We're the Neon Angels, flying high, living fast, never gonna die

Rather than look annoyed with me for wanting to turn the meeting into an actual dinner, Wakako just shrugged and called the petite hostess girl back into the room briefly and spoke with her quietly. The hostess nodded rapidly and departed the room.

Wakako sat back down and sipped her tea, and said, "So, for our next step, we will need a larger sample of the chemical, and I'll need to forward it to my contact at Biotechnica, but he's on temporary medical leave. Apparently, he was wounded in the line of duty recently and had to get a replacement arm."

I nearly snorted my tea, which caused Wakako to raise an eyebrow at me. Anything I saw at work was to be confidential, and I could be terminated for disclosing anything, but I figured that Wakako was the type to not throw intelligence sources under the bus, "I responded to that call at work. There was some kind of an organised and disciplined mercenary force attacking a Biotechnica convoy. The mercs had three Soviet armoured vehicles, which we demolished. His boss, I assume, was DoA when we got there, but I ended up transporting, I presume, your guy with a severed arm below the elbow. He was quite lucky, actually, was hit by one of the HMGs and not the fifty-seven-millimetre high-explosive shell firing autocannon like his boss."

Still, now, by chance, I knew her contact's full name. I didn't know if that would be useful, but I expected Wakako to insulate both sides of the transaction as much as possible, but now I knew at least one side of it. If her guy tried to fuck me over, I could try to get some sort of revenge. That was defeatist talk, though.

Our order arrived so quickly that I was very sure that they had redirected some other person's duck to our table, and it was the same girl bringing it in. She smiled at me as she leaned down and practically bent over to place the duck on the very low table, and my eyes were briefly drawn to the gap in her kimono that was on display. It seems like it was true, and you weren't supposed to wear foundational garments while wearing a kimono. I had read that online, but I didn't know that I believed it. I spent a moment thinking about that while she departed.

In any other neighbourhood, it would be kind of weird for a hostess at a Chinese restaurant to wear a kimono, I thought, but in Japantown, it was pretty common at all of the higher-end places, regardless of what kind of food was served. It was the same at Famous Linh's Pizza, which was nearby, too.

"...so what do you think?" Wakako's voice brought me out of my reverie.

I blinked, "Uh... what? I'm sorry; something distracted me. What did you say?"

I'm not sure if Wakako's smug smirk was excessively smug or not because, honestly, she always had that sort of expression on her face, but she said, "Somethings, clearly. I was saying that due to my contact recovering and his new responsibilities, it might take two or three months at the minimum before we hear back. Is that going to be a problem?"

I hummed. I didn't want to give them an infinite amount of time because it was theoretically possible that they could try to string us along while attempting to engineer a novel synthesis for it. I wasn't under any illusions; the very first thing they'd do would be to put the sample under a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer to get its chemical composition and start working backwards from there.

But I nodded, "That probably is fine, but we're going to have to think about number two or three choices if it's much longer than that. Do you think your contact got a promotion, then?" I wondered if he was behind the attack; a dangerous-looking but ultimately simple-to-repair wound like losing an arm would be the perfect way to make people believe you weren't involved.

She snorted, "I doubt it. He'll have, for a while, an increased responsibility but without any of the power his predecessor had. A terrible position for him, and I doubt that he'll get his boss' job, which for our purposes is ideal, I think." I tilted my head to the side curiously at that, and Wakako noticed and shrugged, "We'll ask a small enough sum that he could have financed it before this; I'll ask for five million but might allow myself to be negotiated down to four or four and a quarter. That is a deal that he could have authorised before his boss died, and with no boss to take the credit, he will be definitely motivated to seal the deal with alacrity. It'll be a shot in the arm. His precarious position will entice him to make a swift conclusion to our deal once he is in a position to realise the worth of the transaction."

I nodded slowly, taking a bite of some of the crispy skin of the Peking duck. A lot of people made a mistake and tried to eat the skin and the meat at the same time, but it was really a better experience to eat them separately. They were a different experience, and it was better not to comingle them too much. The Golden Duck were artists in making what was undoubtedly scop mimic the taste and texture of actual Peking duck, as it tasted very close to what I remembered the one time my parents and I had eaten it in Brockton Bay.

