It was this latter overriding loyalty to the Corporation that prevented him from just having her murdered. Instead, he just had her flown to Central America with nothing in her pockets and then shot in the kneecaps. In her personnel file, it was listed as a leave of absence to deal with personal matters. But if she made it back to Night City alive, he would make her his right-hand woman.
But not before he sat down with her and explained exactly how much her attempt cost the company. He didn't so much mind her attempts to murder him, as that was somewhat to be expected, and it kept him sharp. But her actions caused that old Japanese bat to release what otherwise would have been a Biotechnica exclusive to one of their competitors, Trauma Team.
At least, Trauma was barely a competitor. They produced a few drugs, and they researched a few drugs, but it was all small potatoes compared to them, so it could have been much worse. They already had begun discussions with Trauma Team to market the drug as a joint venture, as their legal team was pretty sure that the EC courts would decline to step in and what Trauma Team lacked in biotechnology they made up for in lots of guns. They were basically a military that ran some hospitals.
Now he would have to go into the quarterly meeting with his boss, which had been his boss' boss up until recently and explain how much they stood to make. It was a lot, but it was still fractions of a per cent when you counted the total enterprise's bottom line.
He wouldn't even mention Sam's perfidy; it was something that would just make him look weak, and besides, he didn't actually have any hard feelings so long as she didn't.
Looking over the files he seized from the woman's corporate account before he had approved her leave of absence, he frowned. Did she really think that this eighteen-year-old girl was some kind of chemistry savant? They had identified her from the genetic material left in a car accident, but it had to be a false trail or bullshit, right? He could see the daughter of a spook acting as a Merc as she did. Papa spook makes baby spook, right? But anything else? It seemed implausible.
That was Sam's claim that the girl was special, but he knew for sure she would have been just as satisfied if he had been kidnapped by the Japanese and forced to commit hara-kari for his supposed betrayal.
Baby spook was probably dead, anyway, in some ambiguous spook-related misadventure, the kind that left no body or trace, very much unlike the guy without the head their SecTeams had found in front of the car accident. Who cared?
He used his cybernetics to mentally stamp the file closed for now.
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Kyaaa!
Although I had left my Quadra back in Night City, the car I got to replace it in Los Angeles was still fairly nice and a sports car, as I liked. From my study of Dr Hasumi's files, I came to the conclusion that she was kind of a Japanese nationalist. I came to this deduction from reading her files and watching the personal videos and photos she posted on social media. She wasn't on the level of some of the ultra-nationalists, but she definitely thought that Japan and its culture and governance were superior to all other options on the planet today, which made me slightly curious about why she came to the United States in the first place.
The woman also had an actual, honest-to-goodness diary in her files, although she was somewhat irregular about writing in it. It seemed clear that she had felt that she owed a lot to the Japanese government, which had taken care of her since her parents died when she was young. As such, I decided to try to find a Japanese car for her to buy and settled on the Mizutani Shion MZ2. It was a used model a couple of years old, and I had gotten a good deal on it. I would have gotten an even better deal on the Targa-style convertible version of the same model, but the weather and pollutants in Los Angeles were sometimes even worse than in Night City.
Far from wanting to drive in a convertible, I wanted to drive in an NBC-resistant hazardous environment tank. But I got the Shion instead.
However, the most troubling thing about Dr Hasumi was she was also the real identity of an online net serial novelist, and this gave me more indigestion than anything else. Was I expected to continue writing 'That Time I Got Transported To My Otome Game, The Rage Of A Villainess Turned White Mage!'? I mean, why was the title so long in the first place? It was over five hundred chapters long already, and I had notes for her planned plot outline for the next five hundred, although I had specifically not opened that file yet so I wouldn't read spoilers. A thousand chapters, really!
