All the passengers were off-loaded, then, and at this point, I was led off separately by a nice-looking man in a suit. What followed was several hours of questioning, and I could detect many of the psychological tricks that modern police officers use to try to trip people who were lying up used against me. For example, they repeatedly asked me the same questions in different ways.
They also asked me to give them full access to my operating system, which I flat-out refused. They threatened to deny me entry into the country, and I just shrugged and asked when my flight out of the country was.
Finally, they let me go, and I was driven to Vancouver International Airport to walk through customs; for some arcane bureaucratic reason, they couldn't clear me where I was.
I was allowed to have my monowire in Canada, but I had to post a twenty-five thousand Eurodollar bond which would be surrendered if I was credibly accused and charged of using it in any way except self-defence, so I finally managed to get my bracelet removed.
I didn't have to be back in Los Angeles until next week, so I was planning to stay five days, even if most of the first one was already eaten up by drama. There was a lot to see in Vancouver, but I wasn't on any kind of itinerary.
I checked into my hotel room a little bit past sunset and decided to sleep naturally, splaying out naked in the cool sheets of a King-sized bed. Freshly washed cool sheets were the best.
My vacation was great. Half of the time, I just stayed in the Hotel resort and either lazed about doing nothing or getting massage and spa treatments. When I did venture into the city, I saw a number of places, and a few museums and today, on my last day, I was riding in a gondola, peering out around the sites. It was really very pretty, and I could see the Howe Sound in the distance. After I reached the summit, I would have a brisk fifteen-kilometre hike back down and around some sights, like Mount Habrich.
I wasn't in any danger of getting lost, so I took a somewhat scenic route, shifting between hiking and jogging, back to my rented car. About halfway through, while I was in the vicinity of Watts Point, according to my internal navigation system, I got an alert. Frowning, I pulled it up and saw that it was from Dr Hasumi's social media accounts. Dr Hasumi didn't really have that many friends, certainly not that many that knew her very well, but she did have accounts on a few Japanese social media sites, and on one of the popular micro-blogging sites, someone tagged me, or rather her, with, " Hasumi-sensei, is this you?"
I had no idea who the person was, but he or she linked to a different social media site. This one was a short-form video site. You generally uploaded edited small videos or experiences, usually about thirty seconds or less. It was very popular. The video he linked played on my optics and in my ears.
"*Szzt* Kyaaa~! *Smack* Straighto!" It kept repeating.
"*Szzt* Kyaaa~! *Smack* Straighto!"
"*Szzt* Kyaaa~! *Smack* Straighto!"
"*Szzt* Kyaaa~! *Smack* Straighto!"
"*Szzt* Kyaaa~! *Smack* Straighto!"
I stopped the playback after the fifth or so repetition. Oh god. It was an edited version of what happened on the aircraft. It even had graphics pasted in, as someone had coloured my cheeks with tiny red lines to simulate blushing as I yelled "Kya", and then there was a text overlay of the whole video with "STRAIGHT" at the dubbed in "Straighto" sound. Fuck, this thing was going viral.
Wait, this angle... I opened the BD that I scrolled of the incident and frowned, replaying it at high-speed. Stop!
This angle on the video! It was Thicc Thighs-chan! How dare you! I trusted you and those thighs. Maybe, it could have been her male colleague who was right next to her. I wanted to call him Abs-kun, but his uniform shirt was just tight enough that they only hinted at the possibility. I rubbed my hands into my face as I could see that the video had already received two million views and a hundred thousand likes, and numerous comments, with more every minute.
I read a few of the comments.
SweetScience69 wrote, " A perfectly executed cross! And from a sitting position, even!"
2DLyfe wrote, "The gap moe is strong! is this the legendary deretsun? wwww"
JutsuSpecialist wrote, " Notice frames 32-60; the bracelet on the left wrist is obviously the lockdown-type for integrated cyberweapon users. Kunoichi?"
I frowned, my Japanese language chip not exactly helping me with the compound word "deretsun." A few net searches enlightened me, though, and I pinched my glabella and stood up. A few more net searches had All Nippon Airways releasing information on the incident, thanking me for my assistance, although at least not mentioning my name. I didn't know how long that would last, as I was sure that Thicc Thighs-chan wouldn't have posted this on the net without the approval of her bosses, despite how catchy it was. If she had done it on her own, she would have been easily identified as the source of the video.