An increase in responsibility without the increase in pay or power to ensure such responsibilities were performed adequately was a perennial nightmare for middle management at most corporations. It was a fairly common situation to find oneself in, actually and the most common analogy I could think of was if you were a line supervisor at a burger joint and your boss quit without notice. For a time, you'd be responsible for the times your employees called out of work, but you didn't have the power to either punish the ones who needed discipline or reward the good workers. You were responsible for staffing the shifts but couldn't do anything to actually ensure the workers came in.

The nirvana of a Corporate manager was power without responsibility, and it was an aspiration that almost none of them would ever achieve. If that was their nirvana, then their hell was responsibility without power. I said carefully, "Just so long as he isn't so precarious that he sees it a better idea to make a swift conclusion to us." Specifically, me. I didn't think that, regardless of what happened, Wakako herself would risk anything personally. That wasn't how she did business, certainly not for so little a sum.

She sighed and nodded, "That isn't an impossible scenario, even if it is an unlikely one. We will just have to show enough strength to make it seem an unwinning proposition if an in-person meeting is ever required. Also, I'd definitely have him murdered if he tried to betray us."

That last bit would have shocked me a year and a half ago, but now it just seemed obvious. I did believe her, too, not that it really filled me with that much security. I did believe that if he betrayed us that she would have contingencies for it. She'd have to in order to keep her reputation. But that wouldn't prevent me from dying, even if I was "avenged."

These days, if I had the choice between revenge and living a long life, I would pick the latter every day. Sometimes it pained me to admit, but I was no longer Edmond Dantès, even if Winslow High School had been my Château d'If. I felt that if I hadn't been transported bodily into a brand new world with a brand new start, things might have been a lot different, though. I would have definitely tried to throw myself into a heroic identity using my power to try to prove all of them wrong. But here, I had nothing to prove. It, once again, made me feel bad for Alt-Taylor stuck there in Brockton Bay.

I had dreams of changing the world, of course, but I wanted to selfishly prioritise my own freedom, first of all, and that meant I had to live as long as possible. I was such a shitty person sometimes. I knew that I could probably revolutionise parts of the world, and If I really was that interested in improving things, then I should be hoping a Corporation with a very large budget kidnapped me. It'd do more than anything else to accelerate my plans, even if I didn't get much of the benefit of it.

I had ideas about carbon-sequestering, oxygen-producing cyanobacteria that you could release into the ocean that could slowly, over a decade or two, bring the atmospheric conditions back to somewhere close to what they had been before the last Corporate War. That would cause an increase in arable land in the range of a hundred million hectares or more globally. Biotechnica would be the ideal place to set such plans into motion, but I definitely, absolutely did not want to go down that path if I could avoid it.

I tried to rationalise it away because I also had ideas that could see true bio-indefinite mortality be achieved, even if only on a small scale initially, a true halting of senescence instead of the rejuvenation treatments that were the current state of the art, so I could afford longer-term plans. However, that ignored all of the people whose lives could have been immeasurably improved in the interim.

Still, if there was one thing that has changed more than any other about myself since arriving in this world, it would have been my selfishness. If you weren't at least a little bit selfish, I didn't think you'd survive here.

Finishing my duck, I pushed the plate forward slightly and fished a small clear baggy of off-white powder out of my pocket and tossed it in an arc over my decimated duck to plop next to Wakako's tea. I was suddenly glad that I had sealed this bag extra well, as it would have been really embarrassing if the baggy popped open and discharged a cloud of the drug into Wakako's face. She might have had me killed if she didn't make it to a private and sound-proof toilet in time.

I said, "That's two and a half grams. Considering that the normal dose is about three hundred and fifty micrograms to the kilogram of body weight, this should be enough for almost a hundred uses. More than enough for Biotechnica to run an abbreviated RCT."

Although I said RCT, I dearly hoped that they wouldn't utilise an actual control group if they followed Wakako's idea of infecting known-healthy people with various bacterium. Since they'd no doubt test using known, standard bacteria, it is very unlikely that they'd need a control group. There are multiple ways to verify infection took place, and it wasn't like they didn't know what the infection process looked like.

If they duplicated the anthrax infection in a standard clinical double-blind, well, that would just be murder. They likely wouldn't. Corporations were amoral, but they weren't wasteful, but honestly, nothing would surprise me.

Wakako smiled at me and slid the sample into her pocket. She glanced at the duck that I had decimated, "Did you like it?"

I nodded and said absently, "Yes. The Golden Duck does a really good job; it tastes almost indistinguishable from the time I had an actual Peking duck in the past. Not sure how they do it, but I don't think it involves actual ducks at all."

