thought, either. Also, I knew that my Tyger Claw taxes were a lot less than my Night City taxes, that was for sure.
Still, to me, it seemed a bit like whataboutism, like just because the government was ultra shitty doesn't give you the right to be slightly less shitty, but I wasn't going to push it, as I relied on a somewhat tranquil relationship with the Claws, although I knew that was being a bit hypocritical.
After that, he invited me to lunch with him and Mr Jin, which I accepted, and the rest of the afternoon was quite amicable. I would have liked to have seen his daughter, but apparently, she was still under a doctor's supervision and her mom, who had also been out of town, wasn't letting her out of her sight. Although they hadn't harmed her precisely, they had kept her and about a dozen other children in a drugged stupor for a period of time. For her, it was just under a day, but others were longer.
This fact made me want to see her even more, just because I hardly trusted the quacks that called themselves doctors around here, even if I knew that Mr Kobayashi would likely spring for the actual, decent physicians. And although I had, theoretically, all the knowledge on psychology that I could ever want, the truth was I was a very subpar therapist, and I suspected that it was mainly post-traumatic stress that the doctor was treating her for.
He once again thanked me, exchanged contact numbers and claimed if I ever needed anything that he could provide, all I had to do was ask.
A month later, I was working on the brain in the jar. I had already interrogated him over the past few days, getting as much information as possible and cross-referencing it with what I read from his data. He had three password-protected banking accounts. The first one, it turned out, wasn't a banking account at all but a line of credit— and already shut down by the time I used several dozen proxies across North America to log into that banking account.
The second account, at a different bank, contained just over twenty-eight thousand Eurodollars, which I siphoned into an anonymous numbered account, which I would keep separate from my other money. Assuming the bank didn't claw it back in a couple of days, I would see if I could convert it into something I could use or cash. I didn't precisely want to just have a link directly to my bank account to this guy's account, but I could likely withdraw the total amount in cash through automated teller machines in a day or two if I tried.
In this world, cash was of two varieties. There were the actual physical notes, which were mostly untraceable, as well as the digital equivalent. You could have a sum of Eurodollars on a data shard or transmit the money digitally to other people without having to go through a bank to do so. Cash on these "digital wallets" wasn't untraceable, but it was irrevocable, namely that a bank could not void a transaction conducted this way or claw back money; it was the same as actual cash that way in that once it was out of your hands it was gone.
It was only the work of a couple of seconds to set up a random "digital wallet" to accept or send cash this way, and that was how I sent most people money. Most phones and implants had apps for this built-in, which was why the majority of people didn't have legitimate banking accounts. That said, I would still try to acquire the funds in physical cash, which was still very popular. Alt-Danny had once said that the government would shift to a completely digital currency the day that politicians stopped accepting bribes.
The last bank account was something that I couldn't access, yet. Apparently, you could only move money out of the account in person with the correct bank account number and password. I had both of those, but I didn't have time for a trip to Europe right now. The bank was based in Spain, and the balance was over a hundred thousand Eurodollars. Perhaps I could hire someone to pick it up for me, for a share of the proceeds.
I didn't find anything earth-shattering in his files, but I came to the conclusion that he worked for a number of people and was something a specialist on person retrieval, in general, in addition to his human trafficking. There wasn't anything listed about who he worked for, precisely, although there was a fair amount of information about who worked for him, so it seemed like he worked using what I recognised as a cellular structure, so compromising his operations, such as getting tortured by the Tyger Claws for abducting the wrong person, couldn't compromise anything but his own team of people.
That was a sign that his organisation was probably, a larger one, which I didn't like the sound of. That first account, which was some kind of line of credit, also led me to that belief as well. From what I could tell, the only thing I could think of was that account was supposed to be used to charge business expenses.
That line of credit would have been the next step if I wanted to continue my investigation, but I didn't because I could see no way of doing it that wouldn't expose me to a potentially murderous group of criminals or, worse, a corporation. So, a little unsatisfied, I decided to stop there and killed Mr Human Trafficker. His brain, though, was still useful.
I decided to go with a hybrid cybernetic solution. It was very easy to permanently end any consciousness the brain might have, and I also carefully excised large portions of his prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia, replacing the connections of this area with specially designed cybernetics based on commercial off-the-shelf memory modules that I had bought.
The memory storage modules were all standard and cheap, but I created a semi-novel neuron-machine interface that would emulate the natural memory access process. It was different from normal data storage implants as those were designed to interface only with other electronics, specifically with an operating system; this was both a simpler and more complicated direct neural interface.
It would allow me pretty much direct access to the unit's "memories", though, which was important as I trained its neural network. There were chemical and biological ways to either remove or create memories in the brain, of course, but they were a messy biological process, something akin to controlled brain damage and not something you'd want to do continuously.
