The Times, They Are A-Changin

The feeling of a level up filled me with determination as I leaned back from my day of embezzlement, bribes, and kickbacks. Turns out I could very much turn Welles Arms into a Street Cred farm, as despite the legitimate operations not contributing to my growth, every illegal transaction did, and with the kind of network the Valentinos and Rogue provided there were lots of opportunities to siphon funds out of the company and keep all my chooms happy with their extra cuts.

Plus it took money right out of the hands of my political class shareholders and the mostly inept board of directors they'd saddled me with. To be fair the CFO they'd sent me was good. Sarah Kennedy, a recent graduate from UC Davis with a masters in finance. She was the daughter of one of my chief backers in the state Senate, a man whose wife owns the next largest piece of Welles Arms after my own.

It also helps that she is a masterwork bio-sculpted ginger in a loveless marriage happy to look the other way and take a cut that fucks over her dad and husband. It took a pair of investigations by Rogue and myself and a handful of meetings to have her on board with railing the shareholders and on top of the desk getting railed the way she'd always dreamed of.

Considering Campo Orto is my COO and the rest of the board are the spoiled talentless often drug addicted children of politicians quietly hooked to the corporation via insider trading it was simplicity itself to cook the books to hide the massive disparity between the cost to produce my products and the sales price. Not to say Welles Arms was a bad investment - far from it - the profit margins had people salivating and holding their stocks in an iron grip. It's just that I had so many industrial efficiency multipliers that no one else has and as such fudging the cost of goods sold is easy.

Embezzle the cash, launder it though various subcontractors owned by the Valentinos, send some back to Sacramento via 'campaign donations', and we'd set up a corruption sustaining closed system.

And I took a cut at every level, including a bloated R & D budget that was essentially just a personal check to me. Non taxable money I got to spend developing the technologies I personally wanted to use, and at the end of the day when I walk away with my improved cyberware and biotech I can just write them off as failures or release lesser versions to profit from.

Rogue Amendieres regularly pulled down huge consulting fees for setting up deals between me and members of her massive network, such as the market crashing supply of precious metals coming down from some of her Highrider friends who don't give a fuck that they were delivering enough gold, silver, platinum, palladium and others rare earth metals to over time devalue them all. After all, I was using them for industrial purposes rather than resell, so it was no skin off their backs to open the floodgates just for me.

Technically it's treason, and 'But it was for Rogue!' isn't the legal defense many people feel it should be, but I wasn't going to say shit, Rogue wasn't going to say shit, and they weren't going to say shit, so nine times out of ten everything was going to be nova.

I was looking specifically to work a skeletal replacement with platinum gold, a mean mother fucking super alloy as hard as diamonds and perfectly at home in the human body. It was a compliment to my engineering work on my more efficient hydraulic ram tech and my efforts to create human compatible biotech musculature to replace both my organic structures and myomar stranding.

I'd lose some limb durability to take better advantage of the massive healing factor gained via Solar Powered and my various internal implants, such as the Grade 2 Special Implants I was close to finishing the designs of and the new 'Wave Breaker' Sandevi-zerk system that came with a new set of biotech nerves that could better handle the stain of use while sending more filtered feedback to the brain, easing the load on each despite the massive time dilation of 92 percent.

It was funny, I'd gone so far into the certainty of steel, and now the path forward is to return to monke. Like a majestic silverback gorilla. A majestic silverback gorilla that's more durable than a honey badger and leaps through the air like a tiger. A tiger that can double jump and run like a cheetah. A cheetah with the eyes of an eagle. The eyes of an eagle that can see thermals like a snake tastes them, and has hearing like a dolphin or a bat. A bat with a donkey dong that cums like a horse.

What a fucking wild and majestic silverback gorilla I'm going to be.

"Is there a particular reason you look so pleased?" V asked as she came in with my post work burritos.

"Just thinking about animals." I told her and unwrapped the foil around my precious cloned beef burrito, "Like the steer that blessed me with this meat. Hallelujah! Praise God!"

