Treading water

We ended up taking the patient to the hospital and returning back to the scene as planned. Thankfully, our defeated enemies were still there, so we stacked three of them in the back of the ambulance. The one we were leaving didn't have much chrome to speak of, aside from his head which was conveniently not attached to his body, so I just shoved it in the bodybag with one of the others.

Since the other guy I decapitated had a lot of chrome in his body but none in his head, I just swapped their decapitated heads. Would anyone even realise or bother to check that the head went with the wrong body? If I was back in Brockton Bay, I would be immediately labelled the Head Swapping Killer or something and have a PRT or FBI task force dedicated to bringing me to justice. Here? I would be surprised if anyone noticed or cared.

We were in Watson and not too far away from my storage unit, so I headed there.

The storage unit did have cameras, as most places did, but like most places, they were connected to the net, and their firmware hadn't been updated in over a year. I wouldn't be able to do anything fancy like loop the camera footage like in Mission Impossible, I wasn't that cool, but I could temporarily disable the cameras. This would normally be an issue and result in an immediate security alert on a truly high-security facility, except that I knew this place was unattended. There were no security guards, and the cameras were only checked in the event of incidents, and I wouldn't cause one.

After hacking the exterior cameras, I briefly shifted into a deep dive perspective and trawled through the storage unit's subnet, hitting each of the other cameras in turn. They'd stay deactivated for some time unless this place had a security watchdog daemon, which I doubted.

I then left Gloria in the car and carried all three body bags awkwardly. It was more weight than I could carry comfortably or very far, but I figured one trip would be less suspicious than two. I sent the key electronically and was admitted into the building. It would be really embarrassing if I wasn't the only person in the storage unit right now. I wasn't sure what I would do if I saw someone carrying three obviously full-body bags into their storage unit... I probably would just nod and pretend I didn't see anything, actually.

I didn't do anything fancy; I just unlocked my unit, tossed the bodies in, and left immediately. I would come back the next day with some tools. It would have been easiest to bring the bodies back to my place as I had all of the equipment needed for a full pathological examination at home, but I didn't want a very amused Mr Jin to know what I was up to, so I would have to do some sort of dissection with rudimentary tools in a dusty storage unit.

For some reason, the sense I got from my power was delighted. Sometimes I felt my power would be happy if I became a serial killer, so long as I could dissect a lot of bodies. Was that the "evil" part of me, I wondered? Or was there really something to the theory that a parahuman's power was some external agent?

"Alright, Gloria... let's get back to it," I told her as I returned to the truck. She was driving, though. My arms hurt. I did seem to be getting stronger, though; carrying those three gonks must have been three fifty kilos easy. The two weren't that heavy, but that damn borg weighed one fifty if he weighed a kilo.

Bioware strength mods sort of acted as a multiplier, although only up to a point. The stronger you were naturally, the better. I didn't look like a body-building ab-girl, or anything, but I didn't have much fat left on my body, and my muscles were vaguely visible. It was kind of nice.

---xxxxxx---

I brought several duffle bags with me back to my storage unit. It was more than necessary to just take back the implants from the three bodies, but I was taking back a number of other things as well.

I think I would have been a lot more upset at killing these four guys if I hadn't worked in an ambulance for several months. Although my patients almost always survived, at least until they got to the hospital, the amount of death I have seen in just my short time here blunted a lot of the anxiety and depression I probably would have felt otherwise. Especially considering a lot of it was caused by the gang these guys were in, possibly these guys specifically in some cases.

So, despite the idea still making me somewhat queasy, I wasn't that upset over it. It did make me think back about the way the PRT dealt with criminals back home with a bit of disdain. It seemed almost performative now. I had thought about that quite a bit in the ten months I had spent in this new world, with my handful of memories from Alt-Taylor helping me. She was a lot less naive than I had been.

The only conclusion I could draw was that the Endbringers were a lot bigger threat than what was portrayed in the media and by the authorities. I hadn't thought they downplayed them, either, but the fact that the people in power accepted murderous supervillains must mean that the situation was a lot more precarious than even I had thought.

