Even with the artefacts, my vision was better than it had ever been before, but I could see how I might have even ignored the occasional twinge of a headache if I had purchased these cybernetics from a less reputable dealer who did not go through as thorough a post-installation calibration process.
I may have put it down to postoperative pain, ignored it, and then later got used to it. But the surgeon was very clear; in his opinion, any properly installed piece of prosthetic-style cybernetics, for example, my replacement eyes or a replacement arm, should feel significantly better than the original. If you merely settled for "feels the same as", then your doctor had failed, to say nothing of many people who he claimed thought glitches, twinges, and pain was normal and just something they had to live with.
I felt that this was a pretty good philosophy to have if you were to sell cybernetics and strove to remember it, which I could already tell I was doing better with as well, even before they calibrated my memory co-processor.
The doctor was a kindly-looking old man of indeterminate age who claimed he retired from a long career at MoorE technologies to open his own practice a decade ago. MoorE was a Swedish company that specialised in radical alterations; for example, customised full-body replacements were what they were famous for. He claimed that he had never once had a patient that had followed his medical advice have any incidence of cyberpsychosis.
I wasn't sure if he was telling the complete truth, but there was some ring of truth in it. I had seen videos of cyberpsychos online; thankfully, most of them were censored on the sites I visited. On the other hand, I had seen many people, some in person and others online, that were as augmented or even more so, who seemed perfectly sane, lucid and rational.
I had begun researching the topic off and on since I learned of the condition shortly after I arrived, especially since I knew I would be getting implants myself. I thought insanity was everyone's secret fear, especially the type of insanity where you didn't realise it was happening until it was too late. However, the publically available literature was... well, I hesitated to call it literature, even. Of course, there was a variety of opinions, but most official-looking documents reminded me of a cross between Reefer Madness, abstinence-only sex education and the Salem Witch trials. "Has your neighbour been acting odd after getting chrome? See something? Say something!"
The possibility of cyberpsychosis afflicted people going on rampages had always been somewhat present from my study of the history of the last half-century, but it was approaching the level of a moral panic, today. And yet, they hardly knew much more about it now than they did back in the 2020s! Or if they did they kept it secret.
A lot of what was said was completely contradictory, too. There wasn't a lot I could learn, but my vast trove of knowledge of violent anti-social spectrum disorders made me suspicious about all of it. Although it was true that people afflicted with psychosis were more likely to be violent than the average person, much more, the truth was the vast, vast majority of people experiencing psychotic breaks never became violent at all. Why, then, were cyberpsychos almost always, eventually, violent?
Or were they? Perhaps there were a vast majority of non-violent "cyberpsychos" that just lived with it? That sounded very dystopian. I didn't know and wasn't in any position to begin some kind of large sample-sized psychological study of the most violently deadly demographic on the planet, either. It was something I would have to just keep watching, but it certainly appeared that my fears about myself succumbing to the disease were not, at least now, likely.
One of the major "symptoms" I had read about was that a burgeoning cyberpsycho began seeing themselves as superhuman and as an average person as an ant, kind of like what was common in the narcissistic personality disorders I was familiar with. If so, I wondered if my low self-esteem would give me a lot more leeway!
I was scanning everyone and everything interesting with my optics as I walked back to the metro station. I was very specifically not using my cyberdeck until I got home; besides the fact that the augmented reality interface took some getting used to and made me not pay attention to my surroundings, which was dangerous, I was a little bit worried about the software running on it.
Honestly, I was a little worried about the software running on my Kiroshis and my operating system, as well. I didn't think I could presently do much about hardware hacks or software-based backdoors placed in the equipment by the OEM, but many people were worried about what malware a clinic might put into their cybernetics. It kind of reminded me of the bloatware that Verizon or AT&T would include in their phones; in some ways, it made the phone easier to operate, but mostly it was just bloatware with unknown permissions doing unknown things.
My OS seemed clean, but both my eyes and my deck had a number of pre-installed software packages. When I got home, I would use my laptop and interface plugs to go through each software package one by one. Once I found which packages I was going to keep, I would note them and then download the most recent firmware from Biotech Sigma and reflash my deck. Then for each software package, I could download the official, most recent, cryptographically signed version from each manufacturer.
There would still be some trust involved, but there was not a lot I could do about that at the moment without becoming a peerless expert at programming, getting copies of all that software source code and then inspecting it line by line. I wasn't some famous hacker; I just was pretty good with computers! Maybe someday I'd have that skill, but it surely wasn't today.
Although I had a tingling in the back of my head of ideas that indicated that my power might help some with software development, it only seemed to be the case if it was the base firmware for a medical implant or medical device. It wouldn't at all help me reprogram the phone app on my Kiroshis, so I knew I wasn't being spied on, for example.
Still, that was something to keep in mind as a possibility in the future. It was obvious, but I noticed my Tinkering worked a lot better on things I was already very knowledgeable about. That was why I could make a techno-tiara that put you to sleep. It was because I was already very familiar with the brain's processes of sleep, rest and healing.
Stepping onto the train, I carefully guarded my purse and sat on one of the open seats. Although NCART was always somewhat busy, I had missed the real rush hour an hour and a half ago. The sun was already starting to set, setting a stark dichotomy, looking like a beautiful ink on canvas amidst the trashiness of the cityscape in front of it.
Going back to my thoughts, I was sure I needed to expand my horizons and learn more about both programming and electronics than I ever learned in Mrs Knott's class. So, although I was very proud, actually I was ridiculously proud, of my sleep inducer, I felt if I knew more about the way, electronically, braindance wreaths interfaced with a person's brain, I could have made a device that did a lot more than just help you sleep and remember.