Each chapter was about two thousand Kanji characters long, so I hadn't even finished reading the entire thing yet, although I would find myself reading a chapter here and there as it wasn't terrible. Perhaps even entertaining. The main character was a doctor that died from overwork and was reincarnated into a romance game that she had cleared when she was a younger girl, except that she wasn't the protagonist but the villainess. A kind of interesting premise that I hadn't seen, although I didn't really have a lot of time to read a bunch of net novels.
I could tell that she had started writing this while in medical school, perhaps as a way to let off some steam, and she did use her knowledge of real-world medicine to give verisimilitude to the main character's White Mage healing magic. The story started when the main character was reborn, unlike my own isekai, which had me thankfully not have to redo puberty. I was only on chapter one-hundred-and-two right now and was kind of curious how the main character was going to deal with the protagonist and her capture targets while at the same time saving the country from invasion by the Fire Demons.
I glanced at the Shion's autodrive system, making sure it was functional before I pulled up chapter one-hundred-and-three. Los Angeles County was huge, way bigger than Night City, and the Japanese consulate was a good thirty-minute drive from Chinatown, where I lived. I had time for a chapter or two, right?
Although Gloria, Kiwi and I lived in separate buildings, we lived very close to each other and often had lunch or dinner together for mutual support. It had started while we were with the Bakkars as we were the only outsiders around and then morphed into a way for me to assist Gloria in studying for the entrance exam for the UCLA nursing program, but she had already aced that test and had started her first term as a nursing student.
Now it was just because we all enjoyed each other's company and we could all provide assistance to each other, although with Gloria as busy as she was now, it was mostly us assisting her and David, but neither Kiwi nor I cared. Paying for both Gloria and David's tuition at school, Gloria at UCLA and David at a local corporate elementary school wasn't difficult. It wasn't a big deal to me. I was spending in total about sixty-five thousand Eurodollars a year for both of them, so I was surprised when Gloria said that she was considering applying for a scholarship.
"What kind of scholarship?" I asked curiously as I stir-fried some meat and vegetables. The cheapest cloned meat was small chunks and it was perfect for stir-frying, "Do you think you'll qualify? We had to make all of your grades more or less average when we created your identity so you wouldn't stand out." It wasn't that there weren't any scholarships, but a lot of them had a number of catches. For example, if I had accepted Kang Tao's job offer, that would have been classified as a scholarship to medical school.
Gloria looked slightly nervous before sending me a link wirelessly. She had gotten a lot better using all of the features of the Gemini, which included a very full-featured operating system, "There is a scholarship for two and three-year nursing students who happen to be full-body replacements."
I paused and then hummed, "So you've decided to keep the Gemini, then?" I was kind of expecting this now, as the more she had gotten used to it, the more she seemed to like it. She had been a bit traumatised from her near-death experience, and I thought that she liked the fact that she was a lot more sturdy, strong and quick than she used to be. Although to be honest, I didn't think her current body would handle two four-gauge shotgun blasts to the chest any better than her last one. Not buckshot or slugs, anyway.
Gloria had been, from all appearances, very, very tolerant of being inside a full-body replacement. Still, I had provided some therapy before we got to Los Angeles while we were travelling with the Bakkars, but I was exactly the wrong person to be her therapist. I wasn't really that suited to it, despite my encyclopedic knowledge of the subject, but most importantly, as both one of her friends and, arguably, the one responsible for her present circumstances, she might need to talk to her therapist about me most of all.
As such, I had arranged for her to see a therapist in Los Angeles, but not before Kiwi and I did a deep dive into the psychologist, including breaking into his office and hacking all of his everything.
I wanted to ensure that he wasn't on anyone's specific payroll and that he wouldn't sell or give his patient information to other parties. Kiwi and I had to break into four psychologists' offices before we found one that wasn't crooked in some way. Either they took kickbacks from drug suppliers or mental hospitals, or they were just a front for the Los Angeles County psychosquad and would have reported Gloria or coerced her into registering as someone at risk for cyberpsychosis, which rarely ended well unless you had some sort of Corporation backing you. And not even then, sometimes.