I decided to work on the borg gentleman first; there were a number of cybernetics that would, for lack of a better word, go bad if they weren't removed from a body within a few days. Mostly replacement organ types and similar systems that needed a constant level of electrical charge to run continuous maintenance systems. I had everything needed to preserve these types of things back at my apartment, though.

Humming the tune to this Japanese girl group which I kind of hated, I disconnected each of his limbs and then carefully excised their interface sockets from what flesh he had on his torso before setting them aside. I had brought some containers from home to carry some of the more delicate implants in, so I carefully disconnected his Kiroshis and settled them into a small cylinder.

Flipping him over, I make certain to work cautiously, disconnecting his Sandevistan. It was a Militech model and fairly reliable. There were cheaper models that provided less of an advantage, with the lowest that I was aware of for Sandy's providing about a two times boost, but that was still on the level of something that regular non-boosted enemies could fight against. It would certainly be harder, but it was possible.

This was the first tier that most actual mercs, and not just gangers, would go for. Something that would provide the real and effective super speed that was very difficult for non-augmented people to really contend with. It was the first level that was "military grade," in other words.

Damn, that song was stuck in my head despite being really terrible. I used my deck to launch my music player. The net service I used to listen to music was fairly cheap, and it used machine learning to try to gauge what my tastes in music were.

"Now playing your favourite oldies," flashed before my eyes, which irritated me to no end.

It didn't take me too long to finish with the other two guys, and I was pretty stoked with the haul. Two sets of Kiroshis, one set of more generic Biodyne optics, a biomonitor, several replacement organs including a Syn-Lung setup, and two full sets of arms and legs between the three guys, including one set of generic Gorilla Arms. The borg's limbs had micro-rotors installed, as well as a heavy-duty ankle reinforcement, so those limbs were pretty valuable, but the rest were average. The Sandy was interesting, too. It was the first time I actually saw one up close, too.

Some of the things I left in the bodies because they were just too annoying to remove with the tools I had and weren't that expensive, such as the polymer arteries the borg had and the subdermal armour system one of the others had. It didn't appear to be a very good one, anyway. However, I was taking the borg's skull replacement back so I could remove it properly by the simple expedient of taking his entire head back home with me.

After that, I grabbed a few of the black market implants that my dad had left me; for example, there was another Projectile Launch System in here, which I had an avenue to sell now. Then I spent a little time disassembling part of the Dragoon. It was kind of difficult because the railgun shot made some panels really difficult or impossible to take off.

Before I had gotten my Zetatech Self-ICE if I had thought about Tinkering ICE, it would be very difficult. My power didn't seem to want to help me with it, thinking it was mainly computer related. However, so long as I kept firmly in mind that it was going to be installed in my body and kept in mind the specific format for the slots in my Zetatech system, it began helping me a lot more.

Keeping all that in mind, I disassembled parts until I got to what my power identified as the cyberwar subsystems. There were both ICE modules, although in a different slot format, as well as generalised ECM and jamming equipment. I wasn't sure what I could do with the latter, but I took it all and put it in one of the duffle bags.

---xxxxxx---

Gloria's car was small, but we managed to fit in what was left of the three bodies in the back seat, as well as the duffle bags of loot. I asked her if she knew where we could dispose of the bodies without anyone being the wiser, and she looked at me oddly and just nodded.

We drove for a fair bit, even leaving the city to the east. I wondered if we would be attacked by the Nomads, but that probably was something that was more just depicted on television.

When we got to our destination, I blinked and then sighed, blushing slightly, "Oh." We were at the municipal landfill. I chuckled a little bit and then just quickly tossed the three guys into an area and tossed a bit of cardboard over them to conceal the obvious body bags. I wondered how many bodies were buried here in the dump. A lot, probably.

She followed me back to my apartment and was a bit shocked at my outer public area, which looked more like a Ripperdoc clinic than someone's apartment. She gaped, "Taylor, are you a ripperdoc?!"

"Uh, no," I told her, "I just happened to get all of this equipment... well... it's hard to explain. I can't really talk about it, but it's mine now."