After two stops, the train filled up again, and I offered my seat to an older gentleman who looked like he was barely making it through to the end of the day. He looked shocked and then suspicious but, after a moment, gave me a genuine smile and told me, "Thanks, lady."
I was a lady now, huh? I liked the way that sounded. First lady, then QUEEN, then GODDESS. Oh, no, they were right about the Cyberpsychosis all along! I giggled at my internal monologue, then coughed when people stared at me and quietly tried to hide behind a mass of people, wanting the floor to swallow me up.
I calmed down after the next stop and resumed my thoughts about my power. It felt like there was a limited amount of secret sauce, and everything that I could build traditionally with science would allow that secret sauce to be spread to areas of my invention that were totally irreproducible with science instead of making up for what I didn't know, which was almost everything in some fields right now. I didn't know if this was normally how Tinkers worked, but I thought that maybe it was as it would explain reasons why Armsmaster went to graduate school for engineering and could produce marvels and Squealer could produce only trashy monster trucks.
I just felt that my jar of secret sauce was a lot smaller than theirs, but that might be just envy from someone newly starting out. But Squealer? I had seen one of her cars driving a hundred and fifty miles an hour down the highway with square wheels on the news once. She not only got the jar of sauce but the whole sauce factory!
Still, I had still learned a little bit more about electrode-based brain interfaces when I made my sleep inducer, building it wasn't a complete fog. It kind of felt like I was working my way up the tech tree in Civilisation, one of the few games our computer at home could still run. Building this one device gave me ideas for other devices using similar but slightly more advanced principles.
In the same way, I had been considering ways to mitigate the effects of the antibiotic I had made before. It was absolute death on bacteria. Such that I couldn't think of any ideas about how to make it selectively leave your microfauna alone.
But when I looked back at the over dozen different shapes of medical nanomachines in my blood gave me the initial sketches of a new type of potential nanomachine, whose tool would be a tiny controllable and coilable filament, twice the length of the nanite itself. A hunter-killer nanomachine that could kill bacteria or even any other type of eukaryotic cell very easily. It was a completely different area of medical science as to the antibiotic, which chemically weakened the plasma cell membrane of bacteria. However, it was still in the same general area of "things that kill single cellular organisms."
However, although I got a good idea of the shape of the machine and even some hints on how its little filament whip would work in identifying and then destroying eukaryotes, I currently didn't have any ideas of how to build the nanites themselves. There was clearly some wiggle room with my power, but building nanites with my alt dad's hand tools wasn't going to cut it.
At the next stop, a boy about my age slapped my ass, laughed uproariously and ran off the train before I could smack him. Had I just been... chikaned? You heard stories about subway gropers in big cities, but this was only my second day riding the damn train! The little shit had a good arm on him, too. I rubbed my butt, mortified. The other passengers ranged from sympathetic to amused, with the latter being the plurality. I got that little booger's face, though, and remembered his stop.
Wait...
Oh, god. With my recently enhanced memory, I thought back to when the asshole got on the train; he was carrying a greasy Buck-A-Slice pizza, which I didn't think was even literally considered food. They either had an asterisk calling their product food in their marketing materials, or they should have. My skirt was dry-cleaning only! I would get even if I saw him again.
I spent the next few days reading guides online and watching videos. I was still very much getting resources from what would be considered the normal part of the net, but I was inching towards sites and channels that were considered... well I didn't know. In my last life I would have called them preppers.
People who stored a lot of food and gun at their house for when the zombies came. Like, some people were professional paranoids, but this segment of people took it as a hobby instead. They were usually corporate workers or professionals that both distrusted and relied on cybernetics heavily.
It wasn't "hacker resources" that I was consuming, but it shared some commonalities, in that they were big on open-source software... or at least software where the source code could be examined or had been examined by other people besides the Corporation releasing it. Their other interests were security and privacy, in as much as the latter could be found on the net or in the world at all.
If I had been as savvy as Alt-Taylor, it probably wouldn't have taken me more than a couple of hours to inspect every software package installed on my operating system, eyes and cyberdeck, reflash and reinstall everything. In fact, this was probably the bare minimum of what savvy people did. The memory co-processor didn't have customisable software at all, and I already checked that it was running the most up-to-date firmware, so I would just have to trust it for now.
However, I wasn't Alt-Taylor. I took several days to accomplish the same thing, although I was learning a lot at the same time. I was notably a little leery about wiping and then reinstalling the software on what I used to see unless I was absolutely sure it would work. I didn't even know what I would do if I just suddenly blinded myself, and I couldn't fix it. I suppose I'd have to call emergency services and get an ambulance ride to the Skyline clinic or invent some sort of echolocation to see in the dark. To say nothing about the cyberdeck, which was even more integrated into my brain.
I found a number of extraneous software packages on both my Kiroshis and my deck that didn't correlate to what either manufacturer considered their factory defaults. Seven or eight in total on each device. Most of them seemed to be bloatware, but I didn't really know for sure.
They were cryptographically signed by a couple of software companies that sounded legitimate, but who knows what they were hired to actually produce and for whom. They had replaced the phone, messenger, moving map, and a couple of other apps. I was pretty sure one of the bloatware apps was designed to run continuously and broadcast my identity to nearby devices for advertising purposes rather than any nefarious purposes. Although a lot of advertising in this world really was nefarious.
Two of the installed apps looked very suspicious. Their permissions granted were extraordinarily broad; they had strange non-descriptive alphanumeric names and were signed by unknown entities. However, one of the apps was cross-signed by a public key that I had linked to the city of Night City by searching online. That was interesting. Some kind of police LoJak or backdoor? It was signed by a different certificate than the software that NCPD provided that ran people's faces in their records. That software looked pretty normal, and I would keep it. The permissions were mild, too; it couldn't get everything I saw at any time, just specific stills when I triggered the app.
