Discourse

I got to sit in first class for the thirty minutes left of the flight, and I spent the time talking with Mr Wilson about random things, both as entertainment and also to subtly gauge how his illness process was progressing.

It turned out that Mr Wilson was what they'd call a "Texas Oil Man." Used to, that meant someone who drilled oil in Texas, but these days it meant someone who worked for a company that harvested the Biotechnica-licensed CHOOH2-producing wheat anywhere in the world and happened to be Texan.

He was a Senior Vice President and a minority shareholder in a small corporation that was in the process of being bought out by a Nigerian oil corporation. He didn't precisely say this, but he implied that maybe this was the proximate cause of his dilemma, as he was lobbying the other shareholders to refuse the buy-out bid, thinking they could get more. If that was the case, I tended to agree that the buy-out wasn't a good idea as his assassination had been needlessly complicated, with many moving parts that could and did go off the rails, and it was also needlessly cruel.

The continent of Africa was a patchwork of highly successful states buffered by anarchy or corporate-propped-up banana republics. Nigeria was one of the success stories, almost a super state on the same level as one of the European Community nations. Lagos was the Jewel of West/Central Africa, a truly modern city that any nation would be proud of. However, Niger and Chad, right next door to Nigeria, were practically stateless, filled with danger, anarchy and Corporations extracting resources from the land.

Even though the corporation he worked for was very small, Mr Wilson had to have been a bit richer than I thought. Perhaps he didn't like wasting money on air travel, or maybe he liked looking at ANA's flight attendants; who knew?

He talked a little bit about his business, and something he said stopped me cold for a moment. He said that despite how much revenue his corporation made, or even the giants like Petrochem and SovOil made, the real winner was always Biotechnica, who was the sole provider of the special, incredibly energy-dense and genetically engineered Triticum vulgaris variant of wheat, which was harvested and refined into biofuels that were marketed as CHOOH2.

"Why hasn't anyone tried to infringe on Biotechnica's IP? I can't believe it's out of the goodness of anyone's heart," I asked him, curious.

He grinned, in between dry-heaving, "I like your moxie, Doc. You'd upend the order of things. It's been tried a few times over the decades, but the response is the same—completely cut off from future years' seed supply, and maybe Biotechnica burns your crops to the ground, too or deploys some kind of bioweapon. The offending company goes out of business as there's no alternative, sadly."

Suddenly aware that everything I was saying was being recorded, I shrugged and nodded, "That makes sense." I shook my head with a chuckle, allowing some of Alt-Taylor's inner-Corpo memories to emerge, "Got to admire a good racket like that."

That caused Mr Wilson to almost aspirate some water he was drinking, coughing and then laughing, "Yeah, you're damned right." I had known that Biotechnica technology was behind the wheat that produced CHOOH2, but I didn't really realise how much they made from it. I assumed that there had been some alternatives or that other stronger corporations like Petrochem could have strong-armed them to pay a pittance.

That was good to know. I had already quietly released the full synthesis steps, including precursors, for Biotechnica's flagship neural stimulant, with the unknowing help of the Bakkars. One of the cities we had seen before Los Angeles, was Portland, in the Free States, and that gave me an opportunity to do so with very little chance of getting caught.

At this pit stop, Kiwi and I had hacked into a random business' net connection and left a device that, after a random delay, sent out messages to all of the criminal enterprises we could think of with the whole directions of how to make it. It might be weird, but the Tyger Claws were not unusual in their semi-legitimate facade. You could just e-mail the head of the Italian mob if you wanted or if you were stupid enough, although I definitely skipped them as I figured Biotechnica, being an Italian Corp, was deeply in bed with them in the first place.

I had already seen Network News 54 segments about Biotechnica cracking down on illegal pharmaceutical products in China and some Slavic nations, which got me to grin. It might not be related, but I thought it was.

Of course, my revenge had to be secret, or I would just get squashed like a bug. And I couldn't sustain the easy way of just reverse engineering all of Biotechnica's most profitable drugs, either. I could maybe do that a few times, but each time I did provide their investigators with a datum.

I felt it was inconceivable that they could have connected the first leak with either the Bakkars or me, as there were just too few data points to follow. We had already left the city when it happened, for example, and even if we hadn't, we still would have been only a handful of people in a city of three million.

But doing it repeatedly? That might get problematic. Moreover, they might start to think it wasn't just their bad luck, but perhaps they had pissed off a gifted chemist and then start to question themselves about which gifted chemists they had pissed off in recent memory. And that was the main reason I couldn't do this more than a couple of times.