She looked at me a little unbelieving, and I waved her off. "Okay, let's get some of these perishable items in the stock-keeping system."

She handed me items, and I placed them carefully in the cryogenic containers and then slid those containers into Dr Gerstatt's old stock system, carefully inputting the name and model number of each added implant into the computer as I did so.

I set one of the cylinders carrying one set of Kiroshis aside for a moment. The limbs I sat on my workbench; I would go through all of their maintenance later today. It shouldn't take too long.

After we were done, I asked her, "Do you want these Kiroshis? They're only a couple of years old, and they're a lot better than the trash you're currently seeing with. I'll update them with the latest firmware, including NCPD downlink and everything."

She looked interested but said, "I don't really have a regular doctor I go to."

I waved her off, "I may not be a ripperdoc, but you already have optics. Swapping in one set of another is one of the simplest procedures there is; it's mostly plug-and-play." That wasn't quite true, as Kiroshi made a lot better use of the optical nerve than most brands, so I would have to make a couple adjustments to the interface, but it really was simple.

She looked amused, "If you blind me, you're the one that's gonna have to walk me to an actual doctor and pay for them to fix me up. But, yeah, sure. I would like to see if the gonks I see are murderers, plus the resolution is supposed to be preem. These can't even do actual phone calls, you know?" She pulled out an actual cell phone, similar to the one I kept in my desk drawer these days.

I nodded and told her, "Okay, take a seat. I'm going to reflash these babies with the latest firmware."

I didn't particularly want to see what kind of media, images or videos a murderous borg kept in their Kiroshi's internal memory, even if there weren't any viruses or malware installed, so I just quickly reset the eyes to factory defaults and installed the latest manufacturer's software on it. It took me over an hour to do that when I did it to myself the first time, but now it barely took two or three minutes to accomplish.

I put on the rebuilt glove tool that I inherited from Dr Gerstatt. It was a little weird getting used to using it, but it really did make a lot of common operations very quick. I administered a local anaesthetic and powered down her optics before using the glove tool to carefully pop them out of her orbital cavity, setting them in a small cylinder one at a time. They weren't very good, but they were still worth a couple hundred eddies, maybe. Waste not, want not.

Rather than immediately installing the Kiroshis, I took a moment to update the optical nerve interface. In some ways, it was standard, but Kiroshi used a lot of semi-proprietary methods, so it would just generate a lot of pointless headaches and sub-optimal performance if I just installed them without making these adjustments.

One of the attachments on the glove hand was an articulable computer interface. I could switch out the tip with various plugs that would interface with a number of proprietary data formats, but the semi-generic optical interfaces always were programmed by a near-field communication system. There wasn't a lot of room for plugs inside your eyes, so I popped that onto the glove and held it close to the nerve interface in her optical cavity until the new Kiroshi software flashed onto it.

I had already reprogrammed the iris colour on the Kiroshis to more or less match her previous eyes instead of the blood-red colour Mr Edgy McEdgerson had selected. She could update it herself in the settings, but there was no point in giving her cringe-eyes to start with. Using the glove, I installed each eye one at a time, making sure it clicked into place properly and then testing its range of movement.

After that, I nodded and did the last few tests before saying, "Alright. That should do it. We'll just need to go through the visual calibration routine in a moment." I tapped a few keys on the Meditech biobed, which should reactivate Gloria's eyes. She blinked a few times and says, "Woah. Nova, everything looks awesome."

I hummed and nodded, asking her, "Hmmm... no glitches, blurred vision or low contrast?" After she shook her head, I rolled my chair back to glance at the read-out on the biobed's drop-down operator display. While she was sitting here, I had dual access to all of the output of her implants. One side of the screen showed a close-up of the iris and lens of each of the Kiroshis, while the other half of the screen was her perspective.

"Okay, activate the HUD and select the new user setup," I told her and then walked her through both the setup and calibration program. I then showed her all the options and how to download a phone app and pair it with her existing phone service, as well as the quality of life things like GPS mapping, taking photos and videos and other things.

"Okay, try the optical zoom mode. Take a look at that poster across the room," I told her, and she gaped, not even realising such a thing existed. "Lastly, the scanning system."