Wakako nodded, "I'm rather curious where you had actual Peking duck, but I suppose it could have been anywhere given your parents. I had to bring in the chefs directly from China, and I pay them more than Trauma Team pays you. But it's worth it."

Oh, she owned the place? Interesting. That explained why she thought it was fine to speak here. And I probably shouldn't have mentioned that the duck was so close to the real thing, as I doubted there were more than a few hundred places in North America that still served actual ducks in decades, although paradoxically, there were still rural people that might as often as not offer to pay you in chickens or a duck instead of currency.

I didn't know what she meant precisely with the quip about my parents, except Alt-Danny had often gone out of the country. Before he worked for Militech, he had been in the NUSA State Department, but that was when Alt-Taylor would have been a toddler.

Wait a second... if she owned the place, did that mean there was probably a claymore mine underneath my pillow or that the teacup was a grenade or something? I thought she was loosening up, inviting me to a meeting outside her strong place. Well, baby steps, I supposed.

I finished the rest of my tea, kind of wishing that I had ordered a Cirrus Cola to go along with my duck, but I didn't want to defile the "tea room" more than I already had.

"Is there anything else we need to go over?" I finally asked a little surprised she had budgeted so much time for the meeting in the first place. Although, I supposed she made time since she was looking at something in the neighbourhood of nine hundred to a million eurodollars profit on our joint venture if everything went well.

She shook her head, and we both stood up at the same time, which was a good thing because my legs were starting to get the pins and needles feeling from sitting with my legs folded underneath my body. I wondered why cats could loaf for hours with no appreciable effects but internally ignored my medical sense trying, happily, to tell me why, which mostly was the square-cube law. It was mostly a mathematics lesson, but in the specialised ways that a mathematical principle impacted biomechanics.

It was the same reason ants could lift ten times their body weight, elephants could not jump and why some larger dinosaurs would have probably died if they fell over from standing.

My power had always been very interested in dinosaurs and didn't understand the concept of a rhetorical question, not at all, so in some respects, it reminded me of the slightly autistic boy I used to play with in elementary school before his family wisened up and moved out of the Bay.

I used this to my advantage and kept a list of things I noticed it seemed interested in, and when the urge to tinker with things or people got especially strong, I'd conduct free-form research on one of the topics, although it was getting harder to avoid

"Thank you for the duck," I told her, despite the fact that I was probably the one essentially paying for it. However, now that I knew she owned this place, I was going to double-check the accounting and have a word if she tried to charge the venture retail price.

We both left the tea room, but I departed the front door, and she went further into the establishment. If I had to guess, she was killing two birds with one stone and had combined our meeting into a likely no-notice inspection of her business.

---xxxxxx---

I awoke suddenly to my phone ringing. I had a simple "artificial stupid" social program screen my calls when I didn't recognise the number, but to interrupt and wake me from the middle of a sleep-inducer cycle meant that firstly, the person had to be someone I knew, and they had to tell the computer that answered my phone that it was urgent and time-critical that they speak to me immediately.

Fuck, I was going to be really upset if someone abused that privilege, as terminating a sleep cycle early caused me to be very drowsy and out of it for several minutes. It was very uncomfortable.

My vision was a little bleary, like I still needed glasses, except that the caller-ID was crisp and high-resolution as usual since it was drawn directly onto my optic nerve. It was Jin. I groaned but answered, "What is it, Jin? I am going to be most wroth with you if this isn't very important."

"Oh, you answered! It's literally life and death, Taylor. I know I told you we wouldn't ask you to chip random chrome in and out of random, sketchy people, but I am hoping, very much, that you will make an exception this time," Mr Jin said, and his tone was unusually intense and slightly emotional.

I fumbled with the sleep inducer on my head and settled for tossing it in the chair as I stood uneasily on my feet. Life and death? I wasn't expecting it to be quite that serious. As I talked, I walked into my bathroom, disrobing as I went and turning on a cold shower to wake me up, "I'm not a Ripperdoc, Mr Jin, so I don't see how I will agree to this, nor how it could be possibly life or death. There are a couple of twenty-four-hour cybernetics clinics in town."

"Just listen. One of my friends and peers in the organisation has had his daughter kidnapped. We don't know where they've taken her, but we've found the... I guess you could say the facilitator that was responsible. However, he has proven somewhat resistant to interrogation. We did get enough info that the data we want is on an embedded data storage nexus, and thankfully our netrunners had already disabled all of his cybernetics, so he couldn't delete it. We are very sure that if we don't find her by sometime this morning, we won't ever find her," he said, speaking very rapidly.