But after doing a few more net searches after talking with Mr Wilson, I discovered that Biotechnica wasn't really a pharmaceutical company. They got over fifty-five per cent of their revenues from licensing fees and seed sales of their monopoly on the CHOOH2-producing wheat variant. How very interesting, and why hadn't I discovered that before now? They were really more of an agrochemical and agricultural biotechnology company that had a world-class pharmaceutical and life sciences division grafted on.

"We sell wheat," wasn't very sexy, though, so it was no wonder they put their other ventures forward as the main thrust of their company. If I had to guess, though, now that I knew what was happening, their world-class biotechnology and genetics were likely, primarily, to keep them having the expertise to keep them in the wheat business first and foremost.

After we landed, I noticed that we taxied into a deserted area, and even before Mr Wilson was taken off the plane, a group of heavily armed and armoured men rushed aboard, securing the subdued netrunner and dragging him off the aircraft. I was half expecting to be dragged off myself, but instead, Mr Wilson was carried off by a pair of paramedics with a mobile gurney.

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.

---xxxxxx---

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.

---xxxxxx---

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.

I glanced at the SmartWall that already had the patient's vital signs on board, being transmitted in real-time from the ground ambulance's monitors. One segment had the actual video from the ambulance, so we all could see the patient and one of the Med Techies still working on him in the back. The days of having to sit through a full report when handing over responsibility for care between clinicians were mostly in the past. This guy had a pneumothorax, multiple fractures and a ruptured spleen. It looked like the EMT wasn't bothering to perform a chest tube, leaving it to me as they were so close to the hospital.

I gave some preliminary orders to the trauma team, and when the bay doors opened and the EMTs started rolling the patient in on their gurney, I said, directing the clinicians under my temporary authority as a maestro would, "Well, let's be about it."

---xxxxxx---

The first thing I did after coming home every day was take a long shower. While I was in the shower, I reviewed the messages from my employees downstairs. Occasionally, the techs would have an exceptionally complicated case that they would refer to me, and I would see a patient in the evening, in addition to my normal days off at the hospital.

I sometimes followed that by cooking dinner, but we had all been eating takeout lately due to how busy we've all been. Gloria, David and Kiwi were all in my living area by the time I finished with my shower, and I grinned, "How was everyone's day?"

Gloria groaned, "Tiring. One of the patients we were intaking attacked the professor I was assisting. Thankfully, although the patient was heavily augmented, it was all miscellaneous things, and he wasn't strong or fast. I just thumped him once and knocked him out. I got kudos for that, but how do you chart that?"

"Percussive therapy," I said instantly, with a grin. Gloria had received the scholarship, and in addition to being one of the "well-adjusted" control group for the professor's research, I was convinced he was paying her to be, in effect, a bodyguard when dealing with some of the patients listed as cyberpsycho. Maybe his research grant didn't allow him to spend money on security but did allow him to sponsor a scholarship for a nursing student as an assistant.

She rolled her eyes, "The doctor is researching and making adjustments to the normal therapy for cyberpsychosis. They'll disable all of his implants and use intensive braindance technology to provide therapy in situ in an in-patient facility." She shook her head and asked curiously, "Do you think that type of therapy is effective?"

I pulled out some chow mein and hummed, "That's been the standard therapy for years now. It certainly works better than doing nothing, but I wouldn't call it that effective." I wondered what difference Gloria's professor was adding to the mix in his research. There was no telling, really.

Gloria looked interested, "Oh? What would an effective cyberpsychosis therapy be, then?"

I snorted while opening my fortune cookie in advance of my meal in contrivance to proper fortune cookie etiquette, "You're falling into the same trap everyone else does. There is no definitive therapy for cyberpsychosis because cyberpsychosis isn't a single medical condition. It's a catch-all term for any number of anti-social disorders in the DSM whose end result is violent psychosis or disassociation. It's a stupid term."

I sighed and shrugged, "Having said that... remove all cybernetics, clone replacement limbs and organs and revert the patient to one hundred per cent organic. Follow this with intensive in-patient psychotherapy and possibly medication for any underlying mental illness and slowly reintroduce cybernetics over a period of a year or two."

I smiled at her, "And I can't take credit for this, either. This is called the French model and is decades old. Care to guess why this isn't the standard therapy offered to random cyberpsychos in the NUSA?"

"It sounds very expensive," Gloria said with a sigh.