"Scanning system?" she asked, confused.

I hummed and nodded, "Yes, that's how you trigger some of the ancillary functions, like NCPD background checks. Focus on my face and kind of think hard about it. Like you did when you zoomed, but a little different. Instead of thinking about seeing distance, think about scanning or just focusing on my face hard." All Kiroshi models had a mental interface, integrating into the user's operating system more completely compared to a lot of the bargain basement optics that still used blink and eye-tracking systems that were decades old already.

"Ah! I see. Well, you don't have any criminal record, Tay," she said with a grin.

I nodded, "After a while, it should become second nature, syncing with your thought processes and reading your intention. This also includes a piece of simple machine learning software that will identify objects in the environment as well. It's not too useful if all you have are optics, but it is still the sort of thing that could win you a bet sometime. So, trigger it on, say... here, your old eyes." I handed her the open container, and she looked inside.

"Ah, preem. It gave me the manufacturer and model number," she said, excited.

I nodded, "You should consider taking the internal biomonitor we found too. It's not too old, but I'm not willing to put it in. But we could find you a good doctor that doesn't charge too much, especially if I go with you to put it in." Frankly, I was surprised that one of the guys had a biomonitor. Most gangers didn't really seem to care that much about their health.

She looked a little uneasy, "But we could probably sell that for ... how much?"

I considered that. Retail price was probably six thousand, "One point five to two thousand eddies."

"That's a lot of money, Taylor," she said, unsure.

I waved her off, "Money is there to be spent. And what is the most important thing?"

"David!" she said instantly.

I coughed and said, "Okay, what's the second most important thing?"

She seemed confused, "...David?"

"Who do you think will take care of David if you're dead?" I asked her bluntly.

That caused her to blink in shock and consider the question seriously, "My health, then?"

Yes, that was the answer I was looking for. I nodded, "Precisely. A lot of people, especially people used to being poor, underestimate the utility of an internal biomonitor because they are kind of pricey and don't provide any obvious benefits. They're considered a 'suit implant.' But consider that... Corpos don't just waste money on things, at least not until you're so far up the ladder that I've never seen, nor my dad. The modern biomonitors made these days are... comprehensive. It'll tell you if you're not getting enough sleep, not getting enough nutrition and what you need to eat to fix that, or if you're getting too stressed, blood pressure is too high, or if you've been poisoned or drugged well before the effects become apparent. If you've been injured, it'll tell you exactly where, which will help you know where to use bleeding control to keep yourself alive."

After that, I finished with, "Which is cheaper from a medical perspective, preventing a problem from occurring or fixing it after it happened?"

Gloria was smart, so she understood what I was saying right away, "Ah, I see what you mean. That does make a lot of sense when you say it that way. Okay, I'll take it even if I have to pay seven hundred or so eddies to buy out your share."

I nodded. I didn't offer to give it to her for free, not only because I needed the money too, but more importantly, she wasn't the type to just accept charity.

I handed her an inhaler that was full of nanomedicine. "Two puffs now, another two in an hour or two." I was giving her that for free, but it only cost about twenty eurodollars.

She followed my directions, and I asked, "Want to stay here for lunch?"

She shook her head, "I gotta get back to little David, but you're free to come over? He likes you!"

I chuckled, "Maybe another time. I'm going to spend a few hours running maintenance on all these items that are now ours. Oh, wait. I have an early birthday present for you." Gloria's birthday was next month, but I had already decided what to get her.

She perked up, "Really?!" and I nodded and told her to wait for a moment while I ran into the private part of my apartment to grab it.

For some reason, wrapping gifts was somewhat of a lost art here; at least there wasn't any wrapping paper at any of the stores I went to, so I kind of improvised with a small bag with coloured paper sticking out of it and hiding what was inside.

I handed it to her, and she took it and blinked, "Heavy!"

She pulled the thin paper out and reached in, "Oooh... you got me..." she pulled out a pistol, "A gun?!"

I nodded. It was the same M-10C Lexington, the compact version, that I had gotten her to practise with at the range with me a few times. My dad had like six Lexington's amongst his personal effects, including two compact ones, so it wasn't even anything I had to buy.