Standing under the cold shower, I woke up more completely as I listened to his plea, "And you think I can dig it out of his skull?" That explained why they didn't go to one of the reputable twenty-four-hour clinics. I could, of course, do exactly that, but there had to be at least one Ripperdoc on Jig-Jig street awake, "There's got to be at least one Ripper available in Japantown that won't ask questions. Dr Tanaka?"

"There really aren't. It's two thirty in the morning on a Sunday, Taylor. The only Ripperdoc we really know is available gives that german Doctor we had issues with in the past a good name. I vastly trust your expertise more than that -- we would stick a gun under the nose of one of the docs downtown before we did that. That is, in fact, our next step, but that is asking for all kinds of other issues if we have to do that," Mr Jin said in a more patient tone.

Turning the shower off I towelled off. I didn't want a real shower to clean myself, just enough to wake myself up. I was quiet on the phone for a long moment, and finally, I said, "If things are as you say, I'll help you. But I don't precisely trust your organisation. It's clear that this is important to you, but it just occurred to me that someone with a psychological profile of me might come up with a story very similar to this to get my help. You need to send me info right now so that I can verify through someone that isn't you that this guy you're going to drag into my clinic is a Very Bad Man. Otherwise, no deal."

He blinked for a moment before nodding, "That won't be an issue. I can send you his dossier right now; it includes all biometrics which you can no doubt confirm when he gets to your place. Do you have access to any kind of background investigation site? Any of them will pull up his record, and it will be very obvious that he is, as you say, A Very Bad Man."

I quickly approved a file transfer, my Zetatech ICE quarantining the file in an isolated virtual machine just in case. It did have everything he said, and as I started to gather something to put on, using my toes to grab my pyjamas and toss them into the hamper, I paid for a simple background on my gumshoe site, using the attached name and biometric data.

The information came back, and it was more or less the same but much less detailed. Even the cheap background I had paid for included a rap sheet that was longer than my arm, including a number of pending charges that included kidnapping and murder in a number of jurisdictions on this coast ranging from LA here to Seattle.

"Why are you so sure you won't be able to recover her? Is this guy a Scav?" I asked as I wiggled into a pair of pants.

I heard Mr Jin make an ambiguous noise and say, "Ano... not probably like you are thinking. It's more a human trafficking type of operation, we believe. If we can't get her before they transport her out of the city... well, it will become very hard, and I personally would rather just be disassembled if I was a pretty fourteen-year-old girl." That was the first time I had ever heard Mr Jin use the common Japanese disfluency "ano." It was kind of like the Japanese version of the English "uhmm." Also, ugh. It did sort of match the guy's rap sheet, though.

"Okay, so long as this is the guy your men drag into my clinic, I'll do it," I reiterated, downloading both versions of the man's dossier I had onto my non-emulated drive after scanning it six ways from Sunday for malware. Both versions included some biometric data. I couldn't do rapid genome sequencing, but the fingerprints would be good enough. My optics had enough resolution to take a person's fingerprints just by staring at their fingers, and I had an app to compare someone's fingers to a provided exemplar set.

There was no way they could have gone to the complicated nanosurgical process of faking the guy's fingerprints and then be on a time crunch for me to remove data from his cybernetics.

"Okay, they're on their way. You just have to promise not to destroy the data. If you think you can't handle it, tell the guys, and we'll move to plan B," he said very seriously. I supposed plan B was putting a gun under the nose of a real, certified Ripperdoc.

I was not too concerned, but I tried to express that I was humble, "Don't worry. I'm not going to let some little girl be sold off to some brothel in Timbuktu or something."

"Probably Dubai, given this guy's previous work," Mr Jin said angrily. That wouldn't be very good. It wasn't exactly surprising, but when oil dried up in the Middle East in the late nineties, the region quickly spiralled into madness, with regional nuclear exchanges by multiple sides turning most of the Middle East into an impoverished, uninhabitable hellscape.

Some people, like the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia and the Emiratis, had long ago diversified enough that they weren't rendered into paupers when it happened. Still, it had only been in the last ten years that the former gleaming jewel of the Arabian Peninsula had been widely resettled, but it was still considered kind of a lawless zone where anything and everything could be traded. There had to be more than a single girl taken if Mr Jin thought that they'd actually ship them that far. It wasn't like there wasn't a market for such things closer to home.