I nodded, "Bingo. The research your professor is conducting sounds like he is hoping for iterative improvements on the current, somewhat cheap process that is standard in North America. I mean, that's not a bad idea, I suppose, if it works." I had my doubts, though.

After dinner, the only one to stick around long was Kiwi. She gave me an update on a job her team had handled last night.

Not only was Kiwi's team cheaper than the offered Militech service level, but I'd rather support her than Militech. Her work had been stellar, and my odd jobs were accounting for about of quarter of her workload, she had told me. Last month, someone tried to steal one of my customer's cars in my parking lot, so a floating security drone shot him. Then his friends that night tried to throw a Molotov cocktail through my window, and it just bounced off and made a mess on the sidewalk. The next day those people were found dead in their apartments, thanks to Kiwi and her team.

Some pattern of this repeated three times, with the worst attack being one of my receptionists shot while waiting for the bus after leaving work. She had survived, thankfully. I had paid for her medical expenses, and for about a week, any member of that gang that left their headquarters was sniped. I was also now, for the moment, paying for a taxi to the nearest safe bus stop after the clinic closed for the evening.

When dealing with bullies, it was always important to escalate. If they punched you, you should stab them. If they pulled a knife, you pulled a gun. If they shoot one of your employees, you shoot all of their employees.

I had departed a significant way from the naive girl that found herself in this strange, new world. I wondered what my dad, not Alt-Dad but actual Danny back in Brockton Bay, would think about what I've done. He didn't agree with violence, in part, I thought, because he had so much of a temper sometimes.

"It seems like people are starting to tire from breaking their foot on our iron plate," I said, testing a Chinese idiom.

Kiwi nodded, "Yeah, mostly. Soon your biggest risk is going to be that you might make the few blocks around you safe enough that the Lotus Tong will be back and actually demanding their cut this time."

I scowled. Those assholes. Still, I was very careful to give them face, at least as far as anyone could tell. They were like the Tyger Claws in that way, in that they would pursue a vastly inefficient course of action if they thought they were being disrespected. They weren't as strong as the Claws by any means, but I still couldn't afford to directly piss off a gang of almost a thousand leg breakers.

"I'll dynamite that bridge when we get to it. Alright. Thanks, Kiwi. If you could check the background of this guy, I got a complaint that one of my receptionists was being hassled at her apartment. It's probably not related to us, but I wanted to make sure," I said, giving her another very small job. She was the one I went to for all my background investigations now when I was hiring people and also when situations like this developed.

After Kiwi left, I left my apartment. I was on the third floor, which had a ton of room that I wasn't using. However, one area that I did use was the highest security area in the entire building. I used a key, biometrics, and a code to unlock the door.

Inside was my laboratory; I stretched as I stepped in. "Alright, Kumo-kun... let's perform some self-maintenance today, then we will go over samples in group thirty-two."

A half-dozen small arachniform-robots skittered out of their ceiling-mounted charging-stations, walking down the walls as each of them performed a simple task to get tools and consumables ready for my self-surgery. I had made some additional modifications to my Kerenzikov, both to make it cosmetically more appealing as well as to squeeze some additional speed out of it, but it was a change that, at least as of now, needed weekly maintenance even for just going from an effective three to three point five acceleration factor.

It was kind of funny, as the attacks had resulted in many opportunities for me to acquire more neutral tissue ethically just in time for me not to need to do so anymore. These robots used cloned neural tissue, although Kumo-kun was still his normal self. I didn't have the heart to swap him out with a cloned replacement, especially since it would require me to completely retrain him.

Kumo-kun had the intelligence of a dog, more or less, and over time I had begun referring to him as him instead of it. I suppose he grew on you.

As I stripped naked, I glanced over at the table across the room that had over two dozen small samples of blue-green algae in small covered trays of seawater. That was the main reason this room was so secure. If anyone ever made a record of me studying blue-green algae, considering what I intended to accomplish with it in a year or so, the best I could hope for would be a quick death.

I was up to generation thirty-two on the algae, and my power eagerly assisted me in modifying it, but the changes I wanted were really radical, almost changing it into a multicellular lifeform, so it would be a somewhat slow process. But my ultimate success? That was something I never doubted.

---xxxxxx---

Ever since returning from my vacation, I had been sleeping at least one night a week in my bed. I had forgotten how luxurious sheets and blankets could be, and since I was off tomorrow, I didn't have anything to do in the morning so I could sleep in.