"And an appendix-style concealed carry holster, three magazines, and a hundred cartridges," I finished for her. I bought the holster, but it wasn't that expensive. I was worried she wouldn't purchase a pistol because of her incessant frugalness.

She chuckled and said, "Uh.. thanks. Do you think I should start wearing it now?"

I nodded and showed her the best way to hide the holster in her pants so that her loose shirt covered it, "And we continue to practice at least once a week for the foreseeable future."

After that, she left, and I worked a little bit on the cybernetics we had secured. I thought now was a good time to slowly stop selling them to Gloria's small-time fixer over a period of a few months. He seemed to be increasingly busy with the drugs I was selling him, anyway. He had sent another message requesting more, and about ten times as much as his last order, so I would drop a few thousand tablets at one of the dead drops I had set up.

Once I had realised such things existed in this town, I raided her dad's book collection. He had a lot of old books, including interesting and suspicious ones from the 1960s and 1970s, about spy tradecraft, like how to run a dead drop. I also remembered one time that Alt-Taylor claimed he was acting like a spy, and his response was telling; he shook his head and said, eyes glimmering in hidden amusement, "Never! Spies, when caught, are simply shot out of hand. Intelligence officers, however, are often traded back, though. Never be a spy, Taylor."

He really was a spy, wasn't he?!

I glanced at the giant handgun I had pulled out of the duffle bag. What was I going to do with this... beast? It would be effective against borgs or people with subdermal armour, but I could get similar anti-armour penetration using the M-76e. The solid steel slugs penetrated fairly well, and there were options for tungsten tips for penetration, although they were a bit pricier. The Constitution Arms pistol was a good, reliable and effective weapon. It was just... nobody would take her seriously if I was carrying it.

It was like what a BD star would use in an action film. If you saw a sixteen-year-old girl carrying a Desert Eagle, you'd be a bit perplexed too. It was the same with this thing.

I had a sudden idea and triggered my contacts list to pop up. I had gotten somewhat on good terms with most of the low-level Tyger Claws that worked in the building. And I recalled treating one of them who talked shit about my "tiny little girl's gun." That the only way he would ever carry a gun was if it was a man's gun, he said!

Perfect. I found his name, Johnny Leung, in my contacts list and called him. The Tygers Claws wasn't strictly a Japanese gang, per se, and Johnny was one of the few Han Chinese members. Although that said, he did go big into the whole Japanese culture thing about Samurai and swords, anyway.

He picked up after the third ring, "Doc girl, whatchu need?"

I sighed internally, "It's what I got. I remember you saying you'd be interested in a gun, but only if it was a big manly one." I held out the giant pistol in front of myself, so it could be picked up on the vidcall, "Constitution Arms, 12.7mm, in really good shape. Two magazines and a belt holster are included. Interested?"

"Fuck yeah, girl! If the price is right! I'll give ya five hundred for it," he countered.

Priced new, it would be about fifteen hundred eurodollars or more. But that included the cleaning kit that I didn't have, though. I countered with a different price, and eventually, we settled on six hundred dollars. He was working security at the front door today, so I took it out to him, belt, holster and all.

"Here you go, Johnny," I told him, handing him the pistol, magazine and belt and holster. The holster was kind of ridiculous; it was faux leather and almost looked like it was out of the old west, complete with little bullet loops. Why you'd have bullet loops when your gun used a magazine, I didn't really know.

"Oh fucking preem!" he said, putting the holster on, "You didn't say the holster was sweet as fuck, choom! I look just like a fucking Samurai cowboy now!" He said, posing with the pistol on his belt and sword in his hands. "Man, I'm gonna get a sheathe on the other side for my sword."

Oh god.

He transferred six hundred and fifty dollars, the extra fifty for how extra sweet the holster was, in his words. His friends gathered around him, and they all tended to agree that it was, indeed, badass, with one recommending he get an ambidextrous co-processor so he could swing a sword in one hand and shoot in the other, like Victor Chang, the BD star.