They were polite enough to ring her doorbell at least, and I said, "They're here. I'll tell you how it goes." Then I hung up, switched to the intercom and said, "Come on in. I'll be out in just a moment," before triggering the door to open.

Drying my hair, I grabbed a scrunchie and tied it up in a simple curly ponytail to keep it out of my way before I stepped out into the clinic. They had dumped my "patient" into the combination operating chair and biobed, and I blinked at him as he was missing both of his legs, some of his fingers, and his eyes. And he was unconscious, although I thought it was likely not from anaesthesia.

Well, clearly, the Tyger Claws had not gotten the memo that torture was not really an effective way to extract information. I'd have to stabilise him before I could operate. At least he had enough fingers that I could actually check his fingerprints. Otherwise, I didn't know what I would have done. I mean, he sort of looked like the guy but not enough that I would have said with any amount of certainty that he was.

There were three Tyger Claws in here with me; two were of the dumb brute variety, but the third... I glanced at him, noticing the cyberdeck installed at the base of his skull, "Were you the netrunner that disabled all of his cybernetics? If so, please send me everything you have about his system and what software you installed."

The skinny man of Japanese descent stood straighter as if I was his Drill Sergeant and said, "Hai!" and immediately started transferring me a number of large files over wireless. My Zetatech started blaring as it heuristically identified several of them as malware, and I narrowed my eyes until I realised he was sending me exact copies of the deployable attack programs he had used, not their malware payloads. Well, that was interesting. I'd keep those after I made sure it wasn't some kind of double fake-out with extra malware installed on the executables. For now, though, they could stay quarantined.

Gloria often told me I was one of the most paranoid people she knew when it came to system security, and it was because the idea of something directly connected to and possibly affecting my brain would have been incomprehensible to me three years ago. I didn't think I was paranoid; I thought everyone else was too used to the risks that cybernetics, especially the type I had, posed and weren't cognisant enough of the risk, but that was just a difference of opinion. There were people that thought as I did, but they were either all netrunners themselves or a particular type of doomsday prepper.

The type that might have called themselves a "Sovereign Citizen" back in my old world, but, surprisingly, that subculture didn't precisely exist here, at least anymore. It had in the past, but the NUSA once publically declared that anyone who called themselves such, well, the NUSA would accede to their demands and treat them as Sovereign and deal with them the way that two Sovereign entities always settled disagreements since time immemorial: armed conflict.

There was famous footage of the government using cluster bombs filled with napalm and white phosphorous on a compound filled with several dozen so-called Sovereign Citizens and their families. It was horrifying. When journalists claimed, stupefied, that such actions were war crimes, the White House Press Secretary, appearing perplexed, had simply stated that the Sovereigns in that compound were not signatories of the Geneva convention or any other convention that covered the ethical restraint in War, and, therefore, the NUSA government did not need to conduct hostilities against them as it would against treaty signatories.

As horrifying as that was, I didn't think there was a single person that claimed to be a Sovereign Citizen after that.

"What are you doing?" asked one of the grunts, curious, as I stared at the man's fingers, bringing them fairly close up to my eyes.

The app confirmed that this was the guy. I didn't think that Mr Jin would have lied to me, but I couldn't say precisely that he wouldn't, either. I glanced at the muscle, "I was verifying his biometrics. I am only willing to do this because this guy is a monster, and I would have been very upset had you tried to sneak in some random gonk."

"Oh," he said, nodding. It seems it was just curious. As I set up my equipment, connecting him to the cardiac monitor and starting an IV in his arm. Perhaps not surprisingly, this guy was not in very good shape. Something told me that they weren't entirely as surgical as I would have been if I had needed to perform multiple amputations on him. His blood pressure was shit, and he was in V-tach that might, possibly, cause a sudden cardiac arrest at any moment, and I was pretty sure he probably had as much blood out of his body as he had inside of it at the start of this whole thing.

Sighing, I stuck some single-use defibrillator pads on him and connected those to the cardiac monitor as well. The netrunner looked interested and must have recognised the pads, "Oh, nova. Are you going to shock him?" He held his hands up and rubbed them together in the universal motion of lubricating the pads of an ancient-style defibrillation machine. I was surprised he hadn't said, "Clear!" as that was what everybody expected. I was also amazed that this gesture was still in the public consciousness, so much so that on medical shows they often used archaic devices because it was more dramatic.