Shaking my head, I ran back to my car at my top speed.
ANA upgraded me to first class on the flight back to Los Angeles, which was nice, I supposed. I got through customs again in Los Angeles without an issue, just showing my visa and my passport. I was still a little worried that this all was a trick somehow, but the bored man in the customs booth merely waved me through after some cursory questions.
"What's the duration of your stay, Ms Hasumi?" the man asked, and I could already tell that he was watching some kind of video on his optics based on the moving image being projected on his retinas. He was clearly phoning it in, or he was the best actor I had seen yet.
"Indefinite," I said simply. Although my visa had to be renewed every year, so long as I was still paying sufficient taxes, I doubted that it would be a problem.
He sighed and tapped something on an actual physical keyboard; I could hear the mechanical keys clicky-clacking. How retro. "Do you have any contraband to declare?"
I grinned at him, "Does anyone ever say yes?" That caused him to wake up, and he chuckled, finally showing a genuine reaction and shrugged.
"Every now and then, but it's usually an accident. Like, yes, I don't have anything, stuff like that... but I do need a yes or no answer to continue," he said, smiling slightly.
I shook my head, "No, sir!"
A few more cursory questions, and I was waved through. I quickly got into my Shion and drove home. Parking my car and walking back across the street, I grinned at the spot where I had slammed that mugger's knife into the sidewalk. The knife was gone, but I could see the hint of a broken blade in the cement. He must have bent it, snapping the first few centimetres of the blade off to salvage at least a slicing tool.
I jogged upstairs, taking the stairs two and three at a time as the elevator was still out-of-service, and when I got into my living room, I saw Gloria, David, and Kiwi were all there. Kiwi made a fist and threw a punch in the air, yelling, " Straighto!" David copied her, singing out " Straighto! " in a boy's soprano.
Fuuuck. How did she find out? It had gone viral on Japanese social media, not here. I just glared and asked, "Where did you see it?"
That caused Kiwi to crack up, and even Gloria was giggling a little bit behind her hand while David kept singsonging, " Straighto! Straighto!" while shadowboxing some imaginary enemies.
"You got almost twenty-five seconds on Quincy Strange's show!" Kiwi said with a grin.
Fuuuuuck. Night After Night was Night City's biggest late-night talk show, and they often had brief segments from the news, either local or around California and sometimes the world, in between Quincy's comedic monologues. Kiwi chuckled, "Thankfully, it wasn't a slow news night. Most of the A block revolved around the death of Blaze Steele," she arched her eyebrows almost to her scalp and said conspiratorially, "Apparently, he committed suicide."
Blaze Steele, where did I recognise that ridiculous name? Oh. Yeah. He was a semi-famous Media until he became almost a household name a little while ago when he published an unapproved biography of Hanako Arasaka, specifically her time at University. I grinned, "Let me guess, he shot himself in the back of the head while handcuffed?"
"Oh, you've heard then," Kiwi said with a similar grin. Wait, what?
She chuckled, "Well... supposedly he shot himself in the back, ten times, while bound hand and foot and then threw himself out of his window, thirty-two floors down, just to make sure. The police actually posted his death on the police blotter minutes before it happened, ruling it a suicide before he had even been scraped off the pavement."
Wow. There was sending a message, and then there was that. David piped up and said, surprisingly insightfully for his age, "I think he made someone very angry. "
"I think you're right, David. How's school?" I asked, glancing at Gloria as well so she knew I was including her in the question as well.
"It's pretty fun, I suppose. Say, did you bring back any souvenirs, like you promised?" he asked, little boy hands outstretched and opening and closing like claws, grasping.
I hummed, "Well, I don't know... have you been good?" I ignored his protestations of innocence and only went into my luggage and pulled out a few things after Gloria nodded. I had to buy another set of luggage in the airport duty-free store to carry all the loot home. Three large jugs I sat on the kitchen island, "Genuine grade A maple syrup! Three litres!" That got an ooh and an aah from Kiwi and Gloria.
I handed David what looked like a remote control, which he didn't have any idea what to do with. "No, no. Don't look at it while you press the button. Here, let me show you."