"Later, Johnny," I told him and left as soon as possible before he decided to ask me about such implants. Was he stupid because he ended up in a brutal street gang, or was he in a brutal street gang because he was stupid?

I then transferred half the proceeds to Gloria with a text explaining what it was from. Although I had done all the work killing those assholes, she did get shot in the chest for it, so she was definitely due an equal share.

---xxxxxx---

A week later, I introduced Gloria to Dr Taylor, who was more than happy to install the provided biomonitor. He charged a little bit more than average, but he provided a comprehensive service that I honestly felt was worth it.

She felt pride in her work when Gloria told her that Dr Taylor was impressed with whoever put her optics in, too.

She said as she walked back to her car, "This thing says I'm chronically dehydrated, deficient in a lot of vitamins, chronically fatigued, malnourished and am close to getting a repetitive stress injury, and I have pre-hypertension."

I gave her a side eye and nodded, "I could have told you all that." In fact, I had told her all of that.

Sighing, she said, "Fine, I get it." She paused and asked, "Do you think you could sell me one of those sleep things you built?"

I blinked and hadn't considered that. Maybe that would have been a better birthday present than a pistol? I nodded slowly, considering the price of the component parts, "Sure, for three hundred eddies. That's friends' pricing." The version I could make now hardly required any of my maintenance at all.

---xxxxxx---

Time passed as water does, and before long, a few months had gone by. Gloria was stoked because she passed the Advanced EMT test on her first try.

"Congratulations!" I told her after she told me the good news as we both started walking from the parking lot into work. I finally couldn't stand riding the train anymore and bought a pretty nice Thorton Colby CX410 for thirty thousand eurodollars from a nomad group that lived nearby and dealt in a lot of vehicles. You could even buy aeroplanes from them.

It had the common modification where the trunk was replaced with a truck bed, so it kind of reminded me of a Chevy El Camino. We didn't have those types of cars in Earth Bet, but it was iconic in Earth Aleph media. The engine was recently fully overhauled, and it purred like a kitten. It was a lot nicer than Gloria's car, but it was still only your average middle-of-the-road used vehicle. The papers on it seemed legit; at least the city didn't make any noise as if it was stolen or anything (even if it might have been), so I thought it was a good deal.

Before this purchase, I had accumulated over a hundred and sixty thousand eurodollars from my various income streams, but now I was back down to one hundred and thirty, which was barely more than when I started out. I had been here for over a year and barely made any progress with my ultimate goals, although I was in a much better position in a lot of ways. Two steps forward and one step back.

Several months ago, I was tempted to keep the Syn-Lungs for myself, but they were a pretty shitty version, so I ended up selling them. I did keep one of the replacement livers and used it as parts to build my armoured liver-heart-detoxifier. I hadn't gotten the guts to cut into myself yet, and the system looked pretty weird, so I was too afraid to take it to Dr Taylor; if he became aware of my monowire, he'd have to tell the coppers, so I would have to just bite the bullet and perform surgery on myself I wanted it, and I did. Perhaps on my next five days stretch of days off.

I was closing on my six-month anniversary working for NC Med Ambulance, and I figured I would start sending in my application to Trauma Team when I hit the nine-month mark. Our record spoke for itself; very rarely did people die in our ambulance unless we were dealing with injuries that were incompatible with life, and their body just hadn't realised it was dead yet.

I think the only reason the bosses hadn't split us up to try to increase the stats of other units was that they were positive I was going to leave here in a few months anyway, so they felt it was better if I managed to get Gloria as shit-hot as she could be in my remaining time here. Personally, I agreed with that; plus, I enjoyed working with Gloria, and we had a business that made us each a small but steady amount of money.

We'd be keeping the same relationship after I left, although I would get less of a share as all I would be responsible for would be refurbishing and performing maintenance on the cyberware she would bring me. But I was trying to think of ways to raise a lot more money at once, though. It seemed like no matter what in this city, the more you made, the more you spent, and it seemed really hard to stick to any saving goals.

In a lot of ways, Night City was like being tossed overboard in the middle of the ocean; all you could do was keep your head above water without ever getting anywhere.