"We haven't used that kind of defibrillator in a hundred years," I told him, shaking my head, "And no, I am doing what is called a synchronised electrical cardioversion, or rather I will after I get some more fluids into him. It is a little similar, but you use cardioversion if their heart is still beating, but you want to reset it to a standard sinus rhythm." I didn't mind chatting with him because medical topics interested me.

It was like someone who loved trains getting asked a really uninsightful question about the differences in gauge on steam locomotives; they'd probably still be pleased to answer and chat about the subject, even if it was a silly question or comment. I was the same way.

At first, I almost decided to skip giving him any blood products, as it wasn't as though this guy was going to be allowed to get better, but I changed my mind because he did really seem anaemic, and I would have to conduct some surgeries myself, and I had already identified the type of cybernetics he had.

It was a bit of an unusual piece of chrome, and one of the options was to configure it to automatically write zeroes to the storage medium in the event it detected the individual it was installed in died or that it was removed. They were common implants for low-tier data brokers, people who were hired to take data nobody trusted to send over the net and deliver it in person. A type of data courier, in other words.

I supposed it was also common in people who were connected to international human trafficking operations. I started another line, this one a central venous catheter that I would give him two litres of normal saline under a pressure infuser, with his normal IV pushing some synthetic blood products.

I talked to the runner for a while longer, and once his blood pressure started to rise, I hit the preconfigured button on the cardiac monitor and easily converted his heart rate back to a normal rhythm. The runner looked disappointed, and glancing at him sideways, he finally said, "I thought he would rise up off the bed." He arched his back to emphasise what he meant, and I just sighed and shook my head.

I called Jin, and he answered on the second ring. I told him, "Alright, I can take the implant out. It's a ten-year-old data courier model from Zetatech. It's probably configured to delete itself if it is removed, but I am very confident that I can get around that. However, I have to emphasise this if you want me to save the data on this implant, this man is not going to survive the operation. Not on so little notice, anyway. I don't think that is a big deal for you, but I wanted you to know before I started."

He nodded, "So long as you're sure, and yes," he chuckled, "the data is the most important thing here."

I nodded, "Okay, give me about thirty minutes," and with that, I disconnected the call. Truthfully, I probably could save his life, but I couldn't think of any reason that I should. So long as the data is recovered, the only thing I would be saving him for is a long and painful death at the hands of a vengeful father. There was also one other reason, as I wanted to salvage his brain. I had urges to continue the research into hybrid biomechanical robotiforms, such as the arachnid designs I had in my cyberdeck, but it wasn't like I ran across free brains every day.

I had been very irritated that I hadn't had the equipment necessary to stabilise brains when I had to kill all those Wraiths. I brought a number of heads home with me, but their brains were mush and not salvageable by the time I got back. Hypoxia-based brain damage can be reversed through sophisticated nano treatments, but not only did I not have that equipment but the longest someone has ever been revived had been an hour post-death, and it was about two by the time I got back. Their crappy brains weren't worth the candle. This guy's fresh brain, though?

Waste not, want not.

I had been irritated enough that I had built a specialised life-support chamber designed specifically for brains. From the outside, it looked kind of like a matte-black cylindrical hatbox, and it was filled with a nutrient and oxygenation fluid as well as numerous electronics. The idea was to take it with me in my car if I thought I might end up having to kill someone so I could quickly salvage their brain. However, the thing looked rather sinister, and that was before I scooped someone's brain out of their skull like it was Baskin Robins, so I immediately nixed the idea of taking it along with me on a job with Kiwi and the boys.

I didn't want them to get the correct opinion about me. Dr Frankenstein was still remade every few decades in this world, so I could just see Kiwi teasing me by hunching over, yelling, "It's alive, it's alive!"

Now though, it could be useful. I dragged it over onto a nearby table and started getting the rest of the tools I would need for brain surgery, humming the tune of the latest earworm from that Korean pop girl group. They were called Neon Angels, and they had songs in English, Korean and even Japanese. The chorus to this particular song had been stuck in my head for a while. I sung/whispered to myself, off-key, as I gathered my neurological rotary power saw, "We're the Neon Angels, flying high, living fast, never gonna die, in this world of chaos and strife, we're the ones who come alive." The lyrics were insipid and stupid, and I thought them inaccurate, too, but still, the combination of them and the melody must have been designed by an AI for maximal earworminess.