It might seem weird to have bought these storage modules instead of reusing the existing data storage implant that, until recently, had been installed on his brain, but not only was that a very expensive piece of wetware which I had set aside, but it was also not really optimised for this purpose. Sure, it had tons and tons of storage, which I needed, but its complicated security and cryptographic modules just got in the way. I would have needed to disassemble it anyway, and that would have been a real shame.
"Tomorrow, we'll see if you can move the arm on the waldo and maybe see out of the optic sensor," I told the cybernetic brain excitedly as I set my surgical tools aside. Rather than interface with the optic nerve directly, like most cybernetic eyes did, I was experimenting with direct access to the sensory cortex. I thought that maybe, the brain might be able to learn to see using numerous, not just two, optical sensors.
There were a number of similar experiments in this world testing full-borgs in a similar way, but their results were mixed, with attempts at three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision and the like being failures. I thought it might be due to the individual already being habituated to binocular vision, though; perhaps if I built this neural network from the ground up it might work for sure, but it wasn't like I was starting from scratch here, either. I didn't have the equipment for cloning experiments, and I wasn't entirely sure I could build it from scratch either, so it was a good thing if I ever wanted to branch out that it was a relatively mature technology base here.
It was interesting to see the edges of where my power was considered not entirely in keeping with my speciality, too. I could think of ideas for therapeutic cloning systems that would only duplicate, say, a person's limb or one of their organs, but thinking about how to create traditional clones was just on the edge of what my power wanted to help me with. I got the feeling that it was flexible, though, and that I could probably convince it to help me in time. I wondered if it just preferred me taking brains from people, as I did get the impression it got excited whenever I got into fights.
I wasn't sure if I could succeed with interesting vision experiments where others before had failed as although this brain had no memories anymore, it still had all of the connections it had built up in its previous life, including the same optimisations in its visual cortex for binocular vision. I had added daily neuro-plasticity treatments to it's tank, though, but I wasn't sure that would be enough.
We'd just have to see, I supposed. Standing up, I carefully put all of the equipment I was using in my autoclave to sterilise and noticed a sound coming from my apartment, a soft pecking sound. Mrs Pegpig often pecked at the door when she wanted to get my attention, so I walked into the back to find her, indeed, pecking at the door, standing precariously on the doorknob. Even if she had the knowledge of how to open the door, and even if she was a super strong pigeon, well, she was still a pigeon and couldn't open it.
She warbled at me and jumped off the wall to land on my outstretched hand. She lifted up her cybernetic foot to me, and I automatically zoomed in on the limb. My eyes could barely be called Kiroshis anymore; I added so many aftermarket features to them. They were really the thing I had made that I was most proud of, as I couldn't just add things without either optimising something else or removing it, as the size was fixed. In this case, I added a very tiny gyroscope for stabilisation on the upgraded sixteen times zoom, twice the zoom that Kiroshi's came with by default. To do this, I had to actually remove some of the other electronics in each of the eyes and relocate them to my orbit, devising a near-field communication protocol so that the electronics could be split up.
It did mean that I had to perform surgery on myself again, reducing my sinus area somewhat in the process. As for Mrs Pegpig's peg? There was a malfunction in the actuator, and it didn't close all the way anymore. It looked like it had suffered something akin to battle damage. Who did she think she was, some kind of raptor? Who was she fighting out there? She was missing a couple of quill feathers in her tail, too.
I made a tsk noise and then started fixing it fairly quickly, but a call from Wakako interrupted me. I answered while continuing to work on the leg, verifying the encryption was on, "Hello, Mrs Okada."
"Hello, Taylor. I have news. I heard back from my contact, and he wanted to know if I was, ahem, fucking with him. So I take it that to mean he has just seen the packet I sent him," she began with a cheery tone.
I smiled, "Well, that is good, I suppose. It probably won't take them that long to verify the efficacy. I assume you followed the plan to discourage dragging their feet?"
"Naturally. I suggested that if I didn't hear anything else within a month or two, we would sell everything to one of their competitors, and I gave him a price of five million eurodollars. He hasn't started to haggle yet, but he did mention that for a price in this range, he would likely need an in-person meeting with the seller, which I will very much try to discourage," Wakako said.
I shook my head firmly, "I would really rather not do that either. I would prefer a total digital exchange," I said, frowning, "Any in-person exchange just provides them with... excessive temptations."
"Yes, however, it might be unavoidable, at least partly. I am sure they will have a technical person on staff who will want to review the data prior to handing over the funds. I'm sure they'd agree to a digital exchange, but only if they get the data first, and frankly, I wouldn't trust him not to stiff us both in that case," she said, then paused, "But it doesn't necessarily mean you need to expose yourself. We're still presenting this as a case of stolen technology, after all."