As I was about to bite into tortilla wrapped victory when a call came through and I sighed. I didn't need my mouth to speak, but it is really fucking hard to focus enough to communicate via thought while eating, let alone eating something delicious.

Big Juan: It's Juan.

Cynthia Lopez: Juan, it's Cynthia. Got a Saka goon here at the front desk asking to speak to you.

Big Juan: Don't mention all the Saka gonks we've flatlined and fried in the last few weeks.

Cynthia Lopez: Obviously. There's a reason I'm the queen of the front desk, baby.

Big Juan: Much love, Cynthia. I got eyes on him. Send him up.

On my screen I could see the man himself, Takemura Goro. My Sacramento database had him listed as one of the thousand 'Security Advisors' sent by Arasaka to the Free States. They'd only been stateside a week and Welles Arms security already gunned down three ninjas and synapse burnt a half dozen netrunners. I'd completely shut them out from my company's secrets.

And they wanted my secrets badly, everyone did. The Welles Arms Badlands Park could produce four Scorpitrons a week and the first batch already hit the battlefield against SoCal forces. The footage of the devastation they unleashed has convinced the rest of the Free States to put in orders for their own. At this point each Scorpitron has been classed as a strategic grade resource, as the four tanks push different fronts in counter offenses that routed the SoCal invasion. Only a desperation sortie by the SoCal Airforce managed to stop the tanks from crossing the border, but the amount of jets and bombers shot down by their tail mounted Surface to Air Rotary Smart Cannons meant that was only an option so many times before they'd completely lose the battle for air space control.

The damaged Scorpitrons were recovered and were on track to redeploy in four days with the next four tanks. Odds were good that Southern California would surrender not long after all eight moved into their territory as they were still a long way off from connecting with their NUSA allies. Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico were already taking a shellacking, and Washington, Oregon, and Idaho 'declared neutrality' even though it was basically outright surrender to the NUSA before any boots or bombs even dropped on their soil. So it was a game against time as Arizona, Nevada, and Northern California didn't have the resources even with Arasaka and Welles Arms backing them up to fight the rest of the country.

So yeah, Arasaka wanted the secret of my power, just like everyone else.

Since corporate espionage failed the next level to shutting me down would be going after the people around me, but their pet Tygers already have tried that, and while actual Arasaka forces would be far more effective, antagonizing me while trying to bankroll my customers would raise some eyebrows.

So unless Goro had a mini nuke in that briefcase he was packing this was a 'if you can't beat them, join them' situation. Or a young master type thing where I must bow my head or the full weight of the sect will come down on me because my dog eyes cannot see Taitian. Either way could be fun.

I put my burritos back into the mini heater they came in and had V take them over to the couch so that they could tempt me less. 'Hold on Mr. Cybersamurai, this beef burrito is calling to me. It demands to be eaten! SO I WILL EAT IT!'

Might be a neat negotiation tactic though.

The man buzzed into the office and entered wearing a dark business suit and made a short bow not far into the room.

"Thank you for accepting this unscheduled meeting, Mr. Welles." the man stated in an even heavier accent than what he'd have in 2077, "I am Takemura Goro, and have been entrusted by the Arasaka Corporation with a request for you that I cannot fail to deliver."

"Proceed Mr. Takemura." I internally shrugged.

Takemura placed his briefcase on my desk and took out a case of business cards from within his jacket, the first he handed to me with both hands while bowing before proceeding to do the same for V. From my shirt pocket hidden behind my vest I pulled out a gold card case, opening it to reveal a set of business cards of my own, one of which I slid across the desk to Takemura who took it despite the lack of returned courtesy and examined it closely.

Subtle off-white coloring, a tasteful thickness, and a watermark had the cybersamurai sweating at the Chadness of my card.

The card returned to the desk from Takemura's finger and I indicated with a hand for him to take a seat. Clearing his throat, he began talking biz, "Forgive me for the bluntness of my speech. Despite being one of the highest ranking Arasaka representatives in North America, I was not trained for negotiations."