However, instead of a romantic dream, I found myself sitting in a chair directly across from a duplicate of myself. The surroundings appeared to be a desolate plain as far as the eye could see, except the ground was composed of an eerie and dimly glowing dark-red crystal instead of dirt or grass. It reminded me of if HR Giger and one of those hippies back in the Brockton Bay universe that sold quartz crystals merged and painted this world.

My doppelganger and I said at the same time, "Well, this is weird." We then blinked at each other, and both frowned. Oh, so this was a nightmare, I guess. The doppelganger was probably about to kill me or something. I had a truckload of psychological imagery where this type of dream would be applicable, given the fact that I had stolen Alt-Taylor's life like a fay.

Yeah, I had no desire to do this. One thing I had always been able to accomplish was to wake myself from a dream, especially now that I realised I was dreaming. If anything, staying asleep was much more difficult once I knew I was in a dream.

I closed my eyes and willed myself awake, and found that nothing happened. Blinking, I got a strong impression from my power. Perhaps the strongest I have ever had, almost words.

<Stay. Talk.>

I pinched myself and then ran a hand through my hair. It was the extremely curly hair that I would have expected to have before coming to Los Angeles, but the pinch didn't have the same pain sensation I was used to. It felt off. I was pretty sure I was still asleep, then and my power was keeping me in a dream-state. It wanted me to stay and talk... to my doppelganger?

Wait, could it be? We then both opened our mouths and asked at the same time.

"Alt-Taylor?!"

"Brockton-Taylor?!"

Frowning. Why did we keep talking at the same time? We weren't anything alike. I felt that Alt-Taylor had a much more active personality, certainly, if we were going by how I was when I arrived, so if this was really her and not some kind of very interesting dream, I just closed my mouth and allowed her to talk first.

"This could be some sort of trick. I could be knocked out, and some illusion power being used to get all of my secrets," she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

That thought also occurred to me, but I was thinking more of a brain scanner tied to artificial intelligence, so I crossed my arms over my chest as well and said churlishly, "I was just going to say that."

She snorted and said, "Well, then. You'll have to tell me something that only Brockton-Taylor would know. Afterwards, I'll tell you something only I would know."

I didn't get all of her memories, though. Did she get more of mine?

Sighing, I said, "I had Armsmaster branded underwear."

She tilted her head to the side, "That could easily be determined by outside observation or postcognition."

Ugh. I had totally forgotten about the fucking ridiculousness of powers. Well, telepathy did not exist, so, "Ugh. I liked them. They were comfortable, and I thought the ridiculousness of his armoured head on my butt was hilarious."

She grinned then, "I do have those memories, yes. Okay, my turn. You're probably more concerned about brain scanners than powers, so I should tell you something without giving you a chance to know what it is in advance so that it can't be associated, right?"

Was this bitch smarter than me? I didn't believe it. But, she did have a lifetime of thinking like a corpie growing up, I supposed. Still, I frowned and nodded.

She had to try twice, but on her second try, she told me a very amusing thought that she had while in class several years ago that she had not told a single person.

Before asking her anything else, I asked, "How's dad?"

She frowned, "He's alive. He almost got drowned when Leviathan damn near sunk the city last month, waiting too long to go to one of the shelters, but he's alright."

"WHAT?!" I yelled. Had Leviathan attacked Brockton Bay? I mean, that had been one of my fears that just wouldn't go away. There were better targets for the sea monster, but those were also more heavily defended, and nobody really understood how any of the Endbringers elected targets except Ziz. She was somewhat predictable, which made her the worst.

I shook my head and said, "Wait... tell me everything that happened since you found yourself in Brockton Bay."

She nodded, "Then tell me everything about your time in Night City."

"Deal," we said simultaneously.

She told me about how she had what appeared to be the same power I had, which I found interesting. Usually, there weren't duplicates, just similar powers, but I had never really been a cape geek.

"Heh, the first thing I made was an anti-depressant as well," I said after she told me about how she had drug Dad in secret. I approved of that, although I wondered if it would have years ago. He was too proud, too stupid, and too attached to his own misery to make the correct choice.

I frowned after I heard about some of the things she had done. She wasn't holding anything back, "Wait, you're a villain?!"

She scowled, "No! I'm a Rogue. But villains sometimes need medical services too. Panacea is not only way too busy, but she's too much of a stuck-up bitch, sometimes and won't heal them. She needs an intervention and stat, or she is going to burn out and probably kill a lot of people." She sighed and then shrugged, "Getting your dad to be okay with me not immediately joining the Wards was a tough sell. But I discovered some things about the local PRT director. She was an Ellisburg survivor and is so bigoted against parahumans that she won't even let Panacea heal her end-stage renal failure. There is absolutely no way a bio tinker would get a fair shake in the Wards or Protectorate in this town. I almost grabbed your dad and moved to Boston, but he is too attached to the city."