I grabbed it from him and held it out, and pressed the single button on the device, and instantly, with a hiss, a stick made of carbon-based super-materials telescoped and deployed out of both ends until it was nothing other than a child-sized hockey stick. David gasped and grabbed it out of my hands, "Bright! Blinding!"
He played with the mechanism a few times, and I said, "I also got you some rollerblades, but you can't use them until your mom says you're safe with them." Especially around our current neighbourhood, but maybe he could take them to school or something. However, judging from the way he was swinging his hockey stick, which would have gotten him some serious time in the penalty booth for high-sticking, it might be a while.
Four months later
"Dr Hasumi, incoming trauma, bay four. MVC, car versus motorbike. You're up," said the attending, a man a few years older than Dr Hasumi's twenty-nine years. I had worked as a resident here at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre for two months. In the end, I elected not to apply to the Trauma Team-owned teaching hospitals in town, mainly because I felt it was a small risk that I could be identified. While my set of implants wasn't unique, and I had taken steps to ensure that, it was pretty unusual for a gifted clinician to have a specific model of cyberdeck, stealth system and monowire.
I hadn't left on bad terms, as I had paid my buy-out fee of six weeks' salary, so I was technically rehirable as Taylor Hebert, but possibly being found out about my secret identity was the opposite of what I wanted. Surprisingly, being the "Straighto girl" helped me get this job, as the man interviewing me when I had got back had taken one look at me and yelled, laughing, "We'll just place your application straighto to the hired stack!" That was kind of nice, but I was a little upset that I hadn't gotten to demonstrate much of my brilliance to the hiring manager.
Luckily things had died down a bit, and my fifteen minutes of fame were all but up.
I glanced at the trauma nurses, as well as the other residents that were watching. While my residency was a surgical one, emphasising cybernetics installation, we would all perform some rotations in the emergency department, not only just being called in for surgical consults but also practising emergency medicine at least once a week.
I always thought from watching TV shows that residency in hospitals was a gruelling never-ending slog, where you had to get sleep where you could in the break room like you were in boot camp or something, but the truth was I worked about sixty hours a week. It did mean that I had relatively limited time to run my own biosculpt clinic myself, so I hired a couple of fairly experienced techs to work the hours I could not, as well as four pretty faces to work the front desk and pharmacy, to set appointments, and the like.
They were almost supernaturally pretty faces, as in addition to their salaries, I offered discounted or free biosculpt services. It was kind of expected, and I wouldn't have hired anyone that didn't want fairly significant changes. They served as advertisements to people walking through the door as much as the shingle outside. It was similar to the way I remembered receptionists at dentist's offices having the whitest, straightest teeth of anyone I've seen back in Brockton Bay. One was close to what I might classify as an exotic as she had the lithe, timeless fae-type look, complete with elfin ears and slightly larger than normal eyes. Biosculpt was the main reason she had agreed to work with me, actually, once she realised I was pretty good at it.
I was doing a pretty brisk business, although at first, the customers had only been people in and around Chinatown, as the neighbourhood I was in wasn't the safest. I was a bit annoyed with the Lotus Tong as I discovered that I had been misled, as the location I was in was essentially in a no man's land, and the Lotus Tong didn't have proper control of the area. Instead, it was not really controlled by anyone but had a number of small gangs that the Lotus Tong didn't get along with, as well as just chaotic criminal elements.
I stopped my plans to pay them any percentage of my profits until such a point as they could actually demonstrate effective control over the area, and instead, I spent double what I had expected on security products, and I think I had made the Militech sales rep's week. I might be a small customer, but I had spent hundred and fifty thousand Eurodollars on bullet-resistant reinforced sapphire glass for the store exterior, cameras, sensors, turrets and three types of autonomous drones. Two combat drone systems and one aerial surveillance system based on my roof, which would patrol a diameter of about four city blocks.
The man had tried to upsell me on a Militech fast-response security service, a kind of private police subscription, but I declined. Without paying truly ridiculous rates I couldn't afford, I wouldn't get actual fast response times. Although, like most mercenaries, Militech would accept jobs that were, in effect, revenge attacks on those responsible for attacking my storefront, I already had a mercenary team I knew pretty well that was well capable of handling the street criminals that sometimes made a nuisance of themselves.