The man lowered his head humbly and then looked up with a stony expression, "Saburo-Sama contacted me this morning about a delivery I was to make to you. I was unable to set up a meeting over the phone, thus I had to come in person. I could not fail Saburo-Sama's command."

Takemura opened the briefcase revealing a handful of datashards in secure slots, "On these shards are proposals for projects the Arasaka Corporation seeks to subcontract. Please take them and contact me with any additional questions or concerns."

I nodded my head and took the case, shutting it, "I'll go over what has been presented."

"Thank you for your consideration, Mr. Welles." Takemura bowed his head and awaited dismissal which I gave him, leaving me with the case to consider.

It wasn't sending any remote signals, so any danger would come from the shards or from Goro who I watched depart on the security feed. Seeing the man do nothing besides leave promptly, I signaled V to come over with my burritos while plugging the first shard into a quarantine zone in the Phantom Box I kept here in the office.

"Whatcha got on that." V asked as I started with the subcontract agreement before even looking at the proposed project.

"Ninety pages of bend over and grab your ankles if anything goes wrong written with way too many words. Pretty standard agreement though, actually fairly generous with many of the conditions." I explained to her after finishing the first dose of beefy goodness, "I'll give it more than a skim if I like the project proposed."

The project itself was some simple engineering outsourcing for one of their automotive subsidiaries. Fix some problems with an underperforming model for next year's edition. The others were similar projects for companies under the umbrella of Arasaka General Manufacturing, all except one that was for the Arasaka Cyberware Division. It looked like Saka wanted to make a run at Bodyweight in the medical biotech world. It was the most complex proposed project, but all of them were fairly simple and straightforward for me. I could have them busted out in a handful of weeks start to finish with prototypes and full documentation. Not that I would though as that would see me dedicating all my working hours on them in the middle of a war, my companies rapid expansion, and the birth of the Brotherhood of Steel. If I took the project I'd just get them done within the proposed schedules. Maybe push for a bit more time on some of them just for fun.

It was a lot of that typical Japanese indirect long term business planning that you never see at Militech who are more of a pissed off pitbull out for blood when they see anything they don't like. Saka wanted to get their foot in the door with a couple of easy home runs and wait for me to put my guard down and an opportunity to get at what they really want.

The secret of my powers.

I'd put the house on this being the next step in a decade spanning plan to get me strapped to Mikoshi so they can pick my brain for an eternity on engineering issues.

"Game on, ya wrinkly old puto." I raised my next burrito in honor of the Emperor.

Poor guy doesn't know what's coming his way.

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What a beast of a chapter. Not the longest I've ever done, but I think its the longest for this specific story. It also let me know that we are never going to get a PoV for an Arasaka boardroom meeting. Just reading through the pageantry for a regular meeting with Japenese business men was headache inducing. There is no way in hell I'm going to put in the effort to figure out what the fuck a meeting of super elites would be like.

In other news we got a sneak peek at what Juan is planning for his next body upgrade and it was a surprise even for me. I was just spending some time thinking about how much a shame it was that Juan has built up all this powerful regeneration for so little of his total body mass. I was doing this while reading through Cyberpunk Wiki's and source books and while reading the grafted muscles section I was thinking how much a shame it was that those cloned muscles weren't as strong as Myomar strands. Then I was like, but Big Juan is the Homelander of body modding. He's better. He is better! So I came up with his new build.

Now we need to decide whether there should be a brand new Aux Chapter for Juan's new character sheet leaving the old one as a snapshot back in time, or if I should just continue replacing all that stuff with updates. Vote on it below.

Keep the out dated character sheet of his first Borg Build.

Replace it with his King Kong Build.

Also I finally found an image that captures most of Juan's proportions and features. I've just been using images of Maui from Moana because he captured the spirit of Big Juan so well. Obviously this new image isn't one to one either, as it is early concept art for Padre, but apparently Padre was originally going to be a thicc boi. So enjoy.

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