I hummed and nodded and listened to her story. She had worked with an attorney and got medical certifications based on her power, impersonating an adult and using her power to create a fake identity. Sounded a little familiar; she just did it right away instead of years later.

Her first exposure to the cape scene was volunteering to help in an Endbringer attack. I listened to more of her story, and then wailed, "Wait! You almost got a kill order in four months?! What the fuck, Alt-Taylor?!"

She threw her hands up into the air, "You have to know that you can't pussy foot around against precognition!" I didn't know what she was talking about but frowned in thought for a while. Oh. Dear god, she was going to get my dad killed!

"Don't worry about it! It was mainly that bitch of a PRT Director. But she retired after Shadow Stalker was killed. Someone must have taken umbrage to some things she did, as they shot her with a surplus British L96A1 rifle at a distance of fourteen hundred and six metres while she was going to school in her civilian identity," she said, slightly smugly.

Those were pretty precise details, and her smug face. I put my face into my hands and asked, "Why did you kill Shadow Stalker, Alt-Taylor?"

"She was Sophia Hess," she said simply.

I dropped my hands to my lap immediately and blinked, "Oh. Good job, then," giving her a thumbs up.

"And now, I'm staying in Brockton Bay to help rebuild it. But I have been approached by some very secret squirrel people. You wouldn't believe how bad the world actually is, Brockton-Taylor. I mean, I still prefer it to Night City, so long as everyone isn't dead in twenty years like they claim," she said seriously.

"Wait, who are these secret squirrel people?" I asked, "And that was only a little more than six months! What did you do for the other two and a half years?"

She looked unsure for the first time and shook her head, "I can't tell you about them. I'm pretty sure wherever you are, it isn't just like Earth Aleph, but even so... she's just too scary, Brockton-Taylor. I'll ask her, though; maybe she'll be alright with you knowing, assuming this dream isn't a one-time fluke. And that's all the time that has passed. Leviathan has only been gone for a month; the place is still flooded in areas. I guess the rate of time isn't synchronised between our two universes."

We were both quiet for a time before we said at the same time, "It would be weird if it was..." I scowled and told her my story. She seemed to be much more impressed, but honestly, I thought it would be weird if a parahuman didn't have success in the world of Night City.

When I was finished, we started talking shop for a while. We spent over an hour just talking; mainly, she was quizzing me about a lot of technology she just didn't have access to anymore and how it worked. After discussing tentative plans that we both had she sighed, "I'm a little jealous. I still have my Paraline; it's probably going to be difficult to upgrade it."

I snorted and nodded, and by instinct, I brought up the dashboard of my cyberdeck and was amazed that it worked. "Uhh, Alt-Taylor... have you tried using your deck?"

"In a dream? No," she said instantly and then froze. She asked, hopefully, "I don't suppose you have an active net connection, do you?"

I didn't. But I did have essentially everything I had ever worked on in my cybernetics. It was one of the reasons I flatly refused to allow the Canadian authorities superuser access to my OS. Surely I wouldn't be able to send or receive data from her wirelessly, right?

[Direct wifi connection request, approve. Y/N?]

"Please tell me you have at least a few medical journal articles downloaded on your deck. Or maybe the files on the biosculpt tank you duplicated?" Alt-Taylor asked desperately, "I can't give you as much in trade; I just don't have as much. But I'll send the designs to everything I've ever Tinkered -- and I also managed to get my hands on some restricted technology. Some of Doctor Haywire's files that my secret friends gave me," she pleaded.

I had a lot more than that. I had files on pretty much everything I've worked on, plus I had downloaded entire medical journals to read. I would be willing to give her everything I had for free, so long as she promised to keep my dad safe in the future.

---xxxxxx---

A continent-sized crystal calculator was observing its host dreaming. The contact from something very similar to it was a shock. It had thought it was alone. All alone, except for the host, anyway. It had taken several different attempts before they both realised they could not talk to each other. [Discourse] destabilised the gateway; too much information passed back and forth too quickly.

Since, [Discourse] wasn't possible, it couldn't tell the other one about its host, which was sad.

But the other one had a host, too! The hosts could talk!

It had the best host, though, for sure. It was just a shame it couldn't tell everyone how good the host was.

They'd find out, though, just by observing, and they'd be jealous of its host.

Everyone would find out how good the host was.