Still, we finally found a relatively honest actor, and both she and David had been seeing him since we arrived in LA. It seemed to be working fairly well, and I kept up with her treatment plan through persistent backdoors on the man's system.
It was tempting to go see him myself, but clinical psychology was a field where it didn't work as well if you already knew all the techniques. Through my power, I had a deep look behind the curtain, and I knew exactly what a good psychologist would tell me, to the point where I could just talk to myself in a mirror if I wanted. This was one reason that psychologists often suffered from depression themselves. There was some value in just having a person listen to me, but I didn't need a trained clinical psychologist or psychiatrist to do that.
Real, in-person psychotherapy was a bit of a niche industry too. There were still such clinicians around, but more and more, they were being replaced by individualised artificial intelligence performing therapy over the net, but I was one hundred per cent sure such services were likely funnelling all patient data somewhere, even if it was just to create individualised advertising. Plus, Kiwi and I couldn't hack or break into their offices, as the security on actual services like these was impeccable, so I wouldn't trust them or recommend them to anyone.
Gloria still looked slightly nervous, "I mean, if you don't mind." I glanced at her sideways and knew what she was trying to do. She knew exactly how much her Gemini cost me and was probably trying to save me some money to make her decision to keep the body less burdensome on me. Speaking of which, I would need to dissolve the half-grown clone I had been fast-growing now that we didn't need it. I could still use all of the biomatter for other projects or as a base for biosculpting. David just grinned as he thought the whole idea of his mom as a robot was awesome.
"I really don't. I would probably make the same decision if I were you as well," I told her with a smile. I plated some of the stir-fry and handed it out to everyone, along with some white rice from the rice cooker. Now that I was rich, I could afford such luxuries as actual rice, after all. "But if we associate this identity as a full cyborg user, you'd definitely have to continue to do so if you planned on reclaiming your old identity."
I held the large serving spoon up in thought, "Although, that might make a lot of things easier. It isn't uncommon for someone to get a new identity after they've had trauma sufficient for a full body replacement, so people and Corps won't look askance at you when you come back and reclaim your old identity if that is what you end up wanting to do." I took a brief look at the scholarship requirements and nodded, "To be eligible for this, you'll have to take a concentration in clinical psychotherapy... it's pretty clear the scholarship involves helping someone with psychological research about cyberpsychosis, so expect to be a research subject, probably a combination research gopher and part of the control group as a well-adjusted full-body user."
I made a note to research which department and professor were sponsoring this scholarship. Research into the area of cyberpsychosis was perennial and also perennially terrible, but so long as they didn't try any wackadoo methods on Gloria, it should be fine and lucrative for her, as the scholarship included a small stipend.
I nodded, "It seems fine. But, I tell you what... any amount of money you can get from this scholarship to reduce the tuition I'm paying for your University, I will return half of that to you as living expenses."
Gloria frowned and said, surly, "But the whole idea was to try to pay you back some..."
"And you are... some. But a student needs living expenses, and the less time you spend working odd jobs, the more time you are studying," I said reasonably. I had been the one handling routine maintenance on her body, as well, and one addition I had added to her biopod was a built-in sleep inducer of my design, so she could trigger herself to fall into a mentally restful sleep at any time she wanted.
"Yeah, Mom!" piped in David. He was in favour of anything that involved his mother working less, which I definitely approved of.
She sighed but nodded after a moment and then looked curious, "When is your clinic going to open, anyway?" Kiwi looked interested in the answer to that question as well.
"Soon," was all I said. I had leased the whole three-story building we were standing in for virtually nothing since it was in such terrible shape. With an introduction from Wakako as well as the Tyger Claws themselves from Night City, I had been working with the Lotus Tong here, who controlled Chinatown, in refurbishing the building. Although I was a little put out at making capital improvements on a building I wouldn't own, at least the agreement to do so had me paying almost nothing in rent, so it was kind of a wash.