The chorus of the song was especially terrible, with the lyrics going, "In this city of neon lights, Where the future's always bright, We are the Neon Angels, Living life with all our might."

I changed the lyrics, instead sing-humming as I got everything together, "In this city of utter shit, it's easy to not care a bit. Where it's hard to do what's right, don't worry, I'll saw with all my might." With the last line, I tested the rotary saw, which was essentially a power tool, getting a high-RPM "vrrrm vrrm vrrrm" sound out of it, similar to a Dremel-style machine, because that was basically what it was.

Satisfied, I turned around, seeing the two Tyger Claw grunts seem a bit uneasy and the netrunner looking a little green. "Uh, you guys can wait outside if you want?" I offered. All three of them shook their heads, and I assumed they were under some sort of obligation to see this through. Whatever it wouldn't take too long.

---xxxxxx---

"Why brain in jar?" the most curious of the two grunts asked when I was finished, looking at the floating organ submerged in the hatbox from above.

I pointed to the small piece of cybernetics that I had been very carefully rewiring that was still attached to the brain. I had to drop into a half-fugue to finish the operation as the implant was a little more complicated than I had initially thought, "This piece of cybernetics is not only configured to erase itself if it senses the brain is excessively damaged as I thought but it is also encrypted."

The runner shook himself out of his reverie, looking upset, "Encrypted? What cypher?"

I finished connecting a standard interface socket directly to the device; I had just salvaged one of the sockets from the man's brain, "It's a standard and robust quantum-resistant cypher with a ridiculous amount of bits for the key... however, Zetatech got a little too cocky with this system." I said the last smugly, walking over to wash my hands.

Turning to glance at the netrunner as I did so, I continued, "The encryption key is derived from a continuous neural map using a complicated mathematical formula I don't precisely understand, but it basically boils down to small changes in the neural structure over a set period of time will result in the same key, allowing decryption. But large changes? Like managing to put the implant in someone else's brain? The valid key cannot be derived."

I glanced at the two grunts, remembering the state of the guy's face, "Large changes could have included the traumatic brain injuries often caused by concussions, too, guys. You were lucky. Oh, and his pain editor was on when your runner locked his implants out, so he didn't feel any of this." I waved my hand at the abused body of the man.

I was pretty sure he had pretended he had, possibly hoping they would give him a concussion or two in their further attempts, which might effectively scramble the encryption key and render the data irretrievable. That was actually a pretty clever idea to effectively self-delete the data, even with locked-out cybernetics. Paradoxically, the fact that they had so little time meant they likely jumped completely past the repeatedly knock-them-around stage of torture, though, which saved the data's encryption key.

I didn't know why this guy had gone to such an extent to protect this human trafficking operation, except perhaps being much more scared of someone else than they had been of the Tyger Claws.

The two guys audibly gulped, and I motioned towards the interface socket, "From a user perspective, it is a very intuitive system, and its security was higher than I thought due to that encryption method. But from the user's perspective, so long as the brain is alive and is the same brain, the data is automatically unencrypted. To the user, it looks unencrypted all the time. You should be able to download it all right now." I didn't tell him that I had already passively downloaded a full image of the drive, just out of curiosity's sake.

He seemed to follow my explanation as what looked like understanding blossomed on his face, and he hurried over to the brain-in-a-jar, connecting quickly. It didn't take him long to say, "This is exactly what we needed. Thank you, Taylor-san. We need to leave quickly."

He turned towards me and briefly bowed formally, the two grunts quickly doing the same. Ugh, I hated social situations like this. I didn't particularly want to reciprocate because I didn't feel like bonding with these people, but it would be awkward if I didn't, so I did, just to get them out of my shop.

As long as they rescued the girl, I would feel as though I had done a good deed, mostly. A lot of clinicians from my previous world would have been aghast, deeming everything I had done a violation of the Hippocratic oath, but firstly, I had never sworn that or any similar oath. And second, I disagreed with it on a fundamental basis. I agreed with the idea that if a doctor said they would heal a patient, then it would be wrong for them to then hurt them, but that's it. I never considered Mr Brain-in-the-Jar, my patient, and I certainly hadn't lied to him about what to expect from me.

All three of them left rapidly after that, almost running, and I sent Mr Jin a text explaining that the procedure had been a success. Then I blinked and growled, "They didn't even take the body with them